INKA CUBISM Reflections on Andean Art ESTHER PASZTORY © Esther Pasztory 2010 To the memory of Alan Sawyer and Ed Lanning 1 © Esther Pasztory 2010 “And this may, indeed explain the exceptional character of CADUVEO? Art: that it makes it possible for Man to refuse to be made in God’s image.” -C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1967), p. 172 2 © Esther Pasztory 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements 4 Personal Preface 5 Introduction 9 Chapter 1. Andean Art: From Obscurity to Binary Coding 16 Chapter 2. The Inka State: Utopia or Dystopia? 37 Chapter 3. Chavín de Huantar: The Andean Rosetta Stone 49 Chapter 4. Architecture: Shelter as Metaphor 65 Chapter 5. Textiles and Other Media: Intimate Scale 86 Chapter 6. Moche Pottery: Explicit Hierarchy 103 Chapter 7. Stone Sculptures: Highland Austerity 119 Chapter 8. Later Trends: Image on the Decline 130 Chapter 9. The Imperial Inka: The Power of the Minimal 140 Chapter 10. Colonial Epilogue: Nostalgic Echo 152 Conclusion 157 Bibliography 161 Endnotes 171 3 © Esther Pasztory 2010 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Amanda Gannaway and William Gassaway for editorial and formatting help with the manuscript. 4 © Esther Pasztory 2010 PERSONAL PREFACE I have been interested in Andean art since entering graduate school in 1965. I came to Columbia to study what was then called “Primitive Art” and wrote my Master’s Essay on African Art. However, quite early, I became more fascinated by the mysteries of ancient America and changed my major to Pre-Columbian art, which consisted of Mesoamerican and Andean art. I can thank my training in the Andes to Alan Sawyer in art history and Ed Lanning in archaeology. Sawyer was a visiting professor and came to class with several trays of slides of unpublished works. Eventually, he let me duplicate some for my classes, many of which I still use. Lanning was a processual archaeologist in the anthropology department and showed no slides at all. He referred to art as “the fancy stuff” and did not discuss it. I learned to appreciate Andean culture from both of them. For many years, my research concentrated on the Mesoamerican site of Teotihuacan; I was awed by the enormity of its architecture and challenged by the lack of information on its imagery. I sought to explain why Teotihuacan imagery lacked references to dynastic rulership and even to human figures in general – unlike most Mesoamerican representation. Much symbolism was either benign, impersonal or even standardized. I concluded that imagery was not being used to convey conflict and power but rather order and harmony. These values did not necessarily characterize Teotihuacan as a culture in action but they seem to have been its ideological profile. In my conclusion, I compared and contrasted Teotihuacan with other ancient cultures without dynastic representations, such as the Shang and Chou period arts of China, the Harappan civilization of the Indus valley, feeling that they had particularly strong parallels with Andean art. As I put it in the conclusion of Teotihuacan: An Expeeriment in Living, 1997: 5 © Esther Pasztory 2010 “I therefore see Teotihuacan as a rebellion against the norms of Mesoamerican life and art, an experiment in living differently, and the creation of an ‘Andean’-style culture out of Mesoamerican building blocks. I imagine that the people of Teotihuacan would have been fascinated by objects such as the Tello Obelisk with its design of male and female caymans giving plants, the Gateway God of Tiahuanaco with its anonymous attendants, the endlessly varied and complicated Paracas embroidered beings, and the fragmented and distorted Huari textiles. They would have been fascinated by a world of nuanced image systems without writing (p.244). I have continued these contrasts and parallels in Pre-Columbian Art (Cambridge University Press, 1998) in greater detail through all the major cultures of ancient America. I fleshed out the contrast of Mesoamerican representation glorifying anthropomorphic protagonists and scenes of conflict with the Andean insistence on more cosmic themes of order and organization. I argued that each region had a dominant “climate” or point of view but that one art and culture in each seemed to go in the opposite direction: Teotihuacan was more “Andean” in character, while the Moche were more “Mesoamerican.” These observations led me to discuss the nature of “traditions” and how much control they have over cultures: “One of the most interesting facets of the comparison between regions is that it shows that tradition can be radically changed and opposed for a time, even though their main underlying ideals may last for over a thousand years. It also shows that tradition is not an inexorable force, but can be turned aside, modified, or abandoned within successive cultures” (p.164). The Andean approach to representation is spelled out in the individual monuments discussed, such as the Inka Sayhuite Stone: “There is a strong respect for the form of the natural 6 © Esther Pasztory 2010 boulder from which it is carved, the architectural forms provide the honorific manmade aspect, while the animal figures refer directly to the powers of the cosmos. Man is not the subject of the monument. He is on the outside performing ritual in which the rock participates. Man creates the network, the system, the idea and works through the organization and the essence of things rather than through his own theatrical appearance in images” (p.163). This book had been extensively used as a text in Pre-Columbian art courses until it went out-of-print recently. Evidently, it was too expensive to reprint. My most recent comparative paper was on human sacrifice. (“Sacrifice as Reciprocity: Mesoamerican and Andean,” in Adventures in Pre-Columbian Studies,ed. Julie Jones, The Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, D.C., 2010; pp.120-136). In this study, I argued that while human sacrifice was practiced in both areas, its meaning and context was determined by the prevailing ideologies of each area. I described the Mesoamerican approach as “Dionysiac” while the Andean as “Apollonian.” Apart from comparisons, I lectured and wrote on a variety of Andean topics starting with Inka stonework in 1983, Andean aesthetics in 1997, Moche and other portrait heads in 2000, and featherwork in 2008. Perhaps more significant for this project was a talk entitled “The Fancy Stuff: Western Perspectives on Andean Art” (2003). Familiarity with the Andean material was crucial in my synthesis of the global development of art in Thinking with Things (2005). I took the term “insistence” to refer to the underlying nature of an art and culture from a book on the Inka quipu (Urton 2003). Given the extent to which Andean art and scholars have affected my theoretical thinking, it is not surprising that I chose to pull my ideas together for a book. In many ways this book was inspired by forty years of teaching lectures and seminars on Andean art as well as mentoring a 7 © Esther Pasztory 2010 dozen M.A. and Ph.D. students some of whom are now highly respected professionals in this field. I illustrated these lectures partly with slides of photographs I had taken in Peru. My aim in most of my Andean work has been to elucidate the basic nature of Andean art in its cultural context and its permutations in the various individual cultures. The nature of this art is not obvious and self-explanatory, in that it goes against the grain of Western (and Mesoamerican) insistence. It takes some time to understand how complex the seemingly simple images are because they are generally not naturalistic. I argue that Andean art most resembles Western Conceptual art, in which the idea is more important than the appearance or even the visibility of the work of art. I argue that Andean art and thought represents another way of creating a civilization than the Mesoamerican and Egypto-Mesopotamian traditions we are familiar with. This is illustrated most deeply between the difference in hieroglyphic writing and the Andean coding device, the yarn quipu. Long considered secondary in intellectual development, the quipu is a part of an Andean visual system that is rich and complex on its own terms. The aim of my text is to bring out the unique traits of Andean insistence so that it can be more deeply appreciated for its difference. I felt that such “reflections” on Andean art would be useful alongside the more usual handbooks and textbooks long on detail but sometimes short on overall interpretations. In so far as I once chose Teotihuacan as my subject, I was selecting an art that reminded me of the Andes. Studying the Andes I have now gone to the source. Esther Pasztory December 2010 New York City 8 © Esther Pasztory 2010 INTRODUCTION Less than a handful of books have been written on Andean art because Andean art does not fit well into Western concepts of art. In this book I explore some of the ways in which Andeans related to things and images. This book is not a handbook of Andean art and culture but an analysis of certain Andean artistic issues and problems.1 Existing surveys of Andean art and culture do a good job of educating the interested public and students in the basics of the material.2 Andean art is fascinating because of its many differences from the art of other early civilizations and therefore Western expectations. It broadens our horizons of what ancient people thought about and were capable of in the past. Moreover, it holds up a mirror to our civilization and its concerns. Here I analyze the concept of art as understood in Western culture and how it has been applied to Andean art over the centuries.