Reimagining Our Worth:
Rethinking the Role of Artifacts as Works of Art
Jesus Barraza
Identities
December 10, 2014
2
Looking to Rupert Garcia’s large format print, Untitled for Touchstones (fig. 1), I explore
how the impact of colonialism created a dynamic that worked to privilege European ideas
of aesthetics over those held by the Mexica1 in the Americas. This print is part of a body of
hand painted digital prints Garcia created in the early 2000s in which he juxtaposes
historical images and uses overlaying fields of color to highlight or obstruct the images he
is presenting to the viewer. In Untitled for Touchstones (fig. 2 & 3), Garcia focuses on the
Mexica’s Coatlicue2 positioned above the Greek Laocoön and His Sons3 with each statue
presented in a square with a field of color over them. The piece presents the two statues,
calling on their histories as art objects as well as the value each statue is assigned in the art
word. Garcia’s print touches on issues of knowledge, power and art history, by looking to
civilizations from Europe and the Americas and ways in which European art works are
considered masterpieces whiles the Mexica’s are relegated as artifacts that become the
study of anthropologists. In his print, Garcia challenges this view and situates both works of
art as masterpieces from their respective cultures.
In this work Garcia intentionally positions the image of each statue, one above the other to
invert power and value as well as to disrupt established hierarchies set in the art world
that give disproportionate value to European objects. In the presentation of the two statues
1
The Mexica, also commonly known as the Aztecs, are the indigenous people of the Valley of Mexico, today
know as the Mexico City.
2
The Coatlicue is the mother of all creation and her name translates to the one with the serpent skirt. The
Virgen de Guadalupe is believed to be a manifestation of Coatlicue, this is because the Virgen appeared to Juan
Diego on Mount Tepeyac which is where people would come to pray to Coatlicue.
3
Laocoön and His Sons is considered to be one of the finest examples of the Greek art, although today it is
widely recognized that the statue in the Vatican Museum is a reproduction of an older arrangement of the
statue and is not an original artwork itself (Hwang 3).
3
he overlays fields of gradated colors, in this manner Garcia uses color to both expose and
obstruct the images. This tactic is used to give the viewer greater access to one image over
the other. Garcia implements this approach in several of his artworks presenting the
viewer with a challenge to uncover the references he uses along with their importance to
art history and as well as inviting the viewer to uncover how his use of images and their
juxtaposition expose veiled meanings.
In this artwork he offers two images to the viewers, each being highlighted to expose and
obscure. The color gradient over the Coatlicue (fig. 4), is transparent and covers the entire
image space the statue occupies while overlaid with bursts of orange that can be in
interpreted as highlights that illuminate her and allow her to be seen in a new light,
reveling a power she carries that has been obscured for so long.4 To the left of the Coatlicue
image there are six squares of color stacked one atop another, the arrangement of the
colors are in the reverse order of the overlay of the statue. In the middle of each square
there is a burn mark that looks like a series of wounds in the colors with three parallel lines
running up and down the six squares as to heal the wounds. The gradient color bar over
Laocoön and His Sons (fig. 5) is also transparent but it only covers a rectangular section in
the middle of the image almost as in the process of a computerized scan of the visible color
spectrum. In this light the color bar serves to distort the image, as if to put the statue under
scrutiny that calls into question its relative worth when compared to the Coatlicue statue.
Garcia presents the two statues to the viewer and raises the questions: what value does
4
A similar color overlay is used in Untitled for Lupe (Figure 4), his print of La Virgen de Guadalupe.
4
each piece have and how has this value been determined in light of the process of
colonization that happened in the Americas?
To examine this dynamic I look to Dolores Galindo who states in her Masters thesis Latin
America’s Epistemic Break: Towards a Decolonial Aesthetics5 that:
“Aesthetic coloniality is based on the universal definition of art, established as a
point of reference in order to classify and disqualify all that does not comply with its
ideas. In opposition, decolonial aesthetics looks to decolonize the concepts complicit
in art and aesthetics in order to liberate the inherent subjectivities of each culture.”6
In Galindo’s view decolonial aesthetics has at its center a posture of resistance that offers
“an other thinking” which is in opposition to recognized universal definitions of art,
established as a point of reference in order to classify and disqualify all that does not
comply with its ideas.7 It is this “other thinking” that Garcia employs in his art work, by
contrasting the two statues and through his positioning he privileges the Coatlicue over
Laocoön and His Sons in this manner he attempts to shift the way these works are
considered in art history by recognizing their aesthetic coloniality.
The importance of Laocoön and His Sons (fig. 6) in art history and the art world is
demonstrated by its permanent place of exhibition in the Statues Courtyard at the Vatican
Museum where Pope Julius II made it the centerpiece of the collection after was unearthed
5
In her Masters thesis Galindo expands on the concept of decolonial aesthetics as it is described in its
founding statement that was released in 2011, which was authored by a group of academics. Annibal Quijano
introduced the term decolonility the early 1990s and many scholars have developed this field of study.
Maldonado‐Torres describes decoloniality as “making visible the invisible and about analyzing the
mechanisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large stock of ideas that must
necessarily include the critical reflections of the ‘invisible’ people themselves (Maldonado‐Torres 262).”
6 Galindo, Dolores. "Latin America’s Epistemic Break: Towards a Decolonial Aesthetics." Thesis. Goldsmiths
University of London, 2011, 19.
7
Ibid.
5
in 1506. It is recorded that Michelangelo visited t the statue while it was being excavated
and created many studies and it had an influence that can be traced in various works by the
artist (Hwong 6). The Coatlicue (fig. 7) statue was found and excavated in 1790 in Mexico
City while under Spanish domination and rule; it was considered so terrifying to the
Spanish that it was reburied, remaining there for more than 30 years before it was fully
excavated.8 The history of these two statues can be contrasted in the way they were first
received when found, for the Coatlicue she was a threat to the success of Spains
colonization of the Mexica while Laocoön and His Sons was demonstration of the greatness
of Greek culture. For Galindo, the European invention of “America” meant that the:
“…the history and cosmology of cultures such as the Inca, Aztec and Aymara, are
subordinated in a way that has meant that these cultures lose, in a more or less
gradual form, their explicative function to the subjects that have been part of
them.”9
What Garcia does in his artwork is what Galindo describes as part of decolonial aesthetics
to “rediscover the materiality of such cultural manifestations…not with the end of
exporting the exotic or the primitive, but in order to understand specific forms of
producing knowledge, including their own conceptions of the world.”10 The Coatlicue can
be recognized for the power she represents for the Mexica as the mother of all creation,
also as an artwork that connects the descendants of the Mexica with a cosmology that has
almost been shattered. In this manner Garcia presents the two statues and not only
privileges one over another but works to bring the spiritual significance of the Coatlicue
8 During the 30 years that the Coatlicue was buried there was a period when it was dug out for purposes of
analysis by Antonio de León y Gama who was commissioned by the Viceroy.
9 Ibid. 31
10
Ibid. 21
6
statue to a culture and a people who are in the process of embracing the original
cosmologies from which the statue emerges.
To build an understanding of how each of the two statues have gained differential cultural
value I look to Nelson Maldonado‐Torres and his theory on the Coloniality of Being in
which he argues colonialism normalized an existence of “invisibility and dehumanization”
that exists to this day.11 Maldonado‐Torres establishes this understanding of Being through
his reading of colonialism as a process that naturalized the “force and legitimacy of a
historical system (European Modernity) that utilized racism and colonialism to naturalize
the non‐ethics of war”12 into the everyday existence of people.13 Maldonado‐Torres’ theory
helps to explain the ways in which European culture has been privileged over Indigenous
cultures of the Americas through a process of dehumanization that subordinates a group’s
existence, including their cultural expressions in any form that may exist. This process of
dehumanization was demonstrated when the Spanish rulers reburied the Coatlicue statue
because they feared “the natives of New Spain would begin to show veneration to the
goddess, thus challenging the two hundred years of conversion.”14 This action was a
11
Maldonado‐Torres, Nelson. "On the Coloniality of Being." Cultural Studies. 2nd ed. Vol. 21. London:
Routledge, 2007. 257.
12
Ibid. 256
13
This dehumanization Maldonado‐Torres references can be traced back to treatment of the Mexica through
the colonization process during which people were forced to accept colonial domination with the threat of
death if they did not comply. It can be seen today with the murder of the 43 students that were killed by the
state in Ayotzinapa, which led to discovery of many unmarked graves containing the bodies of people that
have lost their lives in the same manner.
14
Garcia, Dominique E. "Nationalistic Iconography and ‘Anti‐Iconology’ of the Aztec Coatlicue Sculpture." MS.
Arizona. Arizona State University, 2012. 1.
7
continuation of the destruction of indigenous culture that begun with the arrival of the
Spanish in Mexico in 1521.
In contrast, Laocoön and His Sons was seen as valuable as soon as it was unearthed,
becoming the centerpiece of the Vatican Statue Garden and has been considered "the
prototypical icon of human agony"15 which reflects on the brilliance of the makers who
created such an important work. There was also a continued historical record in Rome
from its ancient times that gave the statue a documented history; in Pliny the Elders Natural
History he writes of the statue as “a work superior to all paintings and sculptures.”16 It is
this history that Garcia’s artwork is referencing and it is through the scrutiny Garcia puts
Lacoön and His Sons through his use of color fields as well as the juxtaposition of the two
statues that demonstrates what Maldonado‐Torres has put forth as the concept of the
decolonial attitude. This decolonial attitude is not the same as an anti‐colonial ideology;
instead Maldonado‐Torres describes it as a “radical position against the fact of
dehumanization itself” and breaks it out into two parts. First, it is “about recognizing the
multiple ways that dehumanization is produced and second, it is about the effort to create
strategies and alliances to subvert this dehumanization.”17
15
Spivey, Nigel Jonathan. Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude. Berkeley, CA: U of California, 2001. 25
16
Boardman, John, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray. The Oxford History of the Classical World. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1988. 552.
17
Maldonado‐Torres, Nelson. "Decolonial Love." Lecture, ALICE Colloquium, Portugal, December 5, 2014.
Accessed December 5, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mvjR5FzaMw.
8
I see this decolonial attitude represented in Garcia’s artwork, in which he gives both
statues the status of touchstones18, giving them a both an important value to their
respective cultures as benchmarks of their civilizations. Through this action Garcia works
to challenge the history of subordination of indigenous people in the Americas, in part by
recognizing that both pieces are valued differently on the basis of their cultural origins.
Then subverting the dehumanization through Garcia’s positioning and the illuminating
gradient placed over the Coatlicue statue in relation to Laocoön and His Sons, which is
placed under examination of his distorting color scan. Through this process the power
dynamic between the two statues has been inverted, but I do not see this as merely as an
attempt to say that one is greater than the other. Garcia presents an other reading of the
two works to reveal power dynamics that are part of the coloniality of aesthetics and leads
the viewer through a process that recognizes the process of dehumanization and works to
subvert that process through a contemporary reading of the two statues.
To understand power relations of the statues in terms of art objects and their value in the
art world, I look to James Clifford and his examination of ways in which art works are
represented in museums and the art world as part of the “Art Culture‐System.”19 Looking
to the history of the Coatlicue statue after the she was excavated we can observe how she
was feared, studied, interpreted, and included in a collection that moved many times before
she was moved to her current residence at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico
18 The ides of the touchstone used by Garcia is connected to its definition of being a standard or criterion by
which something is judged or recognized.
19
Clifford, James. "On Collecting Art and Culture." The Predicament of Culture. Boston: Harvard UP, 1988.
100
9
City.20 This was part of a process of collecting that started while Mexico was still
considered New Spain in the first decade of the1800s, and Mexica artifacts were seen as
worthy of scientific study to explain its religious significance, but they were only made
available to a certain group of educated people who were trained to do this work.21 The
process of collecting was further refined when the Coatlicue was moved, along with all
other ancient monuments that had been collected at the time, to the Hall of Monoliths at the
newly built National Museum in Mexico City. This can be seen in Clifford’s view that in the
West “collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture
and authenticity.”22 In this manner we see how the Coatlicue became a part of institution
identifying with a Western way of understanding collecting artifacts of cultures that have
been thought of no longer existing.
In Clifford’s diagram the first and second zones are assigned to “authentic masterpieces”
and “authentic artifacts”, and as can be see in the diagram (fig. 8) there is the possibility for
objects that have been assigned a relative value to move from one zone to another. This
move can happen when an object, such as a tribal artifact, gains a new significance in the
art world such as when connoisseurs and collectors recognize a new importance in an
20
After the Coatlicue statue was excavated it had three homes, in 1810 it was moved to the patio of the
National Museum, in 1879 it was taken to a newly created National Museum where it was placed the garden
and in 1887 moved to the Hall of Monoliths at the same museum. In the mid 1960s the National Anthropology
Museum was created to highlight the many indigenous cultures of Mexico, the Coatlicue statue was moved
there along with a collection of Mexica objects which have been excavated through out Mexico City and its
surrounding area.
21
Garcia, Dominique E. "Nationalistic Iconography and ‘Anti‐Iconology’ of the Aztec Coatlicue Sculpture." MS.
Arizona. Arizona State University, 2012. 3
22
Clifford, James. "On Collecting Art and Culture." The Predicament of Culture. Boston: Harvard UP, 1988. 96.
10
artifact and move it from the realm of artifact to that of masterpiece, in this manner it
moves from “culture” to “art”.
In Garcia’s work the two statues represented have a set place in the “Art‐Culture System,”
from its unearthing Laocoön and His Sons was considered a masterpiece. An artwork
demonstrating the artistic genius of Greek/Western culture added to the Vatican’s
collection of masterpieces. On the other hand after the Coatlicue statue was finally
unearthed it was put into the National Museum at the University of Mexico as part of a
collection of Mexica objects which had also been excavated in the same geographic area as
the Coatlicue. I see Garcia’s artwork moving the Coatlicue statue from the realm of an
“authentic artifact” to an “authentic masterpiece” and he does this not only as an artist
making this work but also as an art historian himself. Garcia uses this work to challenge the
system that Clifford is writing about, what Garcia does through his piece is to take the
Coatlicue statue from the realm of an object of anthropological and scientific study and
elevate it the status of a Mexica masterpiece.
It has been my intention to demonstrate how these three theories help understand Garcia’s
treatment of art works by the Greek and Mexica which exist in an art system that places
disproportionate value on objects based on their origin. Through the placement and
presentation of the two statues, Garcia inverts these power relations that have been in
place since colonization begun, offering a new reading of the two artworks. Marking the
importance of each work in a new light allows for a delinking from European ideas of
aesthetics, establishing an other way of understanding the value of work by the Mexica as
seen through a decolonial lens. By juxtaposing these touchstones from the two civilizations
11
and referencing their histories Garcia generates a discussion of aesthetic coloniality that
interrogates their histories with the aim to demonstrate how each artwork holds an
important significance for the cultures that produced them. Through this strategy Garcia
moves the Coatlicue statue from the realm of an artifact to the realm of a masterpiece for
the Mexica, giving it a similar worth as Laocoön and His Sons had for the Greek.
12
Bibliography
Boardman, John, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray. The Oxford History of the Classical
World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.
Clifford, James. "On Collecting Art and Culture." The Predicament of Culture. Boston:
Harvard UP, 1988. 94‐107.
Galindo, Dolores. "Latin America’s Epistemic Break: Towards a Decolonial Aesthetics."
Thesis. Goldsmiths University of London, 2011.
Garcia, Dominique E. "Nationalistic Iconography and ‘Anti‐Iconology’ of the Aztec Coatlicue
Sculpture." MS. Arizona. Arizona State University, 2012.
Hwang, HyoSil S. "Uncoiling The Laocoon: Revealing The Statue Group’s Significance In
Augustan Rome." Master's thesis, University of Maryland, 2007.
Isasi‐Díaz, Ada María., and Eduardo Mendieta. Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o
Theology and Philosophy. New York: Fordham UP, 2012.
Maldonado‐Torres, Nelson. "On the Coloniality of Being." Cultural Studies. 2nd ed. Vol. 21.
London: Routledge, 2007. 240‐70.
Maldonado‐Torres, Nelson. "Decolonial Love." Lecture, ALICE Colloquium, Portugal,
December 5, 2014. Accessed December 5, 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mvjR5FzaMw.
Spivey, Nigel Jonathan. Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude. Berkeley, CA: U of
California, 2001.
13
Figures
Figure 1
Rupert Garcia. Untitled for Touchstones, 2000.
14
Figure 2
Rupert Garcia. Untitled for Flying on the Ground, 2000.
15
Figure 3
Rupert Garcia. Untitled for Lupe, 2000.
16
Figure 4
Rupert Garcia. Detail of Coatlicue from Untitled for Touchstones, 2000.
17
Figure 5
Rupert Garcia. Detail of Laocoön and His Sons from Untitled for Touchstones, 2000.
18
Figure 6
Agesander, Athenodoros & Polydorus. Laocoön and His Sons, Between 27 BC & 68 AD
19
Figure 7
Artists unknown. Coatlicue, Date unknown.
20
Figure 8
From James Clifford. The ArtCulture System, 1988.