Editorial Commentary (2021)

Colonial Mexican art is the most difficult course I teach at University of California, Los Angeles, where I hold a split appointment in art history and Chicana/o and Central American studies. Every artwork and concept I present engages or potentially provokes contested assessments, fraught value judgements, and claims of political bias. It begins with the title of the course itself and extends to other terminology. Should this art be described as colonial, viceregal, or early modern? Were the events of 1519–21, culminating in the fall of Aztec Tenochtitlan to Cortés’s army, a conquest or invasion? How does one ethically teach art created in the service of forced religious conversion and colonization? My thoughts here represent some of my current views on this challenging historical period. At the same time, this editorial commentary is intended to be aspirational, to hold open space for my (and our) thinking to evolve and change.I am inspired by the increasing calls to decolonize and the growing popularity of the topic of decolonizing in talks, conferences, symposia, books, and articles. What does it mean for an art historian to decolonize, especially one working on colonial art? What are our ethical obligations as we study art and material culture that result from imposed European cultural, artistic, and linguistic norms? Does studying colonial art imply approval of colonial rule or sanctioning of the catastrophic events of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in the Americas? How can a decolonial approach build on the decades of anticolonial scholarship in the field? This short essay examines these difficult questions, surveys some major threads of anticolonial and decolonial thought, considers historical responses to the quandary, and posits possible points of discussion. It builds on the previous Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture commentary by Associate Editor Emily A. Engel, focused on Andean art, “Collaboration and Exchange across the Study of Colonial South American Visual Culture.”1 My thinking is also inspired by my collaboration with Tatiana Flores and Florencia San Martín on our forthcoming coedited volume, Decolonizing Art History,2 and by my work in Chicanx studies. I envision my remarks here as a potential pedagogical tool, one that we may use in discussion with our students and each other as we forge new approaches to the study of colonial art. Is it possible to decolonize the study of colonial art?I understand decolonize to be drawn from “decolonial,” cognizant of “the coloniality of power,” to use Aníbal Quijano’s phrase, the idea that European social order, racial hierarchies, and ways of knowing imposed during the early modern era in the Americas live on and structure the world today.3 To put it another way, coloniality is “the ongoing propagation of knowledge and ideas to foster and cement the interest of the dominant.”4 Decolonial approaches are opposed to colonial ones and seek to upend coloniality. They challenge Eurocentrism and Eurocentric notions of universality; they make visible Foucault’s history of power as they perform what Walter Mignolo has called “epistemic disobedience,” a topic to which I will return. Decolonial approaches have a strong activist arm, rooted in the Indigenous rights movement, a key distinction, as we shall see, in contrast to anticolonial movements. In the words of Rutgers Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres, the decolonial turn is a response to colonialism’s “radical, longstanding forms of systematic dehumanization.” It is “a project to undo the legacy of coloniality in every aspect of our existence including in knowledge, power, and being.”5Comprehending this body of theory is particularly important for those of us who work on the early modern era, or on what’s variously described as colonial or viceregal art and architecture.6 Our scholarly focus is on material culture created against the backdrop of European exploration, imperialism, and colonization. Maldonado-Torres reminds us that the Renaissance, hailed historically as a great efflorescence of western culture, coexisted with “metaphysical catastrophe”—the emergence of the notion that only some human beings were truly human. Others were deemed less than and therefore fit to be enslaved, killed, stripped of their dignity, culture, and right to self-rule.7 What Europeans think of as an era of great cultural flowering was, for the colonized, a period of violence, disease, demographic decline, and enslavement—the beginnings of “permanent struggle against death.”8 At the same time, though, and as many colonial art historians have demonstrated, the colonial era was, at times, and arguably for a select few, a period of artistic and cultural elaboration among Indigenous, Afro-descendant, mestizo and other mixed-race artists. Recently, in an article published in The Art Bulletin, Columbia Professor Alessandra Russo argued for greater acknowledgment of early modern European appreciation of artworks from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Her analysis, centered on the writings and career of Portuguese artist and art theorist Francisco de Holanda, suggests that a European notion of universality recognized and valued the cultural productions of the Other. Russo’s findings soften critiques of Eurocentrism, providing a more nuanced view.9What would it mean to write a decolonizing history of colonial art? What about an anticolonial art history? How do these approaches compare to and intersect with earlier work done in the field? In this next section I mention several examples of recent decolonizing or anticolonial scholarship. A preliminary caveat is in order: I only have the space to single out a few authors. Nonetheless, an impressive amount of scholarship has been committed to anticolonial work in the field, providing a backdrop to or path toward decolonizing. The two approaches, along with postcolonialism, are deeply interconnected. Anticolonialism, which grows out of postcolonialism, is dedicated to identifying and analyzing the persistent effects of imperial rule. Decoloniality, as we shall see, is the logical end result of anticolonial practices, “the path to a decolonial future.”10 To be anticolonial is to critique colonialism; arguably, the ultimate goal of decolonizing is the return of stolen Indigenous land to its rightful owners and the dissolution of European imperialist legacies. In other words, “Anti-colonial and decoloniality are intertwined logics.”11As I surveyed the long history of the study of colonial art of the Americas, numerous examples of scholarship surfaced that imply a proto-decolonizing impulse or prescient (if undeveloped) attempt to decolonize art history. I identify these threads below to demonstrate the importance of past anticolonial work and to inspire future development of the arts of the Americas. Given my subfield expertise, I focus on colonial Mexico. For an outstanding article on the Andes, one that foregrounds Indigenous makers, see Cornell Professor Ananda Cohen-Aponte’s recent essay, “Forging a Popular Art History: Indigenismo and the Art of Colonial Peru.”12The rise of the study of colonial art itself may be an early manifestation of what would later become an anticolonial or decolonizing art history. As a subfield, colonial art was a latecomer to Latin American art history, not emerging as a distinct subject in the United States until the years surrounding 1992, the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Pre-Columbian art was the first subfield to emerge in the 1920s–1940s, flourishing in the sixties and seventies. Modern art followed, appearing after the Latin American Boom of the sixties and seventies. Although not popular until after 1992, a number of key early initiatives in the study of colonial art took place decades earlier in Spain and Mexico. In 1925, Spanish scholar Diego Angulo assumed the first chair in Hispano-American art at the University of Seville. Initial developments in Mexico dated to the 1930s, inspired by precedents in Seville. In 1936, Manuel Toussaint, a foundational figure in the establishment of Mexican art history, sponsored a chair in the study of colonial art at la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. While the chair at UNAM was founded in imitation of the previous one at the University of Seville, and one could argue that the early study of colonial art in Mexico was modeled on scholarship in Spain, colonial art history in Mexico would follow its own unique development.13Early valorization of colonial art also manifests in the various debates, going back decades and still current today, over nomenclature and style labels. Consideration of Indigenous influences was a concern of Alfred Neumeyer, Harold Wethey, José Moreno Villa, and Diego Angulo in the 1940s, as well as George Kubler in the 1960s, all of whom attempted to identify and analyze Indigenous artists or influences in the art of colonial Mexico. Viewed with a spirit of generosity, these various attempts could be interpreted as prescient forms of decoloniality in their approaches. Such scholarship proceeds from an implicit assumption that the imposition of European cultural and artistic norms was oppressive or problematic, and thus it was dedicated to uncovering, re-identifying, and discovering Indigenous artists and influences. And while there is much to criticize in this earlier scholarship—racialized descriptions, patronizing tone, nomenclature that looks offensive to us today—such scholarship seems to respond to the basic premise of decolonial theory, namely, that “colonialism” is “a fundamental problem.”14 Allow me to cite a more current example of such work: Elena FitzPatrick Sifford's recent article on the first depictions of Africans in Mexican art. In this groundbreaking piece, Sifford FitzPatrick focuses on the presence of Africans in sixteenth-century Indigenous manuscripts in Mexico, even suggesting the possibility of Black-Brown alliances in the face of European oppression in viceregal Mexico City.15 Important contributions by other scholars who work on Afro-descendant cultural traditions in the Americas also come to mind, including work by Cécile Fromont, Natalia Majluf, and the late Linda Rodriguez.16Do the arts have a special role to play in decolonizing projects? What we know of colonial art seems to suggest so. About literature and art, Maldonado Torres writes, they “can also lead to their critical interrogation and to the expression of forms of perceiving, feeling, and imagining that challenge the norm and its hierarchies.” Indeed, visual arts “can seek to legitimate, question, or challenge the general apprehension of Being and the normative forms of time, space, and subjectivity in any given worldview, civilization system, or social order.” He considers art created by colonized subjects “an extension and expression of the embodied subject.…” Such art questions the status quo and can lead to “counter-catastrophic creative attitudes.”17Maldonado-Torres singles out for study colonial art in which we detect agency on the part of colonized subjects. Various important examples of this type of scholarship come to mind, such as investigations into the elaboration of Indigenous iconographies or styles in sixteenth-century manuscripts or murals, work on religious art that attempts to discern Native agency, and recent research into materiality.18 One could argue that Afro-descendant Mexican artist Juan Correa, one of the most rigorously studied colonial artists in the Americas, is the type of “embodied subject” that Maldonado-Torres had in mind.19 Arguably, Correa’s inclusion of angelitos of color, a hallmark of his sacred art, as seen in his painting of The Christ Child with Musical Angels of circa 1690s to 1700 (fig. 1), could be understood as an example of an embodied colonial subject questioning normative forms of sacred art, which typically featured only European angelitos, and perhaps even normative notions of the sacred. Such an understanding would enrich what we know of this unique painting, a probable fragment of a larger work and an outstanding example of the late baroque in Mexico.Cohen-Aponte employs a consciously decolonizing approach in her recent groundbreaking article, “Decolonizing the Global Renaissance.”20 It is one of the very first colonial art historical studies to broach decoloniality explicitly. In it she reminds us to consider European art in the Americas as an imposed tradition and not simply in terms of artistic influence—an important contribution to our field. She writes, “By framing the act of artistic exchange as one of reception rather than imposition, we risk reaffirming a discovery-centered approach to artistic production generated under colonial rule.”21 Her caution also brings to mind scholarship that focuses on the originality of art created in the early modern or viceregal Americas, that is, scholarship that goes beyond seeing this art as a reflection of European ideals or influences. I attempted this approach in my recent essay on enconchados, hybrid works that combine oil painting and shell mosaic, a genre that traces back to Asian influences. Recent work has emphasized the novel transformation of these nourishing sources, arguing for the unique status of enconchados as a creation of Mexican colonial artists.22Some of the most exciting work in this vein can be found in Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Ilona Katzew’s magisterial exhibition publications. Her recent catalog on Mexican colonial art, Pinxit Mexici, created in conjunction with the internationally touring exhibition of 2017–18, is foundational for the study of the eighteenth century and establishes the innovation of Mexican painters.23 Her blockbuster casta painting show in 2004 was the first comprehensive exhibition of racial caste paintings. Her accompanying book provided the most extensive documentation to date of these intriguing paintings.24 Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, mounted in 2011–12 at LACMA, was the very first large-scale show to consider Indigenous contributions to Mexican colonial art after the sixteenth century.25As I cite these various examples identifying what I think are proto-decolonizing gestures or anticolonial strategies in the study of colonial Latin American art, I am keenly aware of the ways in which we have failed in this endeavor as art historians. Scholarship that valorizes the Spanish monarchy or Catholic Church in uncritical, wholly positive tones comes to mind, as does work that ignores Native voices and living traditions today. The recent LALVC Dialogues focused on the California missions reacts to this conservative mindset, attempting to articulate a “critical mission studies” that foregrounds Indigenous voices.26 By considering all possible recoverable facts, we present a truer history. This is important even if in the process we come face to face with beautiful artworks used in the name of evil and oppression.These challenges notwithstanding, decolonial theorists remind us of the importance of visual culture, which has the potential to play a special role in decolonizing the humanities. Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusanqui, who has elaborated on her theory of the “sociology of the image,” has argued for the particular power of images to unmask or reveal ideas hidden by official censorship in textual sources. “Words do not signify, but instead conceal,” she writes.27 Public discourse, in her mind, has been converted into “forms of not saying.”28 Images, in contrast, have the potential to reveal: “images have allowed me to discover meanings uncensored by official language.”29 Professor of ethnic studies Laura E. Pérez, writing about contemporary Latina art, makes the following observation, which I easily imagine at work in past centuries: “The arts are among the most valuable laboratories for creating relevant new forms of thoughts often signaled by aesthetic innovations in their own nonverbal form.”30It is the valorization of the visual, as theorized by Rivera Cusanqui, Maldonado-Torres, and Pérez, that inspires my own work on colonial art. I combine their assessment of the particular power of the visual with Mignolo’s idea of epistemic disobedience, mentioned earlier in this essay.31 For me, epistemic disobedience provides a path forward—one that crosses temporal and geographic boundaries. The various strategies of epistemic disobedience allow us to think about colonial and Iberian art in the global world and to bring the of the contemporary world to on the “epistemic from theorist “epistemic which was in the to (and such as the as colonial are and by Eurocentric The of this is that as Mignolo’s for epistemic disobedience is particularly in this disobedience us to the claims of It against about the are and who is to I it to art historical that some art is of than or that we or It me to use Chicanx studies to think about the colonial period and to bring the of the such as work or to contemporary art. It is this approach to art history, one that to into art history, its discourse, its hidden and that I and that I has the power to not the but our And this approach that I bring to my at the and At I am to have with more in process at the as well as more than including a number by students who on to work have to the end a discussion of one of the most important and most challenging on and Is a The goal of their essay is to critique of the decolonize in to the of in the of short of “the of is it that of the as I art history, foster “a of to and In they the use of decolonize as a to of Native The of the or to suggest or more general forms of oppression is that it “a of or to that from the of stolen on the return of Indigenous and their of strategies of me art historical attempts to and Indigenous art, particularly during the colonial ways of to the What about the and development of Indigenous visual traditions or art that from or also and and anticolonial and decolonizing They the in critique often subjects who from the While a understanding of these various approaches anticolonial strategies as toward the they that strategies are to but instead it and are and How can art history Native How can we the of our scholarship to our in For me, I of art history for to ethnic studies. Professor Laura E. reminds me that the of art history have not been a to To from her about contemporary Latina Eurocentric work well for European art, but do they work for In colonial art is to and critique Eurocentric in art history. Pérez, writing about creating new social reminds us that we be about and western and For me, a a to and work can as “the path to a decolonial but the key these two is important to decoloniality on I at past and recent my is that the subfield of colonial art history is for major I am inspired by scholarship that attempts to Indigenous voices and identify the agency of past and work and influences from the Americas back to a inspired by postcolonialism, those who for the global of colonial cultural production or suggest the originality of artistic practices, are all in important anticolonial on the path toward decolonizing. One could even over colonial, early this The same to over the of or attempts to an anticolonial it is difficult to out anticolonial from that on a of their intertwined Is there more work to the early are us toward new in the study of colonial art.