The Utility of George Kubler in Andahuaylillas, Peru

Returning in 1966 to his “On the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-Columbian Art” of 1961,1 George Kubler noted, “I thought that American antiquity was ‘extinct beyond recall.’ I still believe this.”2 This idea, laid out at length in the earlier essay, has for many years been criticized as ignoring the material evidence that Indigenous forms were still deployed in the colonial period. The rapid growth of the discipline of colonial Latin American art history in anglophone circles during the 1980s and 1990s followed or coincided with turns to social history and to feminist, material/visual-culture, and postcolonial approaches. These focused on recovering voices lost to the violence of regimes of power, thereby rectifying (art) historical silences. Kubler’s essay—which seems to insist upon “extinction,” even in its title—was thus bound to be contested.It is easy to look back on Kubler as remarkably unprescient, out of step with the field’s later trajectory. But in fact, he saw the road that lay ahead. Indeed, in 1966, when Kubler reiterated a belief in extinction, he actually noted that it was “with an added reservation that like an equally extinct Greco-Roman antiquity, the deep American past remains tangible enough to excite a prolonged and even interminable speculation on its recovery.” This “speculation” indexed the artistic power of objects, underscoring the still “affective value of the ancient remains themselves.”3In mobilizing the theme of extinction while categorizing various types of colonial survival—and later raising the possibility of recovery—Kubler seems to create a fundamental contradiction. That is, he speaks of extinction even as he presents a bewildering preponderance of evidence of Indigenous persistence—from the nearly faithful copy of a preconquest object in the Codex Borbonicus to the “colonial expansion of Pre-Columbian themes” in the keros of the Andean highlands (26/70). If pre-Columbian forms were so evidently extant, in what sense could they be considered extinct? Kubler’s invocation of a supposedly “equally extinct Greco-Roman antiquity” helps reconcile his thesis with the materials he lays out; for while the societies of the Antique world had been so fundamentally transformed as to be unrecognizable, their motifs—and, so too, knowledge about their meanings—remained available for centuries of appropriation and redeployment. The same holds, Kubler implies, for pre-Columbian symbolic systems, so interrupted and reconfigured by “the Conquest.”This is all to say: Kubler was not claiming that no pre-Columbian “motifs” survived, nor that the meaning attached to them was somehow instantaneously lost. Even in their persistence, however, he saw troubling disruption, even destruction, at the hands of colonial powers. By insisting upon extinction, Kubler stressed colonial violence. In the opening paragraphs, we read of the “extirpation of native observances by religious authorities” (14/66), the “expressions of native origin...suppressed by the colonial authorities” (15/66), and the “division of colonial society [into] exploiting and exploited groups” (15/67). Seeking an affective narration of decimation, Kubler adopted the language of the corpse. The essay promises an examination of the “occasions when Pre-Columbian themes continued in the artistic utterance of the peoples of Latin America;” but lest the reader be moved to relief, Kubler reminds that “these utterances were like death cries” (14/66). He points to eschatology, the end of things, the destruction of one culture by another.Kubler points out that these themes were at odds with what he had been asked to write about, noting that the editors “originally requested an article on ‘the survival of native art motifs into the Colonial Period’” (14/66). His essay emerged as a corrective to overly optimistic modes of analysis, as if so much colonial violence could be swept away by simply focusing harder—and on survival rather than destruction. And he thus pointed to a need to look at processes of colonial production that utilized, if fundamentally destabilized, Indigenous traditions and motifs. Here we argue that this corrective is still critical—and in fact, more so than ever before—given the field’s increasingly dramatic turn from postcolonial approaches toward decolonial perspectives about Indigenous recovery. Ananda Cohen-Aponte recently and trenchantly articulated the potential pitfall: “Artificially conferring equal footing to indigenous, mixed-race or black artists with respect to their European counterparts in an effort to grant them agency in the artistic arena inevitably does just the opposite; it distorts the historical record by interpreting coercion as choice and hybridity as a peaceful convergence of visual systems.”4 If now unfashionable as an analytic approach, Kubler’s taxonomic system of cataloging Indigenous traces and presences in colonial visual culture was in line with this sentiment; for these categorizations demanded precision in handling forms of colonial co-optation and oppression.The mural cycle in the church of San Pedro Apóstol in Andahuaylillas, Peru, along with some of its varying interpretations, point to the need to recalibrate expectations about and approaches to recuperating Indigenous ontologies within colonial visual regimes. The cycle is one of the most studied in the highland Andes, in no small part because of the unusual abundance of information about both the church and the parish priest, Juan Pérez Bocanegra (1598–1645), who most likely oversaw the creation of the original seventeenth-century frescoes. Possessing an uncommon facility with Quechua and Aymara, Bocanegra authored the 1631 Ritual formulario, a Spanish-Quechua sacramental manual to aid priests in the conversion of Indigenous communities. Because of this, and because the criollo artist responsible for the murals, Luis de Riaño (1596–1667), is thought to have worked primarily with Indigenous assistants, scholars have searched the frescoes for surviving pre-Columbian motifs.The choir loft program (fig. 1) has been the object of particular scrutiny and interpretation along these lines. Sabine MacCormack was the first to venture such an account, one that took cues from anthropologically inflected colonial history and art history in the mid-1980s.5 The depiction of the Annunciation seems simple enough at first glance—the Virgin Mary and Gabriel placed on either side of a large oculus. But the scene is reconfigured by text, with the window surrounded by seven lettered roundels reading: “SA[PIE]N[TIA], ADONAI, RADIX, EMMANVEL, CLAVIS, REX, ORIENS.” These, MacCormack posits, refer to the Christian Trinity: the text inside the oculus, which she reads as “CONCEPIT” (“she conceived”), refers to “the Holy Ghost by whom Mary conceived;” “ADONAI” points to the Creator, God the Father; and Jesus is invoked as “EMMANUEL” and “ORIENS” (114).But MacCormack pushes the mural to reveal an Andean spatial logic and cosmology in line with precolonial artistic production. She first claims that the positioning of the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary created a gendered spatial divide mirroring that of colonial Catholic liturgies, during which men and women were separated on either side of the nave’s central aisle. But what was more important, MacCormack suggests, was that this aligned with an Indigenous ordering of space in which “the upper moiety of each community [was perceived] as right, or male, and the lower moiety as left, or female” (116). To make this point, MacCormack draws on the colonial writings of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1534–c. 1615) and his reports of preconquest traditions. Yet she links this arrangement not just to broad Andean spatial categories but specifically to a 1613 drawing by Joan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui of the golden “altar” in the Coricancha, the Inca Temple of the Sun at Cuzco. As the “altar” was melted down by the Spanish soon after conquest, Pachacuti Yamqui’s drawing is a seventeenth-century recollection of the preconquest world at nearly a century’s distance.6 And yet MacCormack argues for a clear parallel between the drawing’s parts andthe distribution of components on the west wall of the choir loft of the church of Andahuaylillas. Pachacuti Yamqui’s man and woman are in the space corresponding to that in the choir loft occupied by the angel and Mary, respectively. The oval disk representing the creator Viracocha, Ticsicapac, or Tunupa which was ‘like the rays of the resurrection of Jesus,’ matches the skylight with its inscription and seven medallions referring to the three persons of the Trinity (118).This reading of the choir loft mural has gone oddly unchallenged despite resting upon idiosyncratic visual and textual interpretation. For instance, the gendered divide attributed to the Annunciation fresco squares poorly with Catholic theological tenets that long viewed angels, including Gabriel, as incorporeal spiritual beings lacking gender.7 Seeing the oculus in line with an oval disc representing Viracocha in Yamqui’s drawing of the Coricancha “altar,” MacCormack concludes that the choir loft mural speaks “with more than one voice,” and implies that she has recovered an Andean whisper within the Catholic picture. But to do so she must notably contradict her own reading of the window: early on she identifies it with the Holy Spirit (114), but now she points to an equivalence between this Andean Creator and God the Father.Furthermore, MacCormack’s interpretation, like those that have come both before and after, originates in a misunderstanding of the highly atypical roundels themselves.8 They do not make generic allusions to the Trinity—a reading that, in any event, would only account for three of the seven—but are rather very precise references to Christ drawn from the Catholic liturgy. Each invokes one of Christ’s messianic titles, and together they comprise the initial words of the “O Antiphons.”9 These are traditionally sung or recited at vespers, one per day, from the seventeenth to the twenty-third of December.10 These antiphons both reflect and create mounting liturgical anticipation for Christmas, Christ’s birth, the event fulfilling both Gabriel’s Annunciation and the Incarnation via the working of the Holy Spirit. In the painted scene, the sunlight streaming through the oculus is made to play the role of the Holy Spirit by which Mary conceives her son.Preconquest highland religions heralded the sun as a revered deity, the creator and life force. This was widely understood by colonial officials and even became a topic of linguistic debate amongst missionaries.11 Ironically then, there is a clear survival of Indigenous systems of belief or thought in the choir loft at Andahuaylillas, but not in the form of an autonomous expression hiding in the Catholic picture. Rather, the Indigenous element of the sun has been knowingly and insidiously seized for the rhetoric of the Church and thus of the colonial enterprise. The identification of the Holy Spirit with the oculus void reconfigures the Andean “idol” of sunlight as the Christian God. Surrounding the oculus with seven incantations of Christ reframes both literally and conceptually the Indigenous “idol” as the incarnational Christian presence. Bocanegra was particularly sensitive to taking hold of such resonances between the natural elements of the Andean pantheon and Christian devotion; in his Ritual formulario, he even compares the Pleiades star formation to the Virgin Mary.12 The choir loft mural at Andahuaylillas thus could be read as a clear case of a colonial religious regime using a preconquest element for its own aims and within its own frameworks—what Kubler calls a “transplant.”Of course, in 1961 few were considering the role of the nonvisible, the material, or the metaphysical within Indigenous epistemologies. But Kubler’s schematization of colonial appropriations of pre-Columbian motifs and forms suggests that if he had been able to think beyond the motif, or the work of art as a purely symbolic expression, then he would have seen this as an act of co-optation, if also one of colonial negotiation. So too, now, can we; but seeing it at all requires coming to terms with the ecclesiastical milieu and the symbolic systems in which colonial actors operated. Kubler’s essay actually primes us to take stock of such dynamics of power vis-à-vis the visual culture that comes down to us. Colonial regimes make space, Kubler contends, for that which they see fit to exploit. He conceived of that in terms of use-value. “Only the practical or useful items were eagerly adopted” (15/67), he writes, and he underscores the point by weaving words like use, utility, useful, and utilitarian throughout the essay.That insistence upon utility also makes Kubler’s essay productive for assessing newer, but related, directions in the field of colonial Latin American art history. If the effort to find Indigenous persistence, and with it resistance, has been motivated by a desire to see agency within colonialism rather than to parse the top-down implementation of power, the same can be said of the impulses behind more recent attempts to uncover moments of local autonomy, whether Indigenous or not. That is, the field has moved ever more emphatically to resurface voices speaking in their own interest, rather than strictly in accord with the hegemonic structures of empire. But Kubler’s correlation of power and “use-value” points to the importance of keeping imperial frames fully in view while doing so.Andahuaylillas again serves as a potent example. A recent restoration of the church required the removal of enormous, gilt-framed canvases depicting the life of Saint Peter that line the upper portions of the nave’s walls. Cuzco’s bishop, Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo (1626–99), commissioned these large oil paintings after visiting the church in 1687.13 One canvas was not reinstalled after restoration, leaving exposed several textual roundels from the original mural program.14 Recently, Ananda Cohen-Aponte has argued that two of the roundels effectively constitute the signature of the parish priest Bocanegra. One roundel reads “EDIFI” when scanned from bottom to top, while another reads “BOCA” when read from top to bottom. Cohen-Aponte takes these together to say “edificó Boca,” or “Boca[negra] built [this].”15 This interpretation would help settle a stubborn scholarly debate, namely whether Bocanegra was primarily responsible for Andahuaylillas’s mural program, or whether there was Jesuit input.16Yet this accounting also rests upon isolating a fragment of the mural’s lexical program. Indeed, though covered or partially obscured by later additions, small textual roundels are spaced at intervals all along the walls of the nave. Reading them in sequence and in a consistent orientation—from bottom to top—they compose the Latin text of Matthew 16:18. “EDIFI” “BOCA” becomes “[A]EDIFICABO,” “I will build,” Christ’s declaration to Saint Peter: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”17 Such doctrinal frameworks do not necessarily preclude wordplay of the sort Cohen-Aponte describes, but drawing the focus narrowly on the local has consequences for interpretation. What, in Kubler’s language, would be the colonial use-value? It is notable that the larger Latin text has never factored into analyses of this church, given that the biblical verse points directly to the church’s patron saint, Peter, and that this passage figured centrally in Catholic-Protestant debates over papal supremacy and apostolic succession. Indeed, on its walls and into the rafters, Andahuaylillas is awash with the papal insignia of tiaras and crossed keys. Together, textual and visual elements link the small village congregation to their celestial patron, Saint Peter, and thus to the Pope, his direct successor and the figure of greatest ecclesiastical power across an ocean. Indeed, one imagines that Bocanegra—as an early modern priest and theologian—took a quite active interest in such matters, however global, or imperial, they might be.There is more at stake in the examples we have chosen than merely setting the record straight. Andahuaylillas points to the particular directions the field has taken that have now made Kubler’s views in the 1960s look so wrongheaded. The “Colonial Extinction” essay centers on the notion that what was useful to colonial aims was retained and repurposed. In this, Kubler points to a potential trap in the interpretation of colonial visual culture: without fully interrogating the ecclesiastical and liturgical contexts in which colonial actors maneuvered, we risk finding Indigenous resistance where there was in fact symbolic co-optation and coercion. Likewise, in the drive to recover and emphasize signs of local agency, we can overlook important aims of the colonial project—in this case, inscribing the residents of a highland reducción into a global Church keen to emphasize the primacy of its own leader and the universality of his claims. To not hold that balance is to dull rather than sharpen our understanding of the shifting colonial contexts in which period actors (Indigenous and not) were forced to try to leave their mark.The authors wish to thank Emily Floyd, Dana Leibsohn, Lisa Regan, and—of course, most of all—Barbara Mundy for their generous reading of this piece, which was greatly improved by their insights

Art · Art history · Citation · George (robot · Icon · Latin Americans · Library science · Computer Science · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy