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BOXED IN: The Connection Between Wari Mortuary Complexes and Inka Textiles

by Katie Elizabeth Ligmond

Before the Inka were a glimmer in the cosmos, the Wari Empire dominated the Central Andes, spreading out from their capital in the Ayacucho Valley, north through the majority of the modern-day country of Peru, and south toward the contemporary Bolivian border. While today the Inka’s fame eclipses that of the Wari, the latter were perhaps formers’ direct ancestors, laying their imperial foundations eight hundred years before the Inka arrived in Cusco. Indeed, much of Inka imperial construction is both conceptually and physically built upon Wari foundations. In fact, the fundamental system of Inka control, a labor taxation system recorded on knotted strings called khipu, appears to be a revival of a Wari system, a technique found nowhere else in the Andes.¹

However, there appears to be a major difference in the way the Wari and the Inka built their empires in the most literal sense. Wari and Inka architecture are dramatically different: the Wari attempted to conquer nature, while the Inka demonstrated that nature supports them. For example, the Wari site of Pikillacta was built on a strict grid, superimposed on the landscape without conforming to the undulations of the mountains underneath; the synthetic grid takes precedence over natural curvature.² By contrast, the Inka fused their worked stones into natural rock formations, creating what art historian Carolyn Dean calls “integrated outcrops,”³ thereby allowing nature to literally support the Inka empire (fig. 1).

Comparing architecture to architecture, however, only reveals part of the picture; in comparing architecture to other media, the Wari legacy within Inka culture becomes readily apparent. In this paper, I postulate that Wari architectural complexes, particularly elite mortuary complexes, provide the geometric grid that the Inka used in their textiles. I believe understanding how the grid functions in both Wari and Inka material culture is central to understanding the organization of their empires. Primarily, in both Wari architecture and Inka works of art, the grid is presented as a means of obfuscation. It provides order for imperial elites, but denies access to commoners.

The Wari were likely the first empire in the Andes, building outward from their capital in the city of Huari.⁴ The Wari civilization expanded until about 900 CE before disappearing in a cacophony of shattered ceramic offerings and burned complexes. This collapse of the Wari Empire occurred about five hundred years before the Inka began their expansion. The Inka likely moved to the Cusco Valley in the mid-1300s CE, but only began conquering their neighbors around 1400 CE. Their empire was expanding until the arrival of the Spanish in 1532 CE. The terms “Wari” and “Inka” are both ethnic and national markers; both empires incorporated groups that were ethnically dissimilar from their own. The Inka certainly viewed subjects of non-Inka ethnicity as lesser, and evidence suggests the Wari also held this bias against those outside their ethnic group.⁵ Given the temporal distance between these two civilizations, it is unlikely that the Inka knew of the Wari directly, but Wari governmental strategies appear to be embedded in Andean ontologies. In addition to the khipu discussed earlier, both the Wari and Inka are known to have created intricate, highly standardized textiles for their elites. In addition, the Inka occasionally built directly upon Wari foundations. One such example is the Inka repurposing of a Wari aqueduct to build a gateway at the site of Rumiqolqa.⁶

As empires, the governmental structures of both the Inka and the Wari were preoccupied with the justification of their rule through the artificial creation of a power imbalance. The power imbalance is visible primarily in the comparison of the material culture of elites and commoners in these empires, with the elites demonstrating extreme wealth and control in a variety of ways. The Wari in particular emphasized power through city construction. As I have stated, the Wari grid superseded nature. Hills often undulate under Wari walls without disrupting the sharp geometric rectangles of the city walls and homes.⁷ Nature could not break the Wari grid.

Wari cities suffocate the outsider. They exist as incomprehensible, opaque, and chaotic. Wari cities—to the foreigner, the rural commoner, the modern tourist—are unnavigable. Firstly, the Wari enclosed their cities within extremely high walls. Today, the peripheral site of Pikillacta has walls reaching about fifteen feet in height, although at the time of construction they were surely much taller (figs. 2, 3). Plaster remains at Wari cities suggest that the walls were a blinding white, which would have been exacerbated by the sharp Andean sun (fig. 4). Inside these walls, the city had no roads and all structures were agglutinated in “patio groups” (fig. 5). Each patio group consisted of a courtyard surrounded by small, rectangular buildings. Thus, there were only two ways to move through the city: by crawling along the dizzyingly high walls or by moving through the patio groups and, therefore, likely walking through citizens’ homes. Archaeologist William Isbell has suggested that visitors to Wari may have faced “humiliating confusion.”⁸ But would the inhabitants of such interiors have felt the same way?

While visitors, servants, or the rural citizens living on the outskirts may have experienced panic at the thought of walking through a Wari city, elites knew that they held the key to understanding the city’s logic.⁹ In fact, elites seemed to feel so confident in their knowledge of their towns that they constructed their mortuary sites according to the same logic, desiring to rest forever in a similar place.¹⁰ The most elite Wari resting place is located within Huari, and built as a “Megalithic Monumental Internment,”¹¹ a term used to describe extremely large, stone burial complexes (fig. 6).¹² From above, the complex mimics a patio group; it is also constructed of rectangular walls built directly next to one another. The relationship is not one to one, but the geometric organization is strikingly similar. Mortuary complexes also include additional subterranean levels, which form a kind of “catacomb” that extends about thirty feet underground.¹³ They are likely the direct inverse of a Wari wall, which would have stood at about this height.

Thus, it appears that there was a logic to Wari cities, one only comprehended by the upper echelons of Wari society. I argue that this was a common strategy across imperial Wari art, in which the organizational principle understood by elites was unknown to the majority of people. For example, Wari textiles often obfuscate major cult figures in an attempt to alienate their citizens from the details of the subject matter while still hinting at the iconographic importance.¹⁴ The clue here may be in the grid pattern that the Wari constructed. This grid is carried across various Wari art forms: The patio group forms a kind of distorted grid of rectangles, some larger than others, arranged around a central core. Similarly, Wari textile patterns utilize rectangles to form heavily abstracted figures (fig. 7). The mortuary complex also mirrors this pattern; it is composed of rectangles of varying sizes that are roughly organized into rows and columns.

I borrow this association between Wari textiles and architecture from art historian Rebecca Stone and archaeologist Gordon McEwan. In their seminal piece on the subject, they argue that both patio groups and elites’ tunics are built using an "additive mode of production." In other words, both a textile and a wall are built "row by row" from the ground up.¹⁵ Further, both elite textiles and Wari complexes contain what Stone and McEwan call “anomalies.” In architecture, these anomalies include curved walls. In textiles, they occur as a change in the expected color pattern.¹⁶ Thus, there is an element of chaos that exists across Wari works of art, breaking expected patterns. By orchestrating the construction of these chaotic elements, elites further denied commoners’ access to the underlying logic. It is worth noting as a well that both textiles and architecture are “lived in” spaces. Elites chose to spend their entire lives in their organized chaos, within a system only they could comprehend. They could work in this world of confusion, choosing to wear dramatic colors and to wander through the confusing halls of Wari cities, in life and in death.

This idea of an organizational code, known only to elites but suggested through the construction of a grid, reappears in Inka textiles. The patterns on Inka men’s tunics are fully abstract. They are composed completely of tokapu, geometric shapes inscribed in rectangles. Traditional tokapu could only appear in a few places: on a garment’s waistband, along the yoke, and vertically down the center. In only one case may tokapu cover the garment completely: when worn by the emperor (fig. 8).¹⁷ Tokapu patterns and organization were recorded in colonial texts, but their meanings seem to have only been known to the most elite of Inka society. Even fairly contemporaneous Indigenous writers were unable to record their messages.¹⁸ Textile historian Mary Frame has observed one clue: tokapu are often organized into four parts,¹⁹ likely a reference to the Inka empire which was aptly named Tawantinsuyu, meaning “four parts together.”²⁰

The tokapu therefore hint at the organization of the empire, without giving direct information about it. The Inka elite demonstrated their control over this system of organization by aligning tokapu in neat rows and columns, suggesting that, while the knowledge that these symbols encode may not be known to the public, the elite were able to manipulate them effectively.

It is important to note that Inka society was built on an intense hierarchy based in complementarity. The archetypal complementary pair exists as a heterosexual married couple, a q’ariwarmi, literally meaning "man-woman." Men and women were both necessary for the continuation of life and society. Both were important and valuable, but men had a higher status in Andean society. The Inka borrowed this core structure and amplified it: both state and citizen are important and valuable, but the state has a higher status.²¹ The role of the state–embodied by the Inka elite—was to comprehend the organization of the cosmos, record it on textiles, and give orders; the role of the citizen was merely to follow orders. This is demonstrated in Inka architecture as well. Recall the integrated outcrop: the state-sponsored, built world of Inka stone exists on top of the outcrop, the natural rock gives itself over to support the structure.

Thus, I propose a connection in this imperial method of confusion that begins in the Andes with the Wari built environment and continues in the making of Inka tokapu. In broader terms, this suggests that confusion is a potentially powerful imperial model, one we should watch with vigilance lest it seep into the present.

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Katie Elizabeth Ligmond

Katie Elizabeth Ligmond is a PhD student of Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She researches Andean empires, primarily how textiles functioned within imperial ideology. She also studies world Catholic traditions, ethnic survival under imperial domination, and women's roles in the development of states.

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Footnotes

1. R. Alan Covey, “The Inca Empire,” in The Handbook of South American Archaeology, ed. Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell (New York: Springer, 2008), 825; what is particularly interesting about khipu is that in all of the Andes, only the Wari and the Inka are known to use them. They seemingly disappear around the year 900 CE and are picked back up by the Inka. It is impossible to say how the Inka knew about them, or whether both groups used khipu in the same way.

2. Gordon F. McEwan and Patrick Ryan Williams, “The Wari Built Environment: Landscape and Architecture of Empire,” in Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes, in Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes, ed. Susan E. Bergh (New York and Cleveland, OH: Thames & Hudson and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2012), 66.

3. Carolyn Dean, “The Inka Married the Earth: Integrated Outcrops and the Making of Place,” The Art Bulletin 89, no. 3 (September 2007): 504.

4. The capital of the Wari empire is also called “Wari.” Archaeologist William Isbell frequently uses the old spelling of the word “Huari” to refer to the capital, and “Wari” (the modern spelling) to refer to the culture. I adopt this strategy here.

5. The Inka were extremely focused on ethnic difference, assigning symbols and garment styles to each particular group so that identity could be noted at a glance. In my opinion, Wari textiles do not demonstrate this kind of boundary setting. However, the Wari would sacrifice children from the periphery, creating trophy heads with the skulls. This suggests that the Wari were certainly interested in instilling fear in peripheral areas, and likely understood these people to be less important than ethnic Wari citizens. For a discussion, see Tiffany A. Tung and Kelly J. Knudson, "Childhood Lost: Abductions, Sacrifice, and Trophy Heads of Children in the Wari Empire of the Ancient Andes," Latin American Antiquity 21, no. 1 (March 2010): 44–66.

6. William H. Isbell and Margaret Young-Sánchez, “Wari's Andean Legacy,” in Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes, ed. Susan E. Bergh (New York and Cleveland, OH: Thames & Hudson and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2012), 253; it is perhaps worth noting here, that the Wari site of Pikillacta, is directly across the street from the Inka site of Rumiqolqa.

7. Rebecca Stone-Miller and Gordon F. McEwan, "The Representation of the Wari State in Stone and Thread: A Comparison of Architecture and Tapestry Tunics," Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 19/20 (1990/1991): 61–2.

8. William H. Isbell and Alexei Vranich, "Experiencing the Cities of Wari and Tiwanaku," in Andean Archaeology, ed. Helaine Silverman (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 180.

9. There are a plethora of burial types in Wari cities, that range from extreme wealth to relative poverty, suggesting that there were some commoners that lived within the city. (See William H. Isbell and Antti Korpisaari, “Burial in the Wari and the Tiwanaku Heartlands: Similarities, Differences, and Meanings,” Diálogo Andino 39 (2012): 91–122). However, the kinds of luxury goods available to all persons living within the complex, by virtue of feasting, were unmatched outside the compound. Certainly, servants lived within city walls, and would be considered “commoners,” but there is no way of knowing how freely they could move through the city. (See, for more information, Donna Nash, “The Art of Feasting: Building an Empire with Food and Drink,” in Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes, ed. Susan E. Bergh (New York and Cleveland, OH: Thames & Hudson and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2012), 82–101). Therefore, “commoners” certainly lived within the city, but they were likely better off (at least in terms of food and access to prestige goods) than rural commoners, and likely had some basic knowledge of the city, but I doubt they understood the ideological processes at play. When I refer to “commoners” in this paper, I am generally referring to those people that lived entirely outside the city, who lived without any access to elite life.

10. It is impossible to say what the Wari believed happened to them in the afterlife. The Inka mummified their ancestors, so that they could interact with the dead as though they were alive, but Wari deceased are not mummified, and thus I believe they expected to rest for eternity.

11. “Megalithic Monumental Internment” is a term William H. Isbell uses to describe Wari royal burials, see Isbell and Korpisaari, “Burial in the Wari and the Tiwanaku Heartlands,” 96.

12. Isbell and Korpisaari, “Burial in the Wari and the Tiwanaku Heartlands,” 99.

13. Ibid., 99.

14. I have discussed the obfuscation of cult figures in Wari textiles in-depth elsewhere, primarily here: Katie Elizabeth Ligmond, “Deliberate Confusion: Abstraction as Iconoclasm,” Annual Symposium of Latin American Art through the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (April 2019).

15. Stone-Miller and McEwan, “Wari State in Stone and Thread,” 54.

16. Ibid., 59.

17. John Howland Rowe, “Standardization in Inca Tapestry Tunics,” in The Junius B. Bird Pre-Columbian Textile Conference (May 19th and 20th, 1973), eds. Ann Pollard Rowe, Elizabeth P. Benson, and Anne-Louise Schaffer (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum and Dumbarton Oaks, 1979), 242.

18. Both John H. Rowe and Mary Frame discuss the value of colonial documents, but note that colonial informants seem to not have full information about the meanings of tokapu. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a man of mixed Indigenous heritage writing in the early 1600s, is one of the primary sources on the function and use of Inka textiles. He does not, however, seem to have concrete understanding of tokapu messages. For a complete discussion, see Rowe, “Standardization in Inca Tapestry Tunics” and Mary Frame, “What Guaman Poma Shows Us, but Doesn’t Tell Us, About Tukapu,” Ñawpa Pacha: Journal of Andean Archaeology 30, no. 1 (June 2010).

19. Frame, “What Guaman Poma Shows Us,” 32.

20. Gordon F. McEwan, The Incas: New Perspectives (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 44.

21. For a discussion on Inka co-opting of Andean family structures see: Irene Silverblatt, "Imperial Dilemmas, the Politics of Kinship, and Inca Reconstructions of History," Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (January 1988): 83–102.

An Alameda of One’s Own: Race and Modern Subjectivity in a Portrait of Ramona Antonia Musitú y Valvide de Icazbalceta

by Rachel Bonner

In a portrait from 1793 by the painter Juan de Sáenz, the wealthy New Spanish woman Ramona Antonia Musitú y Valvide de Icazbalceta occupies an ambiguous space at the center of the composition, poised between a curtained void and an enclosed garden (fig. 1). While her extravagant accessories and the imported textile of her dress communicate her wealth and cosmopolitanism, sustained analysis suggests that Musitú’s self-fashioning is primarily achieved through a racialized discourse of land-ownership and management, as well as access to specialized knowledge. In advancing this argument, I read Musitú’s portrait as a relatively modern articulation of subjectivity. Such an interpretation may complement, rather than undermine, religious readings of the enclosed garden space.¹ While pointing to the ways that Sáenz’s portrait of Musitú may be superficially empowering, I argue that the image contributes to a discourse of racial superiority into which Musitú’s partial agency can be subsumed and which, ironically, continues to affect how Spanish colonial works such as the Portrait of Ramona Antonia Musitú y Valvide de Icazbalceta and Her Two Daughters are interpreted and (de)valued.

In Sáenz’s portrait, Musitú is positioned in the central foreground of the canvas so that her body divides the composition and bridges its two halves. While sustaining eye contact with the viewer, she appears to step forward from the curtain that separates the foreground from the abyss to her right; as if from an interior space she lays claim to the ornate garden behind her. This background both beckons and appears inaccessible to the viewer. The woman and her young daughters occupy a significant percent of the composition, and the viewer’s eye is drawn to the profusion of finery and flowers with which the figures are adorned. As the canvas is animated by diagonal lines and intricate details, Musitú’s hat is one of the focal points of the composition; its two large feathers lend a sense of balance to the painting and its abundance of fresh flowers echo both the plants that are being cultivated in the garden below and the one that seems to spring from the palm of the older daughter. The focus on foliage and ornamentation links the sitters visually and conceptually to the garden itself; this is underscored by the figure of the youngest daughter clutching a silver watering can, whom Musitú grasps by the wrist. Musitú and her daughters are presented as having privileged access to the gated property, while their alignment with material objects also suggests that they constitute a component of its enclosure; the subjects are framed by a void-like section of the canvas that hints simultaneously at access and impenetrability.

While spatial ambiguities in colonial paintings are often dismissively attributed to the artist’s lack of academic training, the particular vantage point of the background in this portrait has ample precedent in viceregal images of New Spanish cities and gardens. As art historian Ilona Katzew explains in the case of representations of Mexico City’s Alameda Park, this aerial perspective is significant as a depiction of what she calls “Pinturas de la tierra,” or paintings of the land, which have come to epitomize eighteenth-century innovation in New Spanish painting.² These works are characterized by the type of encompassing bird’s-eye-view that can be seen in Saenz’s portrait of Musitú and that frequently incorporates a dizzying level of meticulous detail alongside an emphasis on local topography and subject matter.

An example of these “Pinturas de Tierra” is Manuel de Arellano’s 1709 The Transfer of the Image and Inauguration of the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which offers an interesting point of comparison (fig. 2). Arellano’s painting constitutes a view of the outskirts of Mexico City that is so exhaustive as to be paradoxically disconcerting and elusive. Significantly, this work and others like it emphasize regional features of the landscape in ways that facilitate proto-nationalist sentiment.

The painting features the elaborate chapel built in 1709 to house the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This famous image, the result of a miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary to the indigenous laborer Juan Diego in Tepeyac, became a focus of Mexican national identity in the independence period and beyond. As scholar and curator Ronda Kasl notes, The Transfer of the Image and Inauguration of the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Guadalupe includes an inscription proclaiming that the painting is a “true map” along with a key featuring seventeen numbered locations, many of which would have particular resonance to viewers of Spanish ancestry.³ The seventeenth of these itemized features, for example, is a depiction of Saint Felipe de Jesus, the first Creole (an American-born individual of Spanish descent) to be canonized for martyrdom.⁴ The perspective of the painting allows for a sense of all-encompassing access, but would have particular significance for a creole individual familiar with the more intricate details of the landscape and local culture.

Another image that uses the same visual rhetoric, in terms of perspective and richly detailed depiction of territory, is a seventeenth-century biombo describing the conquest of Mexico. This folding screen, inspired by Japanese imports, features extraordinarily detailed oil on canvas landscapes in aerial perspective. The front side of the screen employs a dark palette and consists of ten panels depicting the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City (fig. 3). In the lower left corner of the screen is a map key, which labels nine historic scenes spanning from the first meeting between Cortes and Moteuczoma to later rebellions against the Mexica tlatoani, or indigenous officials.

The reverse side of the screen (fig. 4) maintains the aerial perspective, but depicts a much brighter, more grid like scene of Mexico City as the newfound capital of the Spanish viceroyalty. The biombo as a whole, as scholar Kevin Terraciano explains, depicts the transformation from “a chaotic, crowded site of conflict” to “a spacious, orderly city.”⁵ This observation has a racial dimension that recalls Brenna Bhandar’s theorization of the circular, violent logic that stems from the relationship between the “proper” use of land and a weaponized concept of race, where non-European approaches to land management are denigrated and used as a justification for dispossession.⁶ In this case, the darker palette that characterizes the conquest side of the biombo appears significant, and potentially meaningful to the wealthy Creole or Spanish individual who lived with this screen and whose own sense of subjectivity would be supported by its version of history.

An anonymous biombo entitled Allegory of New Spain,⁷ from the early eighteenth century, presents an environment similar to the one described in the portrait of Musitú. This image depicts what the art historian Richard Kagan refers to as a “pleasure park,” or a specifically “Creole space” for leisure and recreation.⁸ The image suggests the significance of parks and gardens in the New Spanish imaginary, a theme that is reinforced by Kagan’s reading of another anonymous oil on canvas work from the early eighteenth century. Vista de la Alameda de México depicts an aerial view of Mexico City’s Alameda Park, a cultivated green space, located on the outskirts of the city, with a central fountain from which tree-lined walkways radiated (fig. 5). This symmetrical, geometric enclosure is presented as “a refuge from urban life”⁹ for the city’s Creole elite, although, as Kagan points out, its bucolic connotations are complicated by the inclusion of a stake at which Jewish victims of the Spanish Inquisition were burned. This dimension of the work is highlighted within the map legend in the painting’s lower right corner and suggests that the Alameda represented “a place indicative of the order, in the sense of policía, that Creole writers associated with the capital of New Spain.”¹⁰

Another illuminating example is found in an anonymous casta painting of 1775. Casta, or caste, paintings are a genre that flourished in eighteenth-century New Spain. They were pseudoscientific taxonomic works, which aimed to illustrate and label all the possible results of miscegenation in the viceroyalty. These images, which suggest both diversity and order, were created for and adorned the homes of Spanish and Creole individuals and were often taken back to Spain as souvenirs of the colonies. As such, they had a symbolic relationship to New Spain; their pseudo-scientific categorization represented an attempt at intellectual mastery and, by extension, control over a diverse society. This particular image, entitled De Alvina y Español Produce Negro Torna-Atrás, has a strikingly similar composition to that of Sáenz’s portrait of Musitú. In a slightly ambiguous balcony space on the left side of the foreground of the image, a wealthy man and a woman stand with their noticeably darker-skinned child. Behind and below them sprawls the intricately detailed, symmetrical space of the Alameda, where people (many of whom are dressed in bright shades of red that recall the cochineal curtains of the Musitú portrait) frolic and stroll in the shade.

In direct contrast to the portrait of Musitú, however, this casta image does not portray familial cohesion and the continuity of wealth and access. Rather, what is depicted is the resurgence (torna-atrás or turn-back) of blackness that has resulted from the union of a Spanish man and an “albina” woman, understood then to have been white passing but “one-eighth black.”¹¹ As Kagan explains, the woman is shown kneeling in despair at what the viewer is supposed to understand as her loss of status and access to the exclusive space of the Alameda. Her husband, whose status as a white man is secure, turns away from her and their child in order to survey the expanse of the park.¹² His position vis-a-vis the geometric space of the park, and his ability to know it through immediate, embodied observation, contributes to his unique subject position; while his Spanishness or whiteness allows him access, it is his physical presence in the Americas and established relationship to the land that gives him the sense of intellectual mastery encapsulated in his surveying instrument. Kagan’s reading of this image has significant implications for the interpretation of Sáenz’s portrait of Musitú. As a woman, Musitú’s whiteness is affirmed through the fact that her offspring hold the tools that will allow them to access, cultivate, and ultimately manage the garden space below. Whiteness, in its relationship to property, can thus be understood as a prerequisite for the kind of secular subjectivity that this image represents.

This reading is supported by several features of the space that are highlighted in the Musitú portrait; while less panoramic and comprehensive than the depictions of the Alameda and other similar cityscapes, the garden retains a sense of “rational cultivation” through its geometric layout. This rationality is undergirded by the fountain, which features recognizable subject matter. The fountain in the Musitú portrait echoes the cultivation around which the Alameda is centered and suggest a Versailles-like level of control over nature through its manipulation of water. It also features a prominent image of Neptune. As historian David Brading explains, references to classical mythology in the Americas became a way of articulating esoteric knowledge as well as a symbol of Creole identity, predicated on the eccentric but at one point widely cited argument that the Americas had an ancient connection to the lost city of Atlantis.¹³ In an effort to establish a history of the Americas that suited their complex aspirations, individuals who identified as criollo/a also attempted to draw parallels between the indigenous civilizations of the Western hemisphere and the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. The fountain in this portrait can thus be understood to function on multiple levels as a symbol of control over the land through the enforcement of the creole racial privileges.

That Sáenz’s portrait of Musitú partakes of the logic of whiteness in its relationship to elite identity can also be gleaned from comparison with a similar image about which significantly more is known. José de Páez’s Portrait of Francisco de Larrea y Vitorica and His Two Sons, Miguel José Joaquín and Pedro Nolasco José, painted in 1774, has strikingly similar subject matter. Francisco de Larrea y Vitorica, a finance administrator for the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca who would eventually become its governor, is thought to have commissioned this painting while pursuing noble status (hidalguía) based on his Basque heritage. As noted by Ilona Katzew, this petitioning process involved testimonies of “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre).¹⁴ Katzew suggests that the portrait by José de Páez was likely produced as a component of the governor’s petition and that its emphasis on documentation and precision stems from this focus on legal evidence.

The labels that identify Francisco de Larrea y Vitorica and his sons refer back to the family crest adorning the upper right corner of the image; as Katzew notes, the “Basques and Cántabros who immigrated to the viceroyalties tended to be obsessed with emphasizing their place of origin in specific ways through inscriptions on portraits.”¹⁵ That the portrait of Musitú lacks such a lengthy inscription (the map-like key at the bottom includes only the full names of her two children, along with the date) supports the idea that she might have been a criolla, or a woman claiming Spanish descent born in the viceroyalties. Francisco de Larrea y Vitorica and his two sons occupy the foreground of their portrait. Like the Saenz portrait, in which Musitú anchors the image, Francisco de Larrea y Vitorica is painted at the center of the composition. With their tri-cornered hats tucked under their arms, the three men assume confident poses, cultivating a balance between a serene, self-assured stance and an upright formality. There is little in the way of the profusion of objects that characterizes the portrait of Musitú. Francisco de Larrea y Vitorica’s portrait features a large clock, which contributes to its commanding sense of order and precision, alongside a prominent coat of arms, to which the viewer’s eye is drawn by the sweep of the curtain in the background.

As I have argued, precision and the suggestion of temporality function differently, albeit to similar legitimizing effect, in the Portrait of Ramona Antonia Musitú y Valvide de Icazbalceta and her Two Daughters. While the authority of the clock is absent from Musitú’s portrait, time is not: the artist expresses a particular vision of continuity through land management, which is the thread that links the fountain in the background to Musitú’s young daughter’s watering can in the foreground. Whether this reflects gendered differences, Musitú’s possible Criolla (as opposed to Larrea’s Peninsular Spanish) identity, or both, I suggest that Juan de Sáenz’s portrait implies a sense of access to the land and its resources that is predicated on the articulation of racialized subjectivity and the fiction of whiteness. The relativity of race as a construct means that the viewer’s perspective determines whether or not Musitú is identified as a "white" woman in the twenty-first century, which in turn may condition the viewer’s assessment of the image’s modernity, ironically foreclosing an engagement with the facets of its meaning explored in this essay.

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Rachel Bonner

Rachel Bonner is a third-year PhD student in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she focuses on transculturation and identity in the early modern Spanish Americas. She is an editorial board member and incoming assistant managing editor at Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal.

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Footnotes

1. The art and visual culture of the Spanish viceroyalties often subverts, or at least complicates, the religious/secular binary. The Virgin of Guadalupe, as both a religious figure and symbol of national identity, is one such example, as is Saint Rose of Lima. This is characteristic of early modern art on both sides of the Atlantic; Joseph Koerner’s famous reading of Dürer’s self-portrait of 1500, in The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, comes to mind.

2. Ilona Katzew, “Paintings of the Land,” in Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici, ed. Ilona Katzew (Los Angeles and Mexico City: Los Angeles County Museum of Art & Fomento Cultural Banamex, A.C., 2013).

3. Ibid., 294.

4. Throughout this article I use “Creole,” or the Spanish Criollo, as a period term, and do not intend to validate its connotations. By the eighteenth century, the label had a racial dimension, although “Spanishness” was originally conceived in religious terms, see María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

5. Kevin Terraciano “Competing Memories of the Conquest of Mexico,” in Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, ed. Ilona Katzew (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 75.

6. Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2018).

7. Due to museum and office closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was unable to secure image permissions for most of the remaining works that I discuss in this article, many of which are in the same two collections.

8. Richard Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World: 1493–1793 (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 161.

9. Ibid., 157.

10. Ibid., 157.

11. Ibid., 159.

12. Ibid., 159.

13. David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492-1867 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

14. Katzew, Painted in Mexico, 347.

15. Ibid., 347.

Edward Krasiński: Studio as Site of the Universal

by Nadia Gribkova

In the 1970s, a thin line of blue Scotch tape began its horizontal motion across the interior of Edward Krasiński’s (1925–2004) studio apartment in Warsaw, Poland (fig. 1). It crept across the walls and windows, covered furniture, photographs, paintings, and partition curtains. At times, the line would break—only to reemerge unchanged, faithful to its unyielding trajectory around the room, one hundred and thirty centimeters above the parquet floor, nineteen millimeters wide. Soon, it would breach the bounds of the artist’s Warsaw studio and mark the walls of museums and galleries around the world. But it was in his apartment, most intimate of interior spaces, that Krasiński developed the line as a material alternative to the painter’s brushstroke.

The design of one’s room is an exercise in world-creation, an extension of one’s vision into the inhabited space. The choice of the everyday material surfaces over the pictorial possibility of an autonomous art object is a daring declaration of aesthetic control over the mundane. In transferring the abstract gesture of the blue line into the interior, Krasiński overlaid his aesthetic vision onto the materiality of his surroundings and submitted the objecthood of his studio apartment to his pictorial will. As a result, the studio space appears to venture into the abstract.

The blue line of Scotch tape is not only Krasiński’s signature mark, but also an illustration of the post-Stalinist-era aesthetic in Eastern Europe. It signals the broad rejection of Socialist Realism and highlights the artist’s alignment with the tradition of Western geometric abstraction and its connotations of a universal modernist culture. In both his writing and his art practice, one of the most ardent proponents of the universal potentiality of abstraction was Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), famous for his multi-colored compositions with rectangular planes (fig. 2). In his 1920 essay “Neo-Plasticism: The General Principle of Plastic Equivalence,” Mondrian declares the relation of abstract art to the universal: “Art must,” Mondrian writes, “be the direct expression of the universal in us—which is the exact appearance of the universal outside us.”¹ Note here the implied necessity of a consonance between one’s interiority and the external world. For Mondrian, the issue at hand was not mere representation of the equilibrium, but also evocation of the universal within the viewer.

The idea of a universal realm that subverts geographical and political boundaries was understandably attractive to artists in post-Stalinist states. For several decades after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the belief in art’s “universal character” promised to carry East-European artists over the Iron Curtain.² This commitment was fueled, in part, by the wish to participate in the Western art world and make up the time lost to state-mandated Socialist Realist aesthetics. In his book In the Shadow of Yalta, art historian Piotr Piotrowski speaks to the commitment with which artists like Ivan Picelj (1924-2011) and Henryk Stażewski (1894-1988) explored the genres of non-objective painting, at times directly alluding to the artists of the Russian avant-garde (figs. 3, 4). The return to the material-oriented projects “of Constructivism and productivism, which mythologized the fusion of art and life” marked the beginning of what Piotrowsky calls neo-Constructivism.³ Piotrowsky understands the revival of Constructivist tendencies as a reaction against the neo-Classical and Socialist Realist aesthetics mandated by the Communist regime.⁴ However, it was Krasiński who uniquely moved beyond two-dimensional experiments and expanded the abstract realm of the avant-garde canvas to the scale of his living space.

“I don’t know if this is art,” Krasiński commented on his work with Scotch tape, “but, without any doubt, this is scotch ‘blue’: width 19mm, length unknown.”⁵ While Krasiński described himself as “Surrealist in life and almost Dadaist in art,” Piotrowski considers him in the context of the Eastern-European neo-Constructivist movement.⁶ For the art historian, the geometric nature of Krasiński’s line pays homage to the Constructivist tradition dedicated to emphasizing the material. The blue tape heightens both the abstract geometry of its linear motion and the hackneyed, deteriorating materiality of its cheap adhesive (fig. 5). The latter quality further dramatizes the line’s material intervention on the apartment’s surfaces; there is an element of surprise to encountering Scotch tape devoid of its utilitarian purpose, lending the work a prank-like quality. The interior of the studio thus fluctuates between a space of constructivist striving toward an abstract unity and a site of Dadaist mischief.

Krasiński’s apartment intervention suggests he shared a focus on geometric and mobile elements with early twentieth-century abstract and non-objective painters. The characterization of the line as having concrete and unchanging material qualities (width, color) indicates the importance of its unbroken trajectory. The idea of motion, specifically an infinite motion, is embedded in the relation of the line to the objects within the studio space. Unstoppable and unyielding, the line “transgresses space into infinity.”⁷ Despite the persistent materiality of the Scotch tape, it nonetheless serves as an abstracting element, entering the physical space of the studio and turning every object it touches into a surface, flattening the three-dimensionality of the interior.

In a 1975 work titled Intervention 15, Krasiński plays with the same tape and its movement from the physical space into a pictorial one (fig. 6). On a canvas, he creates a line drawing of two rectangular blocks joined at their long edges and opened up away from the viewer in a book-like fashion. A blue line runs across the gallery wall at its stable height of one hundred and thirty centimeters before entering the space of the canvas. The tape then changes its course, dropping down and back up to follow the surfaces of the geometric figures. At first sight, one could see this work as an example of the inversion of the line’s fidelity to the interior as a material plane. The blue tape does not simply run over the piece but submits to its illusionistic, three-dimensional space. The Scotch tape reacts to the three-dimensionality of the abstract configuration, while nonetheless continuing its treatment of the interior space as two-dimensional. However, one must keep in mind Krasiński’s characterization of his line: It is first and foremost a “scotch ‘blue,’” with concrete, invariable width and color. Nothing, not even trespassing into the conventionally pictorial sphere, influences the material qualities of the line.

Seen from this perspective, the “scotch ‘blue’” introduces materiality to the painting’s rigid geometry, equating it with the surface of the gallery wall. The tape does not change scale nor does Krasiński alter the height at which he mounts the tape. If one were to straighten the two blocks and put them flat against the gallery wall, the line would maintain its height from the floor. Krasiński does not entertain the abstract potential of the three-dimensional geometric objects nor of the striking black background of the canvas. The thin line is the ultimate equalizing, flattening force. While playing into the three-dimensionality proposed by the painting, the tape’s presence nonetheless strips its pictorial potential, announcing it identical to the inexpressive flat plane of the gallery wall.

Similar to Krasiński, Mondrian experimented with the relationship between pictorial representation and three-dimensional space of the room. The quintessential Western representative of pure abstraction also expanded his compositions beyond the material bounds of the canvas and into the physical interiority of the room (fig. 7). Mondrian approached the interior as an opportunity to model the universally holistic realm, a radical space of both material and abstract unity. Mondrian writes:

The interior of the home must no longer be an accumulation of rooms formed by four walls . . . but a construction of coloured and colourless planes, combined with furniture and equipment, which must be . . . constituent elements of the whole.⁸

However, Mondrian does not stop at simply material unity:

And the human being? In a similar fashion, the human being must be nothing in himself, but rather a part of the whole. Then, no longer conscious of his individuality, he will be happy in this earthly paradise that he himself has created.⁹

A photograph of his Parisian studio from 1926 shows how Mondrian allowed his colored planes to follow through with their expansive motions and erupt from the canvas (fig. 7). Large rectangles detach from the pictorial plane and are actualized in the material space of the room, adhering to the furniture and merging with the walls. Unlike in his compositions on canvas, black lines are completely absent in this arrangement. The verticals of the walls and the horizontals of the floor and ceiling serve as a point of reference for neo-plastic planes. Mondrian’s studio is a miniature of the ever-expansive, all-engaging neo-plastic infinity he theorized. The easel, reminiscent of an abandoned grid, stands empty before a large mid-tone rectangle that expands on the wall behind it. Another easel, on the left-most side of the photo, still holds the canvas that is releasing the colored rectangles from its surface. Through the movement of the colored planes, the room comes alive.

Totality then, in its Western modernist sense, relies on all becoming a part of a whole, on the blurring of boundaries between the inside and the outside, between the personal and the universal. In working on his studio, Krasiński is hesitant to embrace this idea as an axiom and appears to push against it however inconspicuously. In an enclosed area with a cupboard and a telephone, Krasiński puts up an array of images and objects in an almost Mondrian-like grid (fig. 5). The rectangles and squares of magazine cut-outs, photos of friends, notes on loose pieces of paper, and a golden frame are implanted onto the studio’s wall. The photographs are arranged around the blue line, as if placed after it has traced the surface. And although for a second the line experiences a rupture—as if someone’s hand has ripped the tape for a friend’s photograph to remain unmarked—it picks up a little later and continues its stable run. This private shrine to the sentimental stays put in its designated corner.

The interior of Krasiński’s studio is circumscribed into a closed infinity manifest through the material quality of Scotch tape. Geometric abstraction here is not centrifugal, not expanding, but rather containing, enclosing.¹⁰ The abstract line interacts with images and objects in the room on the level of the material surface. The blue line, in that way, negates the expressive potential of a wall plane as a canvas and turns it instead into a medium for the progression of material through space. The allusion to expansion from a central focus and pictorial transcendence present in Mondrian’s works is being categorically denied here. The studio is marked by infinity, but an infinity so tangible, so loyal to its material immediacy, that it is incapable of allowing anything but an object to be what Mondrian describes as “part of a whole.”

Krasiński’s line does not organize the pictorial space but declares it a surface, creating the opposite effect to the one Mondrian attempts to orchestrate in his Parisian studio. For Mondrian, the room is alive, pulsing with interrelated colored planes, while Krasiński emphasizes the lifeless quality of all surfaces. In this way, the flatlining of the Scotch tape is an embodiment of a pulse, or a lack thereof. An interpretation of the line’s flatness as a cardiac metaphor is hardly a stretch—the height of the line is described by some reviewers as being located at the viewer’s heart level.¹¹

The Warsaw studio apartment achieves wholeness by having its interior bound by the continuous motion and materiality of the “scotch ‘blue.’” Such infinity ceases being universal and becomes particular. In other words, Krasiński’s universe is that of a room, focusing on the immediate materiality of its surfaces. The blue line as an artistic gesture does not appear to share Mondrian’s optimism about the prospect of merging the human with the abstracted whole. Krasiński alludes to a human physical presence by establishing a spatial connection to the onlooker’s heart, only to meet it with a cool, geometric rigidity. The human is here rendered flat—nothing but a stick figure on a sheet of plywood (fig. 8). It is as if the artist gives form to an inhabitant of this totality, a man who, in Mondrian words, is “nothing in himself.”¹² Looking closely at the figure, one cannot help but wonder whether Mondrian’s promise that “he will be happy in this earthly paradise that he himself has created”¹³ is at all a possibility.

In post-Stalinist Eastern Europe, the stakes of seriously engaging with the ideas of the universal were undoubtedly high. Not in the least because of the political implications of the possibility and hope of aligning with a modernist West, culturally antithetical to the restrictive bounds of the Communist regime, were markedly fraught. The injection of rigid special materiality into the modernist non-objective practice can be read as a serious attempt to adopt universal ideals. In this regard, Krasiński’s studio is a peculiar example of geometric abstraction taking over the material world and claiming it as a static, enclosed infinity of utilitarian Scotch tape. In looking at the studio one cannot help but think of Mondrian’s query, “And the human being?” The uncompromising neo-Constructivist line highlights the very thing that might have to be left behind in the process of achieving the modernist ideal: the pictures of friends, and one’s personal history. In using the language of the modernist geometric gesture, Krasiński points to the shortcomings of the attempts to express a universal whole via the materialization of abstraction. In the end, a unity is experienced not through a line drawn but a space inhabited.

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Nadia Gribkova

Nadia Gribkova is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Russian art, mass spectacles, and unofficial art movements in the late Soviet Union.

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Footnotes

1. See Piet Mondrian, “Neo-plasticism: The General Principles of Plastic Equivalence,” in Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).

2. Piotr Piotrowski, “Myths of Geometry” in In the Shadow of Yalta, (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2009), 144.

3. Ibid., 143.

4. Ibid., 141.

5. In the original Polish text, “blue” is written in English, with quotation marks demarcating it, tying the gesture even closer to the Western art world, Włodzimierz Borowski et al., Galeria Foksal, 1966–1994 (Warsaw, Poland: Galeria Foksal SBWA, 1994), quoted in Piotr Piotrovski, “Myths of Geometry,” 120.

6. Stanislaw Cichowicz, “Z historii niebieskiego humoru,” in Edward Krasiński, ed. Janina Ładnowska (Łódź, Poland: Muzeum Sztuki w Łódźi, 1991), quoted in Piotrowski, “Myths of Geometry,” 119.

7. Piotrowski, “Myths of Geometry,” 119.

8. Cees de Jong, et al., Piet Mondrian: the Studios: Amsterdam, Laren, Paris, London, New York, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 6.

9. Ibid., 6.

10. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 18.

11. Laura Robertson, “‘IT Intervenes IN and Unmasks EVERYTHING. IT Exists’ — Into the Studio: Edward Krasiński, Warsaw,” The Double Negative, October 19, 2016, www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/2016/10/it-intervenes-in-and-unmasks-everything-it-exists-into-the-studio-edward-krasinski-warsaw/.

12. Jong, et al., Piet Mondrian, 6.

13. Ibid., pg. 6.