williamaveryhudson

Analysis fails. She is essential. Brilliant exposition on Teotihuacán and Moche cultures, and generally on our New World heritage.

I hope her publishers will tolerate some extensive quotes (purchase information below) -

Thinking with Things

If early, tribal, and archaic people had not possessed rational minds, the ability to reason, to analyze cause and effect, to be able to distinguish material from mythic, we would not be here. There would have been no tools, no crafts, no plant and animal domestication, and no agricultural revolution. No amount of magic weaves a basket. Despite their myths and trances, most people are remarkably practical….

I doubt that in rationality and adherence to myth or group cultural values, there is much difference between a nineteenth-century Apache and today’s Columbia undergraduates.

Iconoclasm/Aestheticism

Writing creates the existence of immaterial history. It is thinking with signs rather than with things. Thinking with things is thinking, at least partly, with the body….

The Portrait and the Mask: Invention and Translation

My argument is that naturalism is always potentially available for the artist – that is, it does not take generations to master it – but only at certain times has it been chosen as a preferred visual language.

Aesthetics and Pre-Columbian Art

It has often been said in archaic societies, art is the handmaiden of religion. Concomitant with that is the fact that in such societies there is no word for “art.”… although its subjects are often religious, art is, more correctly, the handmaiden of society.

Figure 16.7 “Drawing of beans and bean warriors from a Moche vessel” alone is worth the price.

Read her book Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art.

Teotihuacán pre-columbian art aesthetics

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