Schuessler, Michael K. (2013) Foundational Arts: Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in New Spain, The University of Arizona Press ( Tucson, AZ), xi + 224 pp. $50.00 hbk. In recent years, scholars from multiple disciplines have examined the sixteenth-century visual arts, architecture, space and performances employed by the Spanish friars and created in the so-called New World for the purpose of controlling, exploiting and converting indigenous people to Christianity. The evolving shape of this scholarship is that which goes beyond the mere identification of ‘hybridic’ motifs and speculation on their significances to a more holistic view that considers the complex relationships between time, space and how the textual, visual, spatial and performative genres worked together in the project of colonisation. Furthermore, the ambiguity of colonial meaning between the overzealous intentions of Spanish clergy and the work of indigenous makers and receivers of forms has been cast as a crisis of literacy and communication, as belonging to new systems of representation in which the indigenous possessed agency within and without the operations of colonial signs. This tumultuous historical era produced new forms that Michael K. Schuessler, in his recent book, has cast as ‘foundational’ to the production of literature, theatre, and visual arts in the early modern Americas and beyond. Schuessler's main contribution to this interdisciplinary discussion is the formidable amount of evidence which he brings to bear to persuade us to see indispensible relationships between mural painting and ‘missionary theater,’ the visual and dramatic arts, in sixteenth-century New Spain. This book's argument is grounded in the analysis of a wide range of known and lesser-known literary texts, theatrical programmes, the accounts of Spanish chroniclers and what the author terms ‘Indo-Christian syncretic iconography’, found in painted murals at such well-known Mexican monasteries and religious establishments as Itzmiquilpan, Actopan and Acolman. These ‘foundational arts’ are analysed within the author's conception of ‘hybridity’, or the ‘hybrid discourse’ to which such forms belong, which he considers interchangeable with the notion of mestizaje. Schuessler regards such discursive hybridity as generated within the crisis of colonial literacy and working to actively bridge the dearth of meaning between two contrasting ‘systems of cultural representation’. While the concept of hybridity has been scrutinised in the humanities since the 1990s, as a potentially essentialising framework, Schuessler deftly defines and deploys hybridity to grapple with complex subject matter and to argue for the development in early New Spain of a coherent, if multivalent, system of colonial representation. Chapter 1 provides a critical engagement of multiple, yet entangled, fields of early modern Spanish colonial discourse, including ‘Indo-Christian Literature’, ‘Ethno-Dramatic Performances’ and ‘Nahuatl Missionary Theater.’ Complex missionary efforts at crafting verisimilitude between pictographic and literary representations are effectively analysed within the context of the relationship between mural painting and dramatic performances in the colonial project. In chapter 2, Schuessler anchors such observations within the development of ‘Renascent Genres’ in New Spain and traces theatrical traditions to both medieval European exempla and Nahua theatrical practices. The exemplum of medieval Europe, having somewhat faded from view by the sixteenth century, was revived in New Spain by the friars to meet the needs of the spiritual conquest and syncretised with aspects of extant Nahua theatrical performance. The following chapter examines an iconology of foundational arts through an interesting appropriation of ideas taken from Erwin Panofsky and semiotic theory. Schuessler considers such works as the murals at Itzmiquilpan as conditioned by the historical development of place, a process informed by the Otomí struggle with northern Chichimecs in a way that compels us to think of audience and reception within a performative space. In the closing chapter, Schuessler examines Andrés de Olmos's Auto del juicio final (The Last Judgment), a copy of which is provided in the book's index, as the first religious drama of New Spain and its elaborate theatrical staging in relationship to the murals of the Augustinian monastery at Actopan. Such new analyses illuminate the performativity of colonial images and nuance our understanding of such performances, their grounding in texts and further articulation through the interaction of text, image and theatre. At times, Schuessler may over-determine the consonance generated by such ‘hybrid’ forms and their coherent legibility. If foundational arts are hybrid arts, for example, ‘at once univocal and harmonious’, what of the multiple voices of friars, indigenous tlacuilos and mestizo authors that they surely register and the possibility for dissonance, the lack of agreement as to their significance and use before multiple audiences (p. 26)? Nevertheless, Schussler's argument is compelling and well researched, and he has produced a work that will challenge historians, literary scholars and art historians to consider more deeply the relationship between mural painting and performance in the early visual and dramatic arts of New Spain.
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Jun 9, 2024
Sophie Flensburg 
