The Multiple Reinventions of the Américas in Context (English) - Video 1 of 2

good morning good afternoon good evening I'm Mary Miller director of The Getty Research Institute or the gri if you're joining us via stream in live stream in a time zone different from Southern California welcome and Hearty welcome to those of you who come to us on a day other than October 28 2022. we acknowledge our presence today on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the Gabrielino tongva peoples we're here today to dive into and to go beyond the exhibition Reinventing the Americas construct erase repeat which analyzes representations of the Americas produced between the 16th and 19th centuries questioning the mythologies and the utopian visions that proliferated after the arrival of Europeans to the continents the Getty Research Institute and maybe all of you today feel connected to New Spain of which this place California was long apart as well as the quarter century when it was part of the Republic of Mexico yielding a history that took place here in California indigenous and Spanish the makers of The Works in this exhibition mixed reality based on their own expectations what are yours chroniclers illustrators and printmakers created portable and reproducible images that circulated around the world fueling the spread of stereotypes and prejudices and supporting a greedy Covetous impression to perform upon the Americas to counter these European views which are rampant in our gri collections the exhibition features in artistic interventions by denilson beniwa a contemporary Brazilian indigenous artist from the Amazon region of Brazil and we'll be hearing from him later I first saw his work in 2020 in Sao Paulo days before the world shut down for the pandemic the exhibition also includes the voices of local community groups in Los Angeles and I hope you will look for their words and their commentaries in the exhibition labels so I hope you will spend time in the exhibition which is nearby in the on the main floor of the gri I also want to encourage you to visit the exhibition in the Getty museum the courtesy Maya de Mexico the oldest book of the Americas authenticated by the National Institute of anthropology in Mexico the Codex last visited the United States in 1971 when it was roundly denounced as a fake but it's real as Mexico showed in 2018 and I'll be leading a tour at 1 45 145 halfway through your lunch break so if you would like to come take the second half of your lunch break with me where should you meet me at the entry to the exhibition it has its own little Fountain area so housekeeping about today's today's Symposium to make today's presentations accessible the present the program will be offered in English and Spanish and with some presentations delivered in Portuguese all of the morning session will be read in English or delivered in English I don't know if you're all reading but if you would like to listen in Spanish and are sitting here in the auditorium please walk back to where you just came in and pick up a headset um which are you can are labeled according to language this afternoon we're going to hear sessions in Portuguese so you may want to pick up a headset if you want if you would prefer to listen in English for those of you listening on Zoom you may also select your language by enabling the interpretation feature and I bet this is being projected to you on Zoom right now with a textual description of what you do you want to click that little Globe icon on the bottom of your screen it appears in different places depending on whether you're on a Mac an iPad or a some other kind of delivery delivery of the zoom and select your preferred language you may also select the words that say mute original audio feature to avoid hearing two languages at once and once again welcome to the multiple reinventions of the Americas in context you'll now hear from edury Alonso the curator of the exhibition and the organizer of the symposium foreign good afternoon good evening depending where you are alone so curator of the Latin American collections at the Getty Research Institute and also a curator of Reinventing the Americas I want to thank the people that are joining us today from the people around the world watching us online to the people that are here with us in this Auditorium as you know the Symposium has been organized in conjunction with exhibition treatment in the Americas on view right now at the Gary Research Institute and for those that haven't seen the exhibition yet let me give you a short sentence about the show it's based on our collection and is built around the premise that America's America is a European invention um Mary already told you about it so now um let me say that it's a pleasure pleasure and an honor to have such a remarkable group of internationalist Scholars and an artist participated in this symposium I would like to thank them for accepting the invitation to be part of this event I also want you to know that they contributed to enragement in the America's exhibition as I was planning it some were part of a workshop I organized three years ago when I was still shaping the project we spent two days looking at the incredible materials in the gri collections thinking about the possible narratives in the show several of their ideas and suggestions and that are being part of the exhibition from the group of presenters I want to specially thank Renato Meneses who worked with me for a year in the exhibition we were in the middle of the pandemic and that allowed us to have very long conversations we assume he was in Paris I was in Los Angeles on how to tell this very complex story I also want to take a minute to acknowledge the work of this weekend slur who has made all the logistical arrangements for this event reminding the Americas begins with an audio recording of an excerpt of the letter by Christopher Columbus written on his return from his first trip to the Americas in 1493. Columbus talks about the continent as a marvelous and Indescribable place with rivers filled with gold this text starts A Narrative of the exhibition as the first European invention of the Americas to add some local perspectives to the show I invited several members of our community to write various labels in the exhibition I just want to highlight the label that opens the exhibition together with Columbus's excerpt written by Salvador Alvarez Arturo Cuevas Federico Mora and Ephraim Perez from Getty grounds most history is not reality as it consists of both truth and Imagination that is how history is written with a splash of Truth and many lies which in this case were fabricated to attract Europeans to America today we're going to listen to presentations that will discuss the historical context of these images on the Americas why and how these pieces were created how truthful they were what were the political implications that affected their production how they were perceived and understood the exhibition ends with a mural created by the Nilsson baniwa in which he narrates the beginning of the world from the baniwa perspective the opening and the end of the show highlights the fact that the reinvention of the Americas has never been a static homogeneous and a linear process it also confirms that we keep Reinventing the Americas today I hope that this Symposium helps us understand the way in which the many reimentions of the Americas have shaped The View we have on our continent and now let me introduce you to the first Speaker Nicolas biakowski who is a specialist in early modern cultural history he works as a professor and research it at the University at Pompeo favor in Barcelona his Publications include Barbara Guerrera La Historia De tomidis from 2021 from 2020 and Historia natural immedica de los elefantes from 2019 co-authored with Jose urukwa foreign [Applause] I am very happy to be here today I would like to begin by thanking the gri for the invitation to participate in the Symposium in particular tsp answer for making all things practical regarding my arrival here possible and I would also like to thank edury for the invitation and to congratulate her for the exhibition and also to thank her for allowing me to witness the blossoming of the exhibition from the workshop we shared here a few years ago until the opening now and the representation of America by Europeans has been full of confusion contradiction and debate even before the continent had that name they're arriving to America Christopher Columbus's first reaction was to describe its inhabitants as barbarians or savages the distinction between barbarians and Savages was not as clear-cut them as it would become after the enlightenment on October the 12 1492 Columbus wrote in his diary that the people that he met in America were and I quote very poor people they went about all naked like their mothers had brought them to this world and although they are very well formed with beautiful bodies and good faces they don't know armor nor iron and they have no sect whatsoever furthermore since he could not understand their language he concluded that it was a European's duty to teach them how to speak Pope Alexander vasi understood immediately the meaning of Columbus's Explorations on May the 4th 1493 he signed the bio intercatera where he stated that it was a paper will that I quote the barbaric Nations that inhabit the Newfoundlands shall be depressed and reduced to the same Catholic faith and Christian religion end quote given this framework the first images of America are really not that surprising perhaps this German engraving from 1505 could be described as an idealized and rather inaccurate family portrait it depicts the Americans as heroic Savages or cannibals thus revealing some of the European complex and contrasting attitudes towards the people they encountered the men on the right appear admirable and heroic as I pose proudly by their weapons while the women and children on their left from form a loving family sin in the center of the image however a human head leg and arm rolls over a fire on the far left a Woman bites into an arm cannibalism real or imagined was from the start one of the aspects of American society that Europeans found most shocking the caption based on America best push's description of the people he encountered in Brazil presents a mixture of repulsion and attraction to this strange new Society I quote the people are thus naked handsome Brown well-shaped in body their heads necks arms private parts feet of men and women are little covered with feathers the men also have many precious stones in their faces and breasts no one also has anything but all things are in common and the men who have as wives those who please them be thy mothers sisters or friends therein they make no distinction also fight with each other they also eat each other even those who are slain they become 150 years old and have no government end quote the Violence entailed by the conquest and colonization of the of the continent was also debated from the very beginning beating the guise of justification or condemnation in 1515 and 1551 summoned by Emperor Charles the first quanquinas is discussed the issue in bayabalin Sepulveda Justified Violence and war against the American peoples on foregrounds they were barbarians they committed crime crimes against their against natural law they had oppressed and murdered innocent people and they were infidels who had to be instructed into Catholic faith Las Casas on the contrary defending defended a unifying idea of humanity Americans were not essentially different or inferior to the Europeans they weren't as capable of receiving the Christian religion peacefully Spain's Royal in the new world should be spiritual and non-political nor economic he did not bother to ask the Indians as he called them whether or not they wanted to convert into Christianity but he stated that they lived in harmonic communities governed by strict laws that they possessed a beautiful language and that idolaters and cannibals were a minority among them who could be persuaded to receive the Gospel for Las Casas they were barbarians as well but the meaning of the word was different it was much closer to what we would call otherness he also thought that the Americans were no worse than the Spanish I quote we ourselves in our ancestors have been much worse be it in irrational and confused polity as in vices and brutal Customs all around this our Spain both issues the image of Americans in European eyes and the violence of conquest and colonization have been chronicled and reflected upon almost endlessly although all of this is well known I would like to go through some texts and images that represent the people of Americas and the violence perpetrated throughout the continent I will try to briefly examine their Origins and motivations to approach their role in several political debates of their day and perhaps to have a look at their posthumous life in our own days and in this exhibition in particular so let's begin attempt to represent the people in the Americas who are abundant took several shapes and forms and had different and even contradictory objectives it would be surprising to discover the opposite if we consider the diversity of experience and relations in the long period from the arrival of the Europeans to America in 1492 and until the beginning of the struggles for Independence an unsurprising reaction by Europeans to the contact with the Americans was an attempt to integrate them to what they already knew or imagined this idea could be modulated either in secular or religious terms the peoples of the Americas were liking to barbarians or Savages as we know very well the Engravings produced by Taylor debris as an illustration for the first volume of America were among the most popular portraits of Native Americans in early modern times they were devised for an addition for an addition of Thomas Harriet's a brief and true report of the Newfoundland of Virginia published in front 14 1590 uh while debris was excited in London he had managed to obtain Harvest sticks and the set of watercolors painted by John White during the first settlement of Virginia debris based engraving someone of his edition of Harriet's work on a set of images produced by Lemon de morges and debris from this very beginning debris Grand Voyage attempted to provide an account of the reality of the new world in terms of cultural and anthropological otherness the ethnographic approach in the breeze Engravings was also comparative the portraits of American men and women were joined by five images that attempted to show how the inhabitants of Great Britain had been in times past as Savages of those of Virginia those are his words this conviction would last a long time in the minds of the English Setter settlers in America and in any case the breeze Engravings clearly displayed depicts head hunting habits their nakedness their primitivism highlighting their similarities with the Americans as Europeans perceive them at the time foreign this was not always unnecessarily negative some of the characteristics of the Peaks and of the Americans such as their courage their dignity were considered valuable particularly when compared to present decadent manners this attitude can also be traced to classical Antiquity facilities had also transformed the perception of otherness into a temporal development he thought that the Greek had in their past shared a course barbarian costumes with barbarians of his time but there were also several attempts to make the new world fit into biblical narrative in this Adoration of the Kings painted between 1501 and 1506 a Portuguese painter Basco Fernandez combined traditional iconography with innovation the wines the wise men who according to Matthew traveled from the East to pay tribute to the new King of Judea in Bethlehem had been depicted at least from the 12th century as representatives of every part of the world the old man came from Asia a younger man came from Europe the youngest from Africa in this case Vasco Fernandez replaces the African man with an American perhaps from the coast of from the coast of Brazil who has also come to celebrate the birth the birth of the baby Jesus decades later again Theodore debris opened his edition of Harriet's brief answer Report with an engraving depicting Adam and Eve's disobedience in Paradise which you can see here on the left his notice to the reader compared the North American Savages with mankind after the fall deprived of God's gifts but not unable to provide for themselves they have a quote not true knowledge no true knowledge of God yet they pass us in many things as in sober feeding and dexterity of which in making things so neat and so fine end quote but we can also find good examples of this attitude in works of science some of which are included in this exhibition the front space of Williams pisos published in 1648 clearly presents the abundance of American nature as a Garden of Eden and the Brazilian man and woman flanking the entrance to such a Land of Plenty could easily be interpreted as the indigenous equivalence of Adam and Eve thirdly allegorical images representing both America and American nature integrated the lands previously known to the Europeans into the vision of the old world let's take as an example the map of the world designed by Petrus plants use and pretty and printed by Cornelius class in 1594 which you can also see in the exhibition when faced with attacks with a task of representing malianika plants use and class depicting her white and dressed like Asia and Europa and not nude and colored as in the case of peruana Mexicana and Africana not only that but she is shown riding an elephant as you can see right here and I dare all of you to go and find me an elephant in Tierra del Fuego so how can we explain this perhaps because magalianika was imagined as a part of their Australia's incognita an imaginary continent encompassing the entire Southern half of the Southern Hemisphere and the Dutch suppose that what they could find in India and the islands of the Indian Ocean could also be fined to be found in the southernmost parts of America there are other possible explanations for this maybe we can discuss them later in a similar manner Europeans expected to find in America legendary and monstrous beings hybrids of humans and other Critters that were said to exist beyond the margins of the known world this tradition dates back to plini and his natural history and in this exhibition you can see this image here where sorry you can see this image here where which is a copy a 1543 43 copy of Zakaria alcaswini's book of Wonders originally written in the 13th century here we can see a bleming which is a being with the face on his chest an exponent of the people that had that anatomical feature and on November of 1492 Columbus wrote that the Americans had told him that in the next Island he would be able to find the synocephaly which you can see here people with the heads of dogs that's tradition of imagining that you could find those beings in America persisted for a long time a century later during his trip to Guyana Walter Raleigh was still looking for the blemish as the front dispense of an addition of History shows here on the right perhaps more Eastern interestingly other Europeans thought that American peoples had characteristics and customs of Their Own different from those of Europe which could hardly be considered better in themselves of course the locals classicus for this attitude is Mountain cannibals first published in 1580 where he thus refers to the people of the new world I quote I find that there is nothing barbarous and Savage in this nation by anything that I can gather accepting that everyone gives the title of barbarism to anything that is not in use in their own country we find a similar disposition in Gilliam Tomas Francois rhinel's history of the two Indies published in the 1770s this work has been subject to criticism from the moment of its appearance the Spanish considered that it was too harsh on their Endeavors the Americans objected that it gave greed to the idea of the inferiority of America the critics of the Enlightenment saw in it another example of eurocentrism some of these accusations are undeniably true the work is an attempt to understand the relationship of the European Empires to the entire world it is a eurocentric history but one that denounces European corruption violence and greed right now and the other contributors to his work need it all among them who are convinced that it was not the Vanquish but I quote the English the Dutch the French the Spanish and the Portuguese who have behaved with a common frenzy beyond the equator the entire European history is re-evaluated in the light of its Global expansion during Which Europeans destroyed anyone in their path and ruined themselves morally right now's history rejects the idea that the non-european peoples can be considered Savages in the sense of lacking artificiality thought that Arts beliefs and human institutions are different in each society and most of all that they cannot be easily compared Nomads Savages other societies form communities that are as artificial as those in Europe although artificial in different ways his anti-imperialism was just was not just a denunciation of European abuse it challenged the right of the Europeans to subject the rest of the world to their empire let's skip now to the representation of violence in America which was also an important feature of texts and images regarding the experi the experience of the continent from the very beginning we have already seen some examples of this regarding the Americans and their cannibalism real or imagined and we know for a fact that this excited European imagination and incited fear attraction and will to power at the same time no matter how contradictory they may seem however this is not the sort of representation of violence that I would like to analyze today instead I intend to discuss texts and images regarding the violence of the conquest and colonization of the Americas that are truly really terrible so you've been warned in many occasions the representation of racial violence in America and radical violence in America became a signifier for European political and religious dissension they formidable disposition of Christians to harm each other caused Catholic and Protestants Mutual accusations of brutality one of the items in this exhibition was published in Antwerp in 1587 and it is Richard bersigan's theater of the cruelty of the Heretics of our time which you can see one of the pages of which you can see here on the left most of the atrocities attributed by first taken to Protestants in England Belgium and France represent the Catholic victims as Martyrs of the protests and the Protestant perpetrators as humans or barbarians among the horrible cruelties of the huguenots in France Two Soldiers here in the image take a hold of a victim's vowels while three others bury a priests and two more cut children in half finally the remaining soldiers castrated priest Rose his organs and force feed him to him later on disemboweling the old man and forcing him to I quote see how they are digested before his days and end quote both the grill and the obsessive detail in the representation are similar to several depictions of the Barbarian cannibalism of the new world the image you can see on the Right comes from an addition of Las Casas brevisima descriptions written in 1552. cannibalism in this case is said to have been imposed upon the Americans by the harsh conditions created by their conquerors a few years later the Dutch embraced the history of the destruction of the West in the in this an analogy of their own clashes with the Spanish in 1620 John everhart's kloppenberg edited two volumes the front species of which you can see here the first one on the left was entitled The Mirror of the cruel and horrible Spanish tyranny perpetrated in the low countries and narrated the abuses committed by the troops of the Duke of Alba during the rebellion of the low countries the second one which you can see on the right was a translation of Las Casas brevisima published with a title that explicitly equated the sufferings of the Americans to that of the Dutch the mirror of the Spanish tyranny perpetrated on the West Indies evidently the Dutch felt that the torments they had experienced were similar to the to those of the new world in both cases the weight of barbarism was put on Spanish domination both the Americans and the Dutch were victims of the Catholics exploits in other cases violence against the Americans or against either side of the religious divide in Europe was represented to highlight the innocence of the victims and not only the savagery of the perpetrators this is clearly the case in Las Casas verissima in 1598 four decades after it was written cellular debris published in Frankfurt an illustrated edition of the work which was openly anti-catholic and anti-spanish the 17 Engravings included included in the book became the definitive visual document of Spanish cruelty in America and were crucial for the reception of Las casasis in that indictment of his countrymen's actions let's take as an example this image the one on the left on page 36 of that Edition illustrating the narration of The Facts of New Spain when the Spaniards burned Americans alive in order to spread Terror the Serene and dignified expression of the victims the position of their bodies and the actions of the perpetrators are clearly similar to The Angry Birds Engravings in Protestant materialogies as this one you can see on the right from John Foxy's book of Martyrs first published in 1563 and extremely popular throughout northern Europe the massacres of Americans were also represented as hunting scenes when Las Casas narrates the killings perpetrated by Spaniards in the Espanola he describes the atrocities with synergetic metaphors the Indians appeared as hunted animals the murderers are assimilated to their dogs of prey because of their shared ferocity in a topos coming from classical representations of human massacres according to Las Casas I quote all the people that could run away would hide in the mountains and the hills in a flight from such inhuman men lacking piety ferocious like beasts enemies of mankind that would teach their terrible dogs to tear apart by India any Indian they saw in an instant a few years later when Antonio a ray writer desilias published his General history of the facts of the castilians in the islands and Mainland of the ocean he referred to the fact that I quotevoa sent for the dogs to be thrown Against The Chieftains brothers and other prisoners who practice the nefarious scene the passage was illustrated by this engraving also featured in the exhibition the destruction of American communities communities was also depicted as a hellish experience this of course was not new several massacres from the old world had been represented in that fashion in most cases the depiction of mass killings as a scene from Hell tended to justify the fact here we can see an image painted by George obasari in 1572 for acid decoration for the salad regia in the Vatican where he tried to portray the conflicts of his time in which the Catholic cause was at stake for this reason next to a panoramic view of the Battle of Lepanto he included three frescoes with scenes of the religious wars in France the Fresco here that depicts Admiral colonies assassination shows perpetrators as Heroes and victims transformed into the into demons but the representation of massacres in America brought about a decisive innovation that took place in Espana as infernal but it was the Spaniards Who had who became heddish Critters while the Americans were instead innocent victims of their infernal Fury I quote a Christian Capital completed endless and iniquitous wars and infernal massacres and he put that entire territory under the unbearable tyrannical servdom that all Christian tyrants wish for those people in the Indies when these scenes were engraved by debris the internal model was clearly northern European as you can see from the image on the right which is from a painting by Lucas granach there is another aspect of violence in the Americas that cannot be left outside our scope the unbearable situation of African slaves captured from their communities sold near the coast transported across the Atlantic and forests to live and working in human conditions in their destinations who were represented many times but slavery was also a reality for the indigenous peoples of The Americans the third book of the history of the two Indies by reinel opens with this engraving representing a scene of slave trade in the background have naked chain chained men and load the boats docked in the port in the foreground a white man sells a woman also trained and half naked who cries unconsolably the price is a bag of gold the caption reads an Englishman from Barbados sells his lover a passage from the text further describes the facts after a shipwreck one of the sailors was rescued by an American woman who fed him cared for him and after a while took him back to the coast as soon as they reached the port the monster saw the woman who had helped him keep his life who had given him his heart who with all the feelings and Treasures of love according to reinel this episode was transformed into a play by an English poet who I quote immortalized this Infamous moment to Everest this Infamous Monument to avarice and perfidy for posterity end quote it is a tale of yariko and Lincoln which was not narrated for the first time in 1657 and later on transformed into an opera there were of course many instances of resistance in which African slaves in collaboration with Americans fought against their exploitation in 1792 Capital J.G Stedman published in London his Narrative of a five years Expedition against the revolted Negroes of Suriname Illustrated with Engravings by William Blake this is an example which you can also see in the exhibition statement tells the story of the brutal repression of maroon communities groups of slaves that escaped Inland to live in Freedom and fight against the Dutch although it is possible that the author was a supporter of Reform rather than abolition his book was soon Vindicated by those who were active in the campaigns to put an end to slavery but marunich was not the only expression of resistance between 1791 and 1804 Haiti witnessed a successful Insurrection of cell liberated slaves against colonial rule that led to the Island's Independence it was the only slaver pricing that culminated in an independent state free from slavery and ruled by former captives who we can see here a former slave later infantry Capitan of the Rebel forces became a deputy to the National Convention in Paris where he spoke in the session that voted to abolish slavery on February the 4th 1794. painted this portrait in which ballet conveniently raised his elbow next to a bus of right now who had won the European Europeans and I quote that your slaves stand in no need of either your generosity or your counsel in order to break the sacrilegious yoke of their oppression nature speaks a more powerful language than philosophy or interest these are so many indication indications of the impending storm and the Negroes only won't achieve sufficiently courageous to lead them to Vengeance and Slaughter where is this great man that nature owes to its oppressed and tormented children he will appear and he will rise the sacred Penance of freedom and quote the movement suffered a serious blow with Napoleon ordered the invasion of the island in 1802. ballet and to send libertio leader of the Rebellion died in prison years later in 1825 Charles attend imposed crippling were reparations and further impoverished that impoverished the free state of I.T despite those terrible facts the independence of Haiti radicalized the idea of universal human rights because free slaves and their American companions imposed their Liberty and the abolition of slavery on the French colonies and administrators that attempted to curtail it so let's end I have walked you through a collection of texts and images terrible and beautiful regarding the American people's violence among them and violence against them all of these images and texts were produced by Europeans between the end of the 15th century and the end of the 18th century several are part of Reinventing the Americas some even with the Nielsen vanilla's interventions that question them and bring them and bring them back to life it is a contradictory array of representations devised with opposing intentions in different times and contexts with diverse approaches and consequences they show Power and resistance stereotype and Novelty fantasy and reality their authors attempted to portray the world and to shape it to dominate the people in the in America and to fight for their freedom not only that but the experience and the image of Americans and of violence in the Americas had noticeable effects in Europe and in the political and religious clashes that were taking place here in any case those images point to a European difficulty in the representation of otherness but they also prove that the attempt to overcome those difficulties did not always lead to the same results thank you very much [Applause] now we're gonna hear from Thomas Cummins who is the director of Dumbarton ox and the Dumbarton Ox professor of the history of pre-columbian and Colonial art in the department of the history of art and architecture at Harvard University he is the author editor RN co-editor of 10 books the letters of which is sacred matters animacy and Authority in the Americas from 2020. [Applause] well thank you for being here on a beautiful Friday morning of course it's always beautiful in Los Angeles but it's also just a great pleasure to be here at the Getty again and to work with this wonderful uh crew at the gri and I really thank idore for inviting me to return here and like Nicholas I had the great pleasure right before the pandemic to be out here and to look at this Splendid collection and growing collection of books concerning early America and thinking about how to present them and to talk about them and so I begin this morning in the title of my talk is the topsy-turvy images of America and the place of you and you'll see why well I say this I don't even know how to translate topsy-turvy in Spanish or any other language but I use it because I start with Torres Garcia's well-known print uh it's both simple yet it's quite disquieting as one must assume a viewing position that goes against the norm and that's what I want to do today we could see it therefore simply perhaps as an artistic gesture and one's turning away from it we can return to our custom ways of viewing the world r that is Western North American European omniscient omniscient viewing position requires that the north is at the top of the page and not the South as is inverted here there are of course all kinds of implicit biases as one moves from north to south the Nicholas has just referred to some of them one is you become smaller you become Dumber you become impotent this all set of biases that from the 16th century until today talk about the tropics and the Tropics really is not about the tropics it's about moving out of Europe that are implicit in the way we view the world as I say these uh implicit biases including the eventual historical division of America into the Americas done by anglophone America that is it wasn't always the Americas it was America but that's not what I want to discuss today rather I'll start with the earliest image of America and work towards how it slowly expanded in cartography and paintings so as to naturalize viewing positions that are derived from conquest and the colonial Enterprise and I'm focused on just a few places but with multiple representations of them and by that I hope to demonstrate how our subject position of seeing and therefore knowing places before ever even visiting them is conditioned first of all from a western phenomenological position of approach to them and that this is in the main based on the very trajectory of colonial violent Conquest as we just heard about that is the witnessing seeing places implicates an image the viewer in an a topic position that is you are implicated in those images and that's different than looking at other kinds of images because you are situated there and so I begin with the very first image of America it's the well-known line drawing by Christopher Columbus which depicts simply the northern coast of Hispanola which was Haiti becomes Haiti It Is by what it will become a beautiful gesture made to indicate the Topography of where the land meets the water it is incomplete as what else there is for Columbus is unknown very different than his text which is so assertive it is a disquiet it is as disquieting in Simplicity as Torres Garcia's print is but for very different reasons the coastal outline sketched by Columbus was made during his second voyage in 1493 the same year his letter describing his first voyage in which we've already talked about about what he saw whom he met was published four times it was a bestseller right away in Spain Italy Basel Rome the consequences of that narrative are why we are here today it spread that knowledge first of all to people who would never see America but as we see here it is a place that promises but is unknown it can't be seen words of Columbus are not the same as the image he presents to himself and so it was never published and I turned therefore from that cover where there's people there's a trirem here or by uh and Columbus himself coming ashore natives running to meet with him as he brings a class vessel and he's receiving gold that's in the narrative none of that is implied in the visual image rather the coast is the northern coast it looks to the north and everything to the South is still unknown I turned then to an image only six years later or thereabouts in which we see one of the first world maps this is the Cantina planosphere or continuous world map Circa 1500 that then is stolen or traded out of Portugal into Italy I won't go into the history it's well known but this is one of the first world maps that begins to flesh out what Columbus had begun the island of Cuba and Hispanola the Columbus the sketch only hints at now are fully circumscribed and detailed in terms of their size and relationship to each other we begin to see more and more in a topic kind of way witnessing that topography and geography even Florida can be recognized here but more importantly for what America was to become uh and was to speak is also seen here one sees the appearance of the unknown coast of Brazil it like it's like the incomplete sketch of Columbus only hints at a tropical unknown interior that is indicated simply by trees from which Brazil of course receives its name and parrots that ubiquitous index of feathers that are worn and that Nicholas had just talked about but there are no people there are no buildings as there are in Europe rather just a verdant land waiting to be known and to be possessed the index of possession is also present in this map marked by the imaginary line of the most consequential performative speech act in world history it's what creates the America we inhabit it is the line drawn after the Treaty of tordesius that joined Portugal and Spain in agreement as to how the world was to be divided for example one cannot even imagine how Brazil and its relationship to Africa would have been in the 16th 17th and 18th centuries and 19th to 20th centuries if the line had been further east and when I call it a performance speech act I'm talking about Austin's linguistic notion of speech Act in which saying something transforms in reality the world and that's what happened and I simply show here the document uh drawn up between these two kingdoms in Iberia and mediated by the Pope in Rome none of them would ever be there but it's a document that determined the future that we inhabit today but which did not anticipate the land that is marked on the map the Spanish thought that they had it all so the rest is equally known and this of course is the line as you see here I don't want to I hope well I'm not sure which is this I'm not good uh but that blue line is that imaginary line drawn by the uh the tree of todosius and this is all well known but it's it's something really critical to remember when we think about the image of America both as image text and a reality and so the rest as I said is uh well known because we see while the Mueller's map or at least one of his additions the gore actually for a globe in which a world map uh is made about a two years later than what we just continuous map uh it includes the lands that were uh becoming better known and he placed the name America after Amerigo Vespucci as is well known uh and we see it uh what is I'm just if I could oh yeah well if I can find it on the map yeah so it's over here and so uh we see it uh there uh and if we look at the detail of that was Mueller's map in the Katina map we can see that there is a difference uh because the outline of the shore is now filled in as an odd triangular shape it is now a solid Mass still unknown but not indeterminate and it is given a Portuguese name it's not a Portuguese name but a Portuguese explorer and what that means is that uh this shape which is the indeterminate one that is created by the line of tordecias becomes this solid area it declares itself as such and we move from the ptolemaic maps of old into a realm as new as a new world is included and what we see by that is this great map world map of 1506 which in Latin is declared down below it's cut off but the world and all it sees on a plane map Europe Libya Africa Asia and the anthropods the poles and zones and sites of places and Parallels for the climbs of a mighty Globe Giovanni Mateo famed in the ptolemaic art has compiled and marked it out wither away State traveler and behold new nations and a new found world that is the map maker addresses directly the viewer telling him or her to look to see and what do you see a new world America and what is this new world it is a world to be possessed it is a world to be conquered and how do we know this here we see Hispanola and Cuba now fully articulated in relationship to each other but also what we see in Latin written above them is that these are the islands that were conquered dominated by Christopher Columbus for Spain text and image here relate geography and history and Conquest on this map and conrini addresses the viewer directly to tell them to look you are positioned to see and to acknowledge history in terms of geography so that Latin text written next to Espanol is the sketch of Columbus now completed these are the islands that Columbus subjugated for Spain in 1492 1493. but now I want to move back to the Caribbean and to look at Pedro 1511 map which is what you see here and the world and our view is beginning to shift even though this is the map of the new world as recently discovered that's what it says on the page because here you see the island of Espanola the island of Cuba uh and then the sketch of Columbus is repeated but now it's the coastal outline of the Caribbean mainland which will become known as the virenato de Mexico behind this line is again Land Unknown but like Hispanola it will soon be filled in as eight years later Cortez and his troops As We Know and eventually his plushkalin allies conquered the great city of tenochitlan that is you will move from the unknown into what is to become known that is I compare these two maps and we can see how slowly the world is beginning to be filled in but one of the things that I will ask you to think about and position yourself is that if you look at the map drawn by Columbus it is a north south orientation on the page top to bottom if you look uh at the map that is drawn by Getty it is now East West you're moving out of the Caribbean and towards the coast of the Mainland North is to the top but the main area that we are oriented towards is what is to come so what is important here is that the view of the coast now shifts that is the coastal outline is no longer oriented from Cuba and it's been looking West rather it is now oriented on the page so the orientation uh here oh in this map I'm sorry let me go back with the publication of Cortez's account in Nuremberg of the conquest uh includes the most famous map perhaps of the conquest of America it is the most famous map of any uh in Mexico but really any of America and has been endlessly studied and argued about uh and also return to the map of the city itself in just a second but what's equally important is what it does with the map of the Caribbean in it we now have the shift of how we view the coast that is the coastal outline is no longer oriented from Cuba and it's beenola looking West rather it is now oriented on the page so the orientation is from tenochitlan Mexico City this may not seem important but it's a radical shift in The Narrative of America an American Conquest as it begins to become ever more the subject of the narrative and orientation of you that is Chronicles history people everybody is moving out of the Caribbean into the mainland so you're moving that is from west to east and here you see this image of the Punta de Cuba is that's all you see the end of Cuba and you move uh into the coast of Mexico it is a reorientation it's very simply done but Mexico now becomes represented more often than not uh than we see the Caribbean and this is the great image of Cortez the Viewpoint is more or less seen at the bottom of the page uh south to North although it's not really because you have the sun coming up between the two towers uh of the twin temples of the temple mayor but that's not actually where it's oriented uh in this map it's completely askew so as we look uh now oriented in tenochitlan North the South uh is determined by the approach of the Spaniards actually and it takes as and this is the approach that they see Mexico City from first time as they arrive from the coast traveling east to west across the paths into the city uh as described Bernal Diaz del Castillo if you read it you can almost imagine yourself uh seeing this what he says is too beautiful to describe I don't have enough words it's something like out of the book of Amadeus but the approach is not precisely this but it is coming through the past pastel and then looking at and down at Mexico City the point is that this becomes the Viewpoint of Mexico City forever uh and as I said it's not a precise orientation of an actual approach but it's rather it situates the viewer to the orientation of an approach an approach that is about the domination of a place this place is about to disappear tenochitlan will be raised to the ground and it will be rebuilt as Mexico City but it doesn't change the orientation this is how you're going to see it this is the 1550 circuit 1550 map of Santa Cruz that was sent to Charles V and it was uh then amended and described uh by his Royal geographers Santa Cruz in which he employs the king or the emperor to look at the city that he has conquered that is what is written in the gold down at the bottom left of the page that is the text itself is telling you what I just told you I didn't need to actually I could have just read it that is you own this this is yours this is European and it is the same orientation if we go back that Cortez gives us basically uh and why I say that is you can see the uh dike that's built below and you see the Dyke again right here at the bottom this separates the two bodies of water in the lake and you know Barbara Mundy has described these maps and I'm not going to go into that uh it's and it's a wonderful book but my point here is the iteration and reiteration of the same position of the viewer towards a place and that place is the place of benaldias del Castillo of Cortez and of every conqueror and uh colonizer to see the city and so you see the center of the city is ETC and this goes on and on and on these are the two maps of the center of the city uh with the cathedral and the Palace of the governador and it is the same direction it is taken from the same Viewpoint again and again and you see it again and again and again this is the the uh 16 uh I think it's 23 representation in Mexico City uh showing the same Viewpoint and orientation of Juan Gomez and others who and there's a whole iteration of these all of them taking the same subject position the same autopic position that you are taking and I am taking as we look at Mexico say this is how you think of Mexico City and of course Cortez's map is repeated again and again and again the north-south orientation in the representation of tenochitland Mexico City was conceived as a kind of uh well next I mean Teno cheat line should I say it doesn't naturally have this kind of orientation and representation if we take into account the fact that tenochitlan was a kind of axis Mundi with the Temple of Mayor this Temple right at the top there was a kind of axis Mundi of the center of the universe uh because if we look at it differently as a cosmogram from the federal we see the center and the four cardinal directions of this Borgia uh uh Corpus of manuscripts this one from the Codex special but the Point here is that if we look at the directionality of this flat image of the cosmos East is at the top West is on the bottom North on the left and south on the right this is a completely different orientation of representation of the cardinal directions than is being taken in European representations of tenochitlan the point is that once the orientation becomes fixed as it was for Mexico City it is always seen from that perspective so let us look at South America and some of its earliest images we'll see something very different but in line with the autopic position of Conquest the earliest extensively illustrated book and I assume we have let's see as I don't know if it's in the exhibition or not is 1553 published in Seville almost all the images of places and people are incredibly fanciful as you see here his image of Cusco the only thing he gets right here is that the Inca Emperor has a red Fringe but whoever was making this uh image read the text and put that on him otherwise he's dressed in a Roman toga Etc the city itself is a walled European city just as he depicts Lake Titicaca here with European boats and a walled cities all around the lake this has nothing to do with reality but the most faithful image of any topographical feature in America appears in this book that is the image of cero De Potosi this is a real image drawn by somebody who has been there uh and who knows Potosi this is a photograph of uh the Red Mountain as it's called because it's covered with hematite uh the black and white would not uh refer show that but what you see here is his image of Potosi and it's the fabulous silver mine that was only found by the Spanish in 1545. it is seen from a particular vantage point it is the Vantage Point as one approaches from the north going south that's what this photograph is taken from that's what his Sero de Potosi image is taken from already the image depicts Mining and the veins in the Hills as we see here the Esteban et cetera Etc these are private veins in the mountains you also see here uh people going uh indigenous people going up to mine them up the uh up the paths leading up uh going from 12 000 feet upwards and this is a city that in 1545 didn't exist and as we all know by 1600 it has a population of over a hundred thousand inhabitants it has uh mirrors that are being brought from uh Venice uh it has a credible textiles from China Etc it is incredibly fabulously wealthy and this image is a faithful image of that place unlike any other that I know of in the 16th century of America everybody talks about Potosi Cervantes has a whole play about the richness of Peru and the silver that comes from it he also mentions it in Don Quixote and there's an expression uh but this image is the image that is concretized in how we see it from north to south another image I'm just going to go through a couple of these again looking towards the twin mountains with the yamas going up uh and all of the places entering into the mines this is a place where indigenous peoples the meeta of Potosi that is the labor Potosi those who went into the mine stayed for seven days and then came out because it was too it wasn't cost effective enough to have people coming in and out of the mines you can imagine what that was like one quarter of the population of the Southern Sierras of Peru was traveling to at or traveling from botosi in any one day again a 1590 representation same orientation same profile City below but here you have the industrialization of the mint and the uh the production of the ore here and you can see that this artist using color has depicted the red of the uh Red Mountain of the hematite even in terms of fantasy fantable images of the Virgin and the uh image of Potosi it's still the same it has now become uh a religious image as well and I'm not going to go into the text but this has to do with the papal donation as expressed and talked about uh by Nicolas of the Pope the donation of the world to the Spanish and that's what you see here this is a whole implicit mythology but it is the conquest this is a 1701 image of Potosi just as you see from the 1553 image except cast in Silver from the silver mine that was taken to Spain which is uh the by the and it was commissioned by the bishop at Potosi for his own Hometown and is the base of a statue of the Virgin that he venerated but it's exactly the same it has all of the two mountains as you see it this is what faces the congregation in Spain the Virgin sits on top of it just like this and here however you have people going up to the mining it taking out the silver but this is made of that silver Potosi is the only place that is depicted from a north-south orientation uh in the Andes and that orientation is the approach that is seen by the vast movement of peoples and goods who enter into the City and take the silver out of it of course the road to Potosi continues to sucre tukisaka that goes past Potosi but that view is never depictive I never even took a photograph of it either until I realized I should have that is you never take it from south to North it is not the iconic image and that is really interesting because it is the only orientation of a place in Peru that has a South a north to south uh because if we look at the earliest maps of Peru we see a completely different orientation if we look at this 1570s map of warachery the area of watercheri uh we uh which was created for the by Damian Bandera we see a different orientation it is a West at the at the bottom and East at the top or topographically we are looking from the Pacific into the Andes this orientation is followed in almost all views of Indian cities be they Maps plans or images uh and so as you can see there is the ocean at the bottom as you can see the uh Andy's at the top and what you probably can't read but you have one of the great uh images or deities of in the Andes who is mentioned in one of the great mythologies of the Andes written in quechua the only one written in quechua and it says the stairs to uh right at the top and I see if I can put it right there it's right there that's the road that leads uh passed uh out of Lima and into well actually it's going from Pacha kamak all the way up to pariyakaka and then it goes all the way to Cusco but the point is you were going up the page but you're going up the page you're also going up the mountains you're going west to east uh and we see this again and again so if we were take the most famous manuscript written by an andean's world map uh no even the world is compressed this way you go from the ocean with the boats the fish Etc As you move up the world uh you go into the mountains this is mapamundi this is his imaginative map of the world but it has the same orientation as does Banderas map and he didn't see this uh and you can see it for example in the 18th century uh map of kayao done by amade Frasier in uh which these maps and all his images are in Paris they were printed but you see them here this is kayao again this is the city that was completely wiped out by an earthquake and then a tsunami uh in the 18th century this uh but right before he did this but you're looking from west to east as you go up and including if you look at the 1680 painting of The Plaza of uh Lima you have the same orientation you are looking your back is to the ocean here and your uh view is across the plaza and you can see the beginning of the Andes As you move uh upwards and inwards to uh the high out planes even the Absurd image of Cusco that was barbones uh first image that he created uh in the 16th century has the same orientation it is at the bottom of the page you would be in the West and you would move into the city believe me Cusco never looked like this except that it did have sexism on to the north which is this tiered fortress-like edifice up here so you know the orientation that you're looking at and then you have the mountains in the back by the way this is the image of Cusco that's you see everywhere it's the only one you really see there is no really uh picture of Cusco except for the earthquake and that actually reverses it's the only one that reverses the direction and there's a reason for that which I won't go into this is very different than what happens in Mexico what you see here on the right is the description of the Valley of the chimu or chimo and the City of Trujillo that that's on the right and of course again you see the ships uh in the ocean at the bottom of the page indicating the West the Pacific and as you move up the river that's coming out of the Andes you get to the Andes very different than what you see on the left which is the image of Alcapulco that is you're coming out of Mexico City and you were looking into the Pacific from which the Manila Galleon arrives you're looking if you imagine yourself the horsemen there looking from east to west these are inverted positions so Adrian boot's image of 1638 as I said looks east to west to the Sea but the coastal compression of Peru and the dramatic rise of the Andes and then the impenetrable Amazon creates a phenomenological experience that places the colonizer in only one vantage point and that is you arrive from the West eat yes West I'm dyslexic uh that is you're always coming by boat or you do you can come by land but everything is coming really from the boat hence you see the ships at the bottom hence you see the Pacific the West as you arrive that is the position of the Conqueror that is the position of the European as they see this uh and I will say that that is really a radically different way of phenomenologically experiencing space and direction if you were a quechua speaker you do not see the world that way you stand and you look Depending on time of day I can't go into the the semantic I mean the uh syntax the semantics of it but the bodily understanding of how you speak and see where you are in the land is diametrically opposed that is you are taking we are taking as we look at this a subject position of the people who came from Europe who go to Peru just as you take the subject position of Cortez benaldias Etc as you look at Mexico as you look at Acapulco I will end with one really odd part of this and that is the Rio de La Plata as you see here by Blau from 1640 and the inconsequential City of Buenos Aires until the 19th century I hate to say that but it really wasn't that important but it was represented now the real Plata is a beautiful River and to the north is uh it border it actually creates the Border uh you know the area of the guarani and tucuman as you see here but it now is uh you cross the river and you go into Uruguay but what's really confounding here not the grid system of which all Spanish cities are placed and which is really uh fantastic for uh uh Buenos Aires as you see it looks to the River from a northern position or at least you suppose it is because it is towards the top of the page looking down towards the river and this is a normal way of looking at you see the boats here so one assumes if you don't know where you are that Buenos Aires is on the North Bank of the Rio Plata that's and I'm just going to show you these different images that I've taken from the these are all in Seville at the archive of the Indies another one all repeated but Buenos Aires is not on the Northern side of the river it is on the southern side of the river and if you were to study just the maps your subject position would be completely wrong in terms of where you're orienting yourself the only map that I found of in the 17th well there's more is correct is a French one of the plan of the city of buenosa of Buenos Aires which actually puts it at the bottom of the page indicating uh how you're looking looking North all the others invert it I don't have an inter a complete explanation of why this is done except to say that is always looking North to the South as I described at the beginning and to get it right you're looking South to the north so when I began this talk I thought my God Torres Garcia got it right from the very beginning that he is just repeating an historical trope about how one places oneself in the world according to the way you see it on the maps that you are given but in most cases it is an orientation that takes you bodily into a space that is historical that is based upon Conquest and a European sense of propriety of space and those are the views of America that becomes the Americas thank you [Applause] we have now 15 minute break before we go to the next speaker so if you want to have some coffee and come back in 15 minutes thank you okay welcome back everyone now we're gonna hear from danila bleachmar who is a professor of art history and history at the University of Southern California blitzmark's research addresses the histories of Art and Science in colonial Latin America and early modern Europe her Publications include visible Empire Botanical Expeditions and visual culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment from 2012 ambitional biologists images of Latin American nature from Columbus to Darwin from 2017. [Applause] thank you let me start my timer thank you so much for the invitation I am really delighted to be here to come back after that first conversation uh about this show some years ago and what um thank you also to CSV and the amazing team that planned this meeting what in incredible opportunity to be at the Getty today and to see these two exhibitions Reinventing the Americas and the Coliseum Mexico is really incredible and exciting and I'll say that as some of you who know me know I've been working for some years on a book about the Codex Mendoza a third of which you see here and it was a project that started at the Getty Research Institute when I was a scholar there is when it first began and this is from the last chapter so it feels very special to be back at the Getty as this project comes to and end um so the exhibition that brings us together today the exhibition element in the Americas addresses two related and important questions the first question is a historical one what visions of the Americas and Indigenous Americans did European books and prints articulate from the 16th to the 19th century and the exhibition explores this question Guided by the well by the revelatory Insight that the Mexican historian at Mundo Gorman offered in his 1958 book Le Benson America translated into English two years later or government argued that European texts and images did not describe territories peoples and the natural world of the Americas but rather invent them that the issue was not one of representation but rather of construction to this we can add that as we have heard this morning and seen from the show European Americana tells us as much if not more about Europe and Europeans than about the Americas and Indigenous Americans the second question that the exhibition poses is a methodological one how do curators Scholars artists work not only with but also through and against archives and collections how do we address silences omissions erasures and extract new insights from archives and collections that were formed at particular times and with particular motivations and constraints collections have possibilities as well as limits and the very rich collection that this exhibition is based on like most comparable collections at Major research institutions in the U.S consists of what Specialists call European Americana in other words European constructions of the Americas European Americana privilege certain objects but not others and narrate a specific story from a particular point of view as Tom just showed us in this exhibition curator Uriel Alonso thoughtful response to the problem of archival silences or missions and distortions was to invite the contemporary artist Daniel sambaniwa to insert his own work which talks back to the archive in Rich and Illuminating ways creating a present-day response to the historical Archive of European Americana is one way to respond to the limitations and biases of that archive another possibility is to show that the archive of European Americana is itself a contingent and partial historical constructure rather than the story a collection of European Americana could give one the erroneous notion that only Europeans created images and texts about the Americas in this period but not all inventions and reinventions of the Americas were created in Europe or by Europeans and their Spanish colonial rule indigenous mestizo Cleo Spanish-American authors and artists actively contributed to the reinvention of the Americas as its citizens of the independent nation states in the 1800s and the images on the screen are just some examples of the many examples of what we could call American Americana produced between the 1540s and the 1850s in addition to such drawings prints and paintings many indigenous objects were sent and taken from the Americas to Europe in the early morning period an important material archive that created its own set of European responses in a recent article I showed the ways in which these and other objects were reinvented in European collections from early modern cabinets to Modern museums a process of constant interpretive instability and mutability through which the tupinamba feather Cape that you see on the screen could be described as having belonged to the meshika ruler Moctezuma while emeshika chimale or feathershield was presented variously as a shield with a dragon a Chinese sunshade with dragon and an Indian shield with dragon identified as Mexican 300 years after its first listing in a European inventory and Mosaic work knife handle characterized in an Egyptian icing move as a sphinx and a Mexican Stone pendant her figurine as an Egyptian head of the sun and the famous feather work that has often been described as Montezuma's headdress identifies variously as a Moorish hat an Indian apron or a feather work that had belonged to the king of Cuba in my article I argued that such fungibility was not an accident of imperfect or insufficient information that over time gave way to more precise and accurate knowledge the point is not that at first they got it wrong but over time they knew more they got it right he's not a tale of progress instead I propose that such constant malleability is a result of an active interpretive strategy that involved the production of geographical and cultural and specificity through which non-european objects in European cabinets remain always imprecise changing and interchangeable the majority of indigenous objects could be endlessly reinterpreted in collections moving from one characterization to the next with astonishing flexibility but there was a particular type of object that resisted interpretation and those were indigenous manuscripts documents known today as colleges manuscripts contain containing indigenous pictography remained from the 1520s to the mid-1800s almost entirely illegible they collects Vienna for instance is believed to be among the earliest Mexican indigenous objects to arrive in Europe perhaps as early as 1520 has extremely well-documented collection history that has traced its circulation between 1521 and 1678 from Portugal to Rome to Central Europe then Munich Weimar finally Vienna where it has been since 1678. the Codex attracted the attention of Scholars and collectors including the Danish physician Olive who mentioned it in his 1655 publication warrants Museum or history of rare things were never saw the Vienna codex but he received a drawing from a correspondent the German scholar EOB ludov who was the foremost expert on Ethiopia in 17th century Europe ludov examined the Codex in Munich in 1650 and copied some figures from the lower portion of plate 12. he sent his drawings to worm who included woodcuts reproducing noodles figures and a short textual entry in a chapter chapter on artificialia or human-made things a category that Nicolas mentioned in which he lists written works from outside Europe including books in Japanese and Chinese characters but when it came to interpreting the Mexican pictography form had very little to say admitting that neither he nor anyone else had any idea what these images communicated he described the fears as Mexican hieroglyphs established with astonishing figures depicted in various colors from which hardly anyone has reduced anything though he did make an interesting connection because he continued they had great Affinity with certain figures among those at the extremely renowned gentleman Johannes a lot depicted in book 5 chapter 10 of his description of the West Indies so he said I have no idea what these mean but they do seem to connect to others that I saw in another book and I will be discussing that other book shortly unlike firm The Bolognese collector fornia endocospi did possess a Mexican codex in his famous cabinet which is depicted here in an engraving included in the 1677 publication of the Museo cospiano the manuscript is known after this owner as a codex Cosby and some of you will recognize not only that this is a facsimile but that it was photographed in the reading room of the Getty Research Institute a few isolated drawings from the Codex appear in this 1677 catalog where it is characterized as a Libro Mexicano Mexican book and the figures are described as Mexican hieroglyphs which are the most extravagant figures and for the most part depict strangely monstrous men and animals in other passage they author admits what they mean I do not know nor do I know of others in Europe who know it not having yet found anyone who has mentioned them and shed any light on them it will be a beautiful and curious undertaking for someone to shed light on the darkness shrouding these literary Mysteries not yet explained in Europe so Mexican indigenous pictorial manuscripts resisted interpretation they were constantly reinvented and translated into monsters hieroglyphs Egyptian Chinese and almost without exception reduce Europeans through pronouncing them illegible and interpretable unknowable but there was one exception the only indigenous manuscript that was legible to early modern Europeans was the manuscript known as the Codex Mendoza it was painted and narrated by indigenous people only a few decades after the fall of Tennessee and the restoration of Spanish colonial rule it is an example of some of the ways in which indigenous makers not only recorded but also actually actively remade their history and culture for a colonial and European audience this manuscript was produced expressly for export to send to Europe a meshika account of meshika history and it was one of multiple manuscripts created in what is now Mexico between the 1540s and the 1580s to provide information about indigenous cultures before and after Spanish colonization works that Elizabeth Boone has aptly characterized as a descendants of Aztec pictography and like pre-contact indigenous spectrography which was entirely eligible to early modern Europeans these works could be read looked at and understood as they all included texts in a European language either Spanish or Latin and most use a pictorial language that included to some degree Western imagery but while these manuscripts could be interpreted we have very little evidence that they actually were studied and used in this period and again there is just one exception the single Mexican indigenous manuscript that was not only legible but actually read translated reproduce repeatedly in this period was the Codex Mendoza sent from Mexico to Spain the Mendoza appears not to have arrived at its intended destination and somehow there's a story of pirates ended up in Paris then London then Oxford where it remains to this day one of its owners the English cleric Samuel purchase included a reproduction of the Codex in his collection of travel documents purchased his pilgrims publishing four massive volumes in 1625. the engraved frontist piece to their work includes a portrait of the author I think of him as a global sandwich with two hemispheres to either side and announces the goal of the publication explaining that it contains quote a history of the world in Sea voyages and land travels with the world of the world's charities are by a world of eyewitness authors related to the world in the third volume book 5 chapter 7 purchase reproduces de Mendoza and this is the longest chapter in the entire volume the volume is about a thousand pages and this chapter is the longest of all extending over 53 Pages it is also the most heavily Illustrated in the entire publication in all of four volumes and the title of the chapter is very interesting the history of the Mexican Nation describing pictures by the Mexican author explaining the Mexican language which expositions translated into Spanish and then into English together with the same picture history are here presented so there's great attention to the process through which the work was manufactured in a colonial context with indigenous paintings accompanied by an indigenous narrative in naguaro and this in turn translated into Spanish text that was again translated into the English text that purchase published in other words the process of continuous reinvention and translation is one that was not invisible or it was very much the point that purchase was making the first publication of a complete American indigenous manuscript in Europe and there is no other manuscript fully reproducing print for another 200 years Mendoza the only legible and accessible Native American object in the early modern period it was the only item in purchases extensive collection to receive this treatment and he described it as the choicest of my jewels what purchase did was create not a facsimile body translation this is not a copy but rather a reproduction and the vocabulary of original and copy that is so Central to the making of early modern images and things from prints to sculptural casts to replicas is not the most useful for us here nor is the idea of printed images as fixed identically reproducible statements that allow for the standardization of information whether we think of William Ivins or Elizabeth eisenstein more useful here is the idea of the Remake from film studies or of the cover from music studies both of which emphasize not the similarity between the original and other versions but rather the willful appropriation and reinvention that each later offshoot makes possible because purchase version gave way to many others so between 1625 and 1831 we have eight different works plus three translations so 11 Publications that remake the Mendoza whole or in part this makes the Codex Mendoza as far as I know the single most studied and analyzed non-european object in Europe until the second half of the 1800s and what happens with this constant reinvention is extremely interesting purchase used the Mexican manuscript as the source for the published version but once a manuscript gave way to print it disappeared although the Codex was in the botlion library at Oxford not a you know obscure place and included in its published catalog we have no record of anyone Consulting it between the time it entered the library in 1659 and 1830. purchases version was the one that authors used for their multiple reproduction reproductions so it was a remake that was in turn remade over and over and so we see the creation of versions with variable content and multiple meanings the printed version let loose a set of textual and pictorial objects that could be associated in various forms were dissociated to produce versions that are partial partial change sequence create or eliminate possible meanings and end up producing a sort of interpretive pinball machine a sort of Kaleidoscope of statements the key version in the story of remix is purchases as he was the one from which all the authors derived their own overall purchase is virtually strikingly faithful to the original manuscript and communicate a dedicate effort to reproduce rather than recreate it and I'll just mention that this is extremely rare for purchase who has been very harshly criticized by later historians for his liberal editing of the sources that he included in his pilgrims there's so many essays or articles by Angry Scholars who specialize in one part of the world who criticize a way in which he um sort of very savagely edited the source describing that part of the world the title of a 1977 scholarly essay is representative of this problem the title is Samuel purchase the indefatigable encyclopedist who lacked good judgment but with the Mendoza purchase stayed extremely close to the original or what he understood to be the original he considered the indigenous paintings to be what he termed a quote picture history and understood the Spanish text to be not an integral part but rather an extensive commentary an additional element so true to this understanding if not to the manuscript purchase is most significant intervention was to alter the relationship between between image and text in the manuscript in the publication the Spanish classes that in the manuscript appear next to each single image vanish the woodcuts replace these annotations with uppercase letters in alphabetical order which you can see on the screen keyed to a textual commentary setting italics below or next to the image so the move distanced image from text obscuring the Spanish presence within the manuscript itself and the separation of the pictorial and textual elements is emphasized by the running header for the chapter which portrays the Mendoza as a Mexican picture history Chronicle without writing despite the Abundant presence of words throughout the Codex the transcultural production of the manuscript and the colonial slant of the history are erased from view to provide an idea of the indigenous past as an ending and of indigenous people as always an ancient in an example as others that have been mentioned earlier today of what Johannes Fabian and other critics of anthropology have termed the denial of koefulness indigenous people were never contemporary they were Always Somewhere in the past Roman letters provide English translations of the Spanish text and the italics are purchases interpretation of the pick of the picture so in effect there are two voices typographically indicated but by terming this as a picture history Chronicle without words the Spanish presence is minimized this is by the fact that purchase is entirely dependent on the Spanish text to make the figures legible the relation he explained quote that's more fully lay open these things meaning otherwise I would have no idea whatever the Spanish text does not lay open remains shut unable to interpret many of the individual images purchases right right quote all the rest I leave to each reader's own industry and search as this comparison shows purchase was not trying to recreate the manuscript but rather to make it legible the composition of the page the importance of color the replication of individual figures are not his concern much as he minimizes the Spanish authorial presence the textual translation is much more faceful than the pictorial one the first person to use um purchases uh version uh Johannes zelat the Dutch geographer author and founding member of the Dutch West India Company Drew on purchase for the second edition of his widely read new world or description of the West Indies the let selected portions of the manuscript for use in two chapters out of 30 in which he discussed New Spain chapter tension here focuses on language counting time keeping and the recording of History it begins with a vocabulary offering nowatul terms for parts of the body colors various natural thing familiar relations and numbers along with their equivalence in a European language reiterating the Primacy of translation for the study of the new world unlike purchases great attention to now a pictographs however the lat privilege words over images he noted that although Aztecs lacked quote the art of writing they managed to record their history quote by certain pictures which are like hieroglyphs and he reproduced five small woodcuts representing dates and quantities overall the lot is interested in using the Mendoza not to understand pictography but as a meshika history that he can compare to two famous Spanish histories at the time so what you see here is these three columns in which he compares the rulers of the meshika Empire according to gomera according to Acosta and according to this painted annals so the Mendoza becomes one more source for the comparative study of Mexican history rather than a unique indigenous document as purchase had considered it digests with polymath athanasius cure her included or turned to purchases Mendoza for comparative material in his edipus a characteristically complex work in which cure her attempted to recover the secrets of ancient Egyptian religion and Science by deciphering their hieroglyphic writing in a detailed comparative analysis he presented to the reader the compelling case of the supposed relationship between ancient Egyptians and ancient Mexicans based on the parallels between the religious systems they both constructed a pyramidal temples they both construct a worship the Sun and the Moon they both wrote in hieroglyphs here says what more evidence do you need that the Aztecs were Egyptians it's very convincing and as part of this theater of hieroglyphser presented the reader with material that he mined from purchase Mendoza focusing on the calendrical system so while purchase and the lat focus on History Kirk who was primarily interested in pictorial writing I think for reasons of time I'm going to skip all this but I wouldn't want to skip this the use of the Mendoza in the Exile just with Francisco Javier clavicheros ancient history of Mexico extracted from the best Spanish historians and from manuscripts and from the ancient paintings of the Indians published in Italy in 1780. so clavichero's project was to write a complete history of what he called ancient Mexico and he followed on the steps of lorenzobothurini the Italian traveler and collector of Mexican indigenous manuscripts who assembled a gigantic Archive of indigenous sources that he described as a Museo indiano and which he proposed in his 1746 idea of a new general history of America that he was proposing not only a new history but a new Historical Method which plays indigenous sources as the ultimate and necessary source of Mexican history clavi hero was the first to suggest that the Codex Mendoza as we know it since had been commissioned by Antonio de Mendoza before Club no one ever calls it Mendoza or connects it to that name and he he characterizes it as you can see here as Lara culta di Mendoza Mendoza's collection and he considers it so important as a source for mixing a history that it is the very first item in her list of painted sources that he used for writing this book but what he does with the images is extremely interesting the Codex Mendoza was for clavichero a source to mine for information not a manuscript to reproduce the Engravings that are included in the publication which are based on the printed woodcuts that previous authors had published serve as visual records that document specific historical data for instance the designs of military uniforms Shields and weapons shown here but the Engravings do not attempt to copy the figures in the manuscript as had been the case until now with all the previous Publications the figures that correspond to names of meshika rulers and Indigenous towns are presented in a European style it's the content not the form that is presented as relevant so I will not have time today to go through all the interpretations that the different remakes of the Mendoza created but I think I've given you a sense of the range of possibilities the Mendoza could be reduced to a few isolated ear glyphs to serve as evidence of the relative reliability or unreliability of Spanish accounts as with Johannes a lot it could be used as hieroglyphs that provided one among multiple proofs demonstrating that the Aztecs were the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who had migrated to the Americas as would cure her it could be a collection of voyages as with a French compiler tevino um a an element in the comparative history of world religions and in particular of debates about squaring the new world with Biblical accounts and chronology as with Warburton or as we were just hearing us with clavi hero as historical records that would permit the writing of an american-centered history of the Americas where what others had considered to be global history became patriotic Creole history in a proto-national spirit that would give way to All Out National and nationalistic histories produced after 1821 when what was the vice royalty of newspaper became independent Mexico naming itself after the tribe whose local history is depicted in this manuscript and choosing as its symbol the ego Standing On Top of the prickleberry captives the name the city of Tenochtitlan and this fragmentary remakes represent the bulk of the Mesoamerican indigenous archive in early modern global history and remained so until this study of Mesoamerican pre-hispanic and Colonial codices took off in the second half of the 19th century it was not until 1831 The kingsborough's Landmark Antiquities of Mexico provided an extensive compilation of the various codices in European collections the title presents a work as one of fact simile exact copies from the Latin to make something alike of the same kind and the very first manuscript of the nine volumes is the collection of Mendoza which had by the time become by far the best known and studied Mesoamerican manuscript and once again Kingsborough divorced image from text replacing the alphabetic keys that purchase use with numbers that connect individual figures in the composition to the textual explanations um Strangely I think oh I wanted to put it next uh strangely what what's left in is the autograph by the Mendoza's first recorded European owner the French cartographer andrette who signed the manuscript in several places but as you can see every image is accompanied by alphabetic writing in Spanish and that writing is entirely removed um there's a lot more that we could say about Kingsborough but I just want to end by noting that this process of using indigenous objects and Indigenous images to reinvent visions of America is one that continues today I am showing you on the screen the digital Mendoza produced in collaboration between Ina and Oxford which is described in the website as a digital repatriation thank you very much foreign so um now we're going to have um I think like a half an hour discussion about and then we're gonna have also uh 10 15 minutes for questions from the public and also if you're joining us via Zoom you can type your questions as well so um I really like these presentations because they were all very different and I was trying to think about commonalities in a way and the connections with uh with exhibition and I think that um there's one thing which is repetition that happens in the three cases that you were putting together which is also the verb that goes together with the the exhibition title right um repetition and in some cases construction I think uh specific especially in both Tom and nicolas's presentations how do you construct this image right um and so I was I was thinking about that idea and how how in the in the presentation of Nicolas we have a very clear view of how these images are set and constructed from the very beginning and then repeat it over and over again uh throughout centuries in the case of Tom is like an image that starts appearing so the beginning is not so clear and it starts becoming a construction through the years but I wanted to ask you about this idea of repetition and how is it questioned or is not questions how we can have this constructed image repeated for three centuries for centuries I guess I want to also connect this to how much of this is about print and books is not the entire story but it's certainly a big part of the story well I mean being older than you guys sufficient is is that this idea that you you know as a as a scholar and as an art historian and as you accumulate a memory of images it all of a sudden becomes clearer to you as a scholar and then you begin to work on this issue of what does repetition mean because you you know that you've seen it before what does seeing something again and again mean uh and so the issue that Nicolas brought up which is the illustration by debris of uh by debris of Las Casas is probably the most repeated body of images that served various needs and purposes that are antithetical to each other but yet our images that everyone knows and become repeated and so that by the time you get to the 19th century uh and the United States goes to war with Spain one of the very first Illustrated anti-spanish texts and books is uh I think it's well I know is that clear who published it so I don't want to say uh because it's anonymous incorporates all of the debris drawing or prints by about from Las Casas to accuse the Spanish of being rapist pillagers etc etc but the very first image in the book is a blank page and it says and this just says this image is so horrible that we cannot print it and then you see all these images that you've seen before and it is used of course to who you know have the American North American population uh really rally against Spain so and just as you have of the mirror the symmetry of the mirror you know it is again used for that so what rep repetition is critical to the role that these kinds of and it is print that these images have because it is you know to use the term uh imagine Community it's an imagined community that participates in these images time and time again over history that allows you to connect back and presently to the condition that you're in and that's really clear in uh what you were presenting so there's I think we were all talking in in one way or another about two separate relationships one is the relationship between what the image shows and something out there in the world that is being represented and the other is relationships from image to image right and so they move at different speeds and they don't always move together I think you know and and so part of it is the the visual economy of print that is uh um a central practice is that of reuse of adaptation and also of quotation right of images quoting other images uh where the relationship between the image and the thing it depicts is not as present and I think that is very um hard it's a historical relationship to the role of image as representation that is so different from a modern understanding of the role of the image to the thing it depicts that I think is very very hard to um to feel it to fully be able to accept that these images were never realistic were never intended to show things as they exist in the world there were always meant to construct certain stories is Tom going to disagree or am I no I what I wanted to add to all your comments is that of course in the images in all the images we've drawn we've shown there is repetition but there is also usage and in each repetition each usage transforms the image into something new uh not because the image changes but because what you try to do with the aim with each of the users of the images try to do change the meaning of the image can you give us an ex and the political use of give us an example of not only but not only the image themselves but also the models on which the images are based so there are examples in the in the presentation that I showed that you can represent the same terrible facts with the same models and the same iconography and the same thing the same patterns that become formulaic but you are trying to do something different and opposite with them we are trying to show that the victims of the massacres are responsible for their own faith but in other usages of the same images and of the same patterns you are trying to show that they are not that they are innocent so also in repetition by usage there is change and change in meaning and also in the same sense I think that something that is common to all three presentations is that there is invention in repetition one of the maps that you showed actually has the word invention in it and each interpretation of the Codex Mendoza that you showed is an invention of what the Codex is saying and you can say the same about other interpretations of other images but also of other objects as you very well explained in think for example about the interpretations of the kipus uh from the very time that a European sisakipu he imagines or she imagined imagines that the people does one thing and they're books text discussions debates trying to explain what they do all contradictory showing the same object or similar objects and not finding an answer so there is repetition interpretation invention and change but I think there's also an interesting fact here like the Codex Mendoza there is from the beginning they're saying we don't understand what this means but in the other hand then you have all these images that you have shown in which there is a very clear interpretation of what there's seeing quora Court in the Americas because let's say that many of these illustrations were done by people that had never been to the Americas but they're very clear almost stating this is what it is there but with the Codex Mendoza is like we don't know what this means you know and and that um I was interested in that in in why is that like they're very clear on how we represent the Americas and the people of the Americas but we don't understand this object that comes from the Americas that's not always true and there's two cases to this one is the codices are used in America in Mexico only uh as documents of witnessing and proving uh genealogies uh transfers of monies they're entered into the way out single 1529 these are seen as truthful uh readable uh understandable documents and uh Felipe de guavara in commentarius de las pinturas which he wrote in 1560 and he and his father are the ones that we bring uh uh all kinds of paintings to the Royal Court has a chapter on Egyptian hieroglyphs in which the modern Edition separates this out but the addition that was printed only in the 18th century uh shows that they were written together has a whole explanation of a codex and which Guevara first says I don't know if this is independent intervention invention or whether this is something that comes from Egypt however we see similarities in the way the hieroglyphs are being constructed and I was shown X codex and we don't know what it is and then he goes ahead and interprets the figures and tells you what they are and why they did what they did so it's it's not that people certain people didn't look and try to understand and use both Spanish and Elite indigenous peoples and we have all these trials where pre-columbian codices are brought into the court and presented and the same thing happens in Peru but with a different media and that's textiles we know that these textiles were brought in they are shown for reasons that I can't go into that they have fingernails that are kept of their ancestors they're embedded into them this proves that we own the land so there's all kinds of different media that are accepted interculturally as uh means of communications the Codex Mendoza is one that is generated not by the indigenous uh people as far as we understand but it's probably uh because the beginning of it at least to say why it's being produced is not for anything like that it's being produced as a compendium of a kind of history that is not the way that history is told in other uh codices it's really a well anyway you know this better than I do it it's so it's a very composite uh made up of perhaps three different genres that are sutured together uh it's not something you would ever produce in court uh to have it adjudicated truthfully with interpreters it is that's I think that there's a reason standing behind you must explain this in the book but and I want to go to the idea of truthful truthfulness and how um and and I think I'm one of those people that do this constantly that I always think that something that has indigenous hands on it is more truthful than anything that doesn't right um what do you think about that well in the case of the Codex when uh Singo which is presented by the lawyers of Cortez in a court the opposing lawyer that is the person defending the kabildo and who had robbed Cortez says all Indians are liars you can't trust this uh however the judge and everybody else sees images that they can recognize and say yeah that's what it is so that the they accept the truthfulness and Cortez actually wins the case in part by the witnessing but more than that the manuscript and this is also the case for Don Juan Austria of tilantango who produces the manuscript that shows and that's the pre-columbian manuscript and he shows those are my ancestors that's my and they can see that they the genealogy that that was already depicted in this manuscript so truthfulness and this goes back to Austin Tim as well is about that kind of context in which truth is being made yeah yeah I mean the word truth is you know very interesting and very complicated and of course is a constant word that is used in this period right the true history the true account and so the word true gains importance in in the 16th century as is always presented as a counterpart to that other guys false history mine is it true history but then you compare all the true histories and you know from a postmodern moment you see that the 16th century is very postmodern because there are many truths as there are narrators and so I I think that you know we're talking about 400 years an entire continent two continents many genres many moments what happens in a court in Mexico City in 1530 is so different from what happens in according Mexico City decades later or in a court elsewhere or in Europe so I just I guess I'm too much of a historian to believe that the word truth is the key here rather than the word context which was the other word for the symposium I I I'll ask you a deep attachment to the word truth and I am not entirely willing to sacrifice it uh I think that um it is an important word that has come under um increasing um criticism for a few decades and I think that we are in a way in many places now suffering the consequences of that the valuation of the meaning of Truth and I think that many of the things that we said today and that we showed today um in a way I tend to show that perhaps abandoning the pursuit for truth is dangerous and that it's always at least in what we do an objective that we can never realize but that we should not abandon um and I think that in many of the discussions that we refer to today the difficulty in the construction of Truth and uh um and the importance attached to uh the direct witnessing into that construction um was fundamental and was Central to the debates that were taking place back then you mentioned clavichero and one of clavichero's arguments was that the people that were writing for Europe could never access the truth of the Americas because they had never been there and he had been and he knew what he was talking about and he was speaking the truth um so even if the issue of Truth for us is not necessarily determinant to understand what truth meant for them truth was important for them as I think it still is for us that's what I wanted to say well I would I I agree with you uh and I don't want to get into postmodern or modernist or whatever debate about truth because it is at risk now more than ever but I do want to say that it is important to and this is context of understanding what truth might mean and to give a case in point because we've I talked about both Cortez's letter uh and vanaldias Del Castillo's letter there are two radically different truths told about the same event and that comes from the subject position of the person writing them one is the commandant who glorifies himself and therefore the events are told from a certain position just like the maps you know you you take this kind of subject position and write from it and Castillo says wait a minute I was a foot soldier and I'm going to tell you from my perspective not on a horse but on foot what it was like and so you get a radically different kind of narrative about the conquest of Mexico and that's internal to the people that participated in the conquest but I think it's important not just to have a binary of conquered and conquered conquerors but to understand that there are radically different positions about telling the truth to what they think is the truth uh and uh understanding the position from what they're talking so you know one of the work I did here at the Getty was with the manuscript by Martin de marua which doing the forensics on that manuscript actually uh demonstrated that the great Andean author who I showed here Ayala is basing most of what he says to the king on what Martina marua had written and he copies it but he is writing they're writing from entirely one's a mercedarian and one is an Andean author who has been dispossessed of his own land and as you see the the two Chronicles diverge they're not they're not trying to dissimulate or just but they have a different uh the points of view by the author and without actually well they do know it uh but anyway the point is that I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater is what you're saying is you know the the this issue of Truth is one that no one now is talking about where are you coming from with that truth just as where were they coming from with that truth and then what does truth mean at that point to claim it true uh and it can be a court of law or it can be a course to Chronicles and so you have different historical moments that we're we're witnessing my talk was slightly different in the sense that this is assumed to be a genre of truth that is a mapping a lot you know you can laugh now but not then this is this is the movement of of across a kind of representation of autopic presentation of uh you know uh but it does something about what you think the truth is about position so uh you know they're anyway I'll stop there because I'm getting lost yeah but maps are also a great way of showing appropation uh right and that that was the whole point of this um with this mapping right also to show what it belongs to whom on what it was and who belongs to but um I want to go back to the some of the voices of the people that were going kind of like against the the regular uh discourse that was happening at the period so for example you you talked about Las Casas of course montane and then clavilejo I mean so what um do they really change the the regular discourse with this different ideas and voices during their period how are they perceived did they make a difference is that what you're asking in the perception will you show the descript description which was presented to Philip II by the embassy from Clash Gala in which they were there to argue certain rights and privileges which actually were given to them and the tush Collins then were given lands to the north they were given lands to so it's a case-by-case uh kind of situation which is dependent upon historical conditions the Tosh Collins of course were the allies of Cortez so you know they but but even though they weren't have been given certain privileges those have been rescinded or at least trampled on and they go to the court in Spain to fill up the second and argue before him but also present him yeah yeah but for example montane like how is his um essay received when he's talking about we're also as horrible as I would say that mountainous essay did not make a huge difference in how cannibals were perceived or in the uh but is it criticized like not as not accepted during his time when mountains essays were published after his death so the reception is later I would say um the reception of Father authors that I mentioned that were publishing during their lifetime was more polemical that was the case with Las Casas very early and from the very beginning there were people in Spain reacting to and denouncing his account and there were people in countries that were in conflict with Spain celebrating his account and using it politically and exactly the same thing could be said about right now um the second right now publishes his compiled work out of the hand of many authors the first thing the parliament of Paris does is to Outlaw it and to make it illegal because it is detrimental not only to the interests and the image of France and of the Europeans but also to the church and what happens immediately after that is that within 20 years there are 35 pirate editions of his work which shows that people were actually very interested in Reading with what he had to say so um your question was did they make a difference my question my reply would be not really in the treatment that the people that they were trying to defend received but perhaps very much so in some of the people that were interested in reading them and that were using their works with a polemical uh intention we're gonna open now for questions from the from the public and if you please can try to make your question short so we don't lose a lot of time with the questions that would be great um in your interventions we observed from sketches to Engravings to printings so how formally the reproduction process changed the truth in terms of immediacy of the participant observation of the artists thanks small question short and short and small go ahead well I mean that's a wonderful question in the sense that uh so you were showing debris uh magnificent and classicizing images of Horror but you know the many of those originally uh occur uh in a very wood cut representations in in Italy by uh okay now I can't think of his name uh no no no Ken who I can't think he he isn't published in Spanish until the 20th century because he's so anti-spanish he's Italian I can't think of his name all of a sudden anyway but what you can see is that transmission from a drawings uh would you say remusio yeah Oh I thought you said oh I'm sorry yeah uh you can see I'm sorry uh I uh that he was doing drawings uh and he combines them and they're very rough until you get a classicizing view of the same Horrors and it really changes and these are not wood-cut as ramusios are but uh they're uh copper Engravings yeah and it really universalizes in a way these images that takes them out of a really much rougher sense uh and you can see all kinds of references to European Renaissance paintings Etc that are not in those and so it really shifts the the rhetorical part of the image and it's also the clean line of the copper engraving versus the rough line I mean you do get and you can trace that and it's really kind of Interest I don't think anybody has but it's really kind of interesting to to see that I mean that must be I mean that's when I was looking at uh the various how it changes of the Mendoza yeah yeah and then you post your question in terms of immediacy right and I think that there is such a interest in this period in perhaps other genres about what you can know through an image about an experience right in anatomy it is Central in in in um and and the idea that what you want is not something that shows you things as they are because that would not give you the kind of information that you need but that in edits and summarizes and highlights what you want to see not what things look like but what you want to see from the image and that this course is happening around the same times and around the same like print cities where many of these are getting printed and but it's not the discourse about the work that the images are doing is not explicit for these Publications as it is for other genres but I think that these images are operating within the same image mode of print in this period that is like the image selects the image compresses the image magnifies some things and erases others is is never the idea of the image as indexical or naked right nuda and so I think that is in these images too but it doesn't get discussed the same way foreign thank you all for your wonderful uh presentation so it's a great way to start start off the morning Tom I have a question for you the Cortez's map or the technology land map I'm I always love the little map of the Gulf Coast next to it and I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that subject position because their Yucatan is at the top and you know the Rio Rio Panico leads into the country and um and so it is one of those topsy-turvy images that you were talking about with the south at the upper part and uh if you could maybe talk about that of course I also can't help but related to the Florentine codex because that's where my mind is these days and thinking about the the orientation of the Gulf Coast in the frontis piece of book 12 of the flooring codex where it's also basically shown the way that it's shown in the in this Cortez map well yeah first of all yes it's like it's shown like Cortes I mean it that becomes fixed I mean it's very hard to shift that position but uh to go back to the your first part of the question which is the uh uh the Caribbean and the islands and the Yucatan uh that that image is never discussed it's cut out almost always of the representation of tenochitlan because what's important is tenochitlan and so as far as I know hardly anybody talks about that image but that's a fold out you know it's a double page it's intended they're two different representations uh that are pulled together uh and why the Yucatan is placed as it is seems I think to be either seeing it inversed in verse should I say that then it has to be reoriented to fit that relationship to tenochilan which is crazy but I I can't quite you understand what I mean that uh it you need the coast to be east of tenochitlan to understand that this is where we came we came from Cuba we came to the coast and we got to tenochitlan and this is you know the prize so that's the big and so it's there to situate you uh uh in relationship to what the whole narrative is going to unfold uh so uh it's completely out of scale to the major representation of the energy line so you can see it's it's uh uh you know out of scale but indexical to how this happened uh and he doesn't talk about it nobody I mean it's not there's no text that goes with this there is text but it doesn't talk about what these maps are doing except it says the Latin does talk about the map of Tennessee line it doesn't talk about really uh the Caribbean yeah yeah yeah yep yep yep I have no question hello thank you for the panel hopefully you excuse this question but the conversation about Pursuit for postmodern truth kind of inspired me to ask this um one of the things that I'm I'm sensing and thinking about how indigeneity and in a very contemporary way is Being Framed um seems to be like this conversation around a kind of post-humanism and in fact how we're thinking about ourselves in relationship to Nature and our relationship to the planet and often it's framed through a kind of like re-indication or reclaiming of indigenous worldviews and cosmologies I was just in Mexico City in the concept of it was post-cartesian was the term I saw over and over again and so I'm just wondering as a panel if you've you've thought or you have any Reflections on how this reframing of indigenous knowledge thoughts science whatever you want to call it is is is this some way another another reinvention that's going along long Paths of reinventions or if you have any thoughts on that thing [Laughter] no it's a great question it's another small question well if you go to the exhibition the final part of the show with the Nilsson bani was last installation piece it's called the Nielsen's reinvention so yes I I also agree that you know we can think about about it that way it's the many re mentions but that's why I would like to add one thing if I can um I think that the question is very interesting and it's very pressing at this time I think that you can very well think of that as another reinvention but it's not completely detached from what we've been saying today in the way that even from the beginning there was a an attempt in the Americas to represent not only the continent but also the people that lived in it as people that lived closer to Nature and that's edgy I would say and there there is a a thin line if you go through that argument because uh it could also be used or interpreted in the sense that the these people as being closer to Nature lack something like something that at one point would have been called culture in at other point it would have been called artificiality at another point it would have been called industriousness and I think that's risky because it's depriving the people you are talking about of something that they actually do all the time and it's an argument that could also be made not only about America but about representations and interventions regarding other places like Africa and I will stop there but we can further discuss it if you want but this endic view of the uh peoples of other places that are closer to something that we either celebrate or reject like nature is dangerous and edgy I would say as a political discourse about the people you are talking about I also want to add something I mean you know it is one of the key questions that are in our worlds of study these days and you know all of these weather being close to Nature means a lack or again a loss or or or or an enrichment um and you know the the idea of the human and the more than human and how it it plays um into this um as as you were saying this idea of whether being close to Nature what that is doing for the telling of the story but I think that for me part of what is interesting is what is being ascribed to whom and to what effect when and so in this period we see this constant insistence that these are people without people without government people without currency people without monogamy people without civility people without I so many so so many things right um and um but also people without history that they are always in the past and for me um the the the importance of whether you call it civility culture but also of history for any people is is so there's an Ethics there that I find very very very important and so one of the things that really intrigues me about this period and that is is a constant preoccupation in my work is a relationship between uh the sort of the X and Y axis of geography and temporality right whether place where places are positioned according to imagined centers and peripheries how that maps to a present and a past that is continuous and doesn't have history and so for me one of the important questions with this uh interest in other Traditions other forms of knowledge other ontologies is what is being put there and what is being taken and the problem of history is one that really worries me the idea that any human group is always in the present and changing a historical is one that feels to me profoundly unethical and so that is is my concern with this foreign it's a really critical question today and it's a political question that uh has ramifications way outside of Academia uh and what I mean by that and I'll give you two examples and it really has to do with Spain's relationship to Latin America and so recently it to a year ago the mayor of Madrid came to New York uh to talk about Madrid with the stock market and everybody but she came to uh the New York America's not American society Hispanic Society and this was during the change from Columbus Day to indigenous day and she declared that among other things that indigenism is the new communism now what that means be it as somebody who follows she does Franco that means Extinction that means violence that means oppositional to indigenous rights the king of Spain then goes to Puerto Rico and says I don't know what this is all about all we did was bring culture education and civilization meaning there was no civilization there was no other alternative way of seeing the world and being in the world so whether we are Cartesian post-cartesian or pre-cartesian you know is not for me in question what really is what is going to happen uh when we start having contemporary discourse that is asking for at least rhetorically what Nick Nicholas has shown happened uh and and there's the denial of that the denial of a kind of history that is based upon the extirpation of the beliefs that we're talking about that this was not an innocent kind of Confrontation between animism and Catholicism I I have a wonderful cartoon uh you know which you see a Catholic priest saying uh your religion is false and the Inca says well at least the sun is real you know uh so I think that you know it really is subject position of yeah I can accept my religion because it's real I can accept my science because only that science is real I'm not asking for a uh an entire uh you know repudiation of Western Civilization but I think we do need to at least have some kind of respect for other forms of knowledge and being foreign [Applause] questions we'll be back uh after lunch but please remember that Mary Miller offer a tour of the Codex so the Maya codex uh what was it 145 145 so please go on and check the Codex and we'll be we'll be back in at two thank you yes yes 2 30 sorry 2 30. [Applause]

Channel: Getty Research Institute

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Id: INeuConX9OU

Length: 168min 35sec (10115 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 08 2022