Mesoamerican Art: Mayan, Aztec, Olmec, Toltec etc

[version]

There's a recent Laurent Binet novel that flips the colonisation of the Americas and has the Incas and Aztecs invade Europe.

 

[Murphy]

Shows how long I’ve been out of any actual digging

1200AD is the supposed date of approx contact between Polynesians and South Americans, so we could go further and pick apart

Native Americans and Polynesians Met Around 1200 A.D.

Genetic analysis of their modern descendants shows that people from the Pacific Islands and South America interacted long before Europeans arrived

www.smithsonianmag.com

 

[mixed_biscuits]

they weren’t the status of ‘myth’

that's what I'm saying

 

[Murphy]

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[droid]

There's a recent Laurent Binet novel that flips the colonisation of the Americas and has the Incas and Aztecs invade Europe.

Doesnt live up to its potential, but its alright.

 

[Murphy]

A plurality of civilisations and worldviews creating Mesoamerican art is stating the obvious. Even Egyptian dynasties moved their focus to the Aten from a polytheistic pantheon relocating their entire capital, changed their minds, got subsumed into later Greco/eastern Mediterranean dynastic polities etc. Even had a pre-dynastic pharaoh named Wash

Just because a long term overview might suggest stasis, the reality isn’t necessarily static eg Roman or christian art

Myths are too reductive in and of themselves to filter such a broad realm of artistic expressions too. Think of a vast dating chronology of timeframes needed, geographical scope/spread of cultures in the o.p. . Social organisation and social structures necessitate craft guilds, master craft workers, all the way to ’sweeping up‘, add the influence of religions, power brokers, feudalist competition, failed harvests

We think primarily about temple architecture, of big sites, yet the bulk of this material culture is tied to personal adornments. Grave goods can inform you about shifting designs and the geographical distribution of art styles as much as a civic or religious hub can

Isn’t there a thread on ‘geotrauma’ or a close approximation @version ? Can’t find the correct word search, as people’s first thought re anything Mesoamerican is mass blood letting

 

[Murphy]

And there’s always a t-shirt available to buy too

 

[version]

Isn’t there a thread on ‘geotrauma’ or a close approximation @version ? Can’t find the correct word search, as people’s first thought re anything Mesoamerican is mass blood letting

It's come up a few times, but there's no thread on it.

A Brief History of Geotrauma – Maya B. Kronic

See also accompanying video The Invention of Negarestani. Freud, Ferenczi, Lovecraft, Bodkin, Challenger, Cane, Barker, Land, Parsani. Unilkely characters. Crackpots, every one of them. Frauds, fakes, pseudoscientists at best. Indisciplined thinkers breeding speculative mongrels. Hysteria...

readthis.wtf

 

[Murphy]

Ta duck, the archivist strikes!

 

[Murphy]

You could compare to rock art in the US southwest and even Utah

As northern neighbours some degree of porous co-relationship is present but tbh just googling the images and moving your screen focus in is probably much more fun than going down overtly narrow journal pieces

 

[Murphy]

equally for a ‘good read’ with a few remarkable chapters comparing Olmec works local libraries might have

The Archaeology of Art: Materials, Practices, Affects

How can archaeologists interpret ancient art and images if they do not treat them as symbols or signifiers of identity? Traditional approaches to the archaeology of art have borrowed from the history of art and the anthropology of art by focusing on iconography, meaning, communication and...

www.routledge.com

 

[sus]

Only half-related but has anyone read Paz and/or Sunstone? It's supposed to be circular in the same way Finnegans Wake is, starting where it begins, and modeled after the Aztec sun stone calendar

Read it this morning over a banana/morango smoothie.

Some interesting stuff happening with symbolism. Very small library of images that come back over and over on every page all knotted. Sun/stone/fruit. Caged/bird/song.

 

[sus]

Paz seems like he's very horny. Lots of stuff about how breasts are mountains and there's a river coming out of his lover's loins.

 

[sus]

Lots of kinda halfbaked hippy ideology, about how two lovers can change the world, and how invisible barriers and masks divide men and how if they crumble maybe we'll reclaim some lost original unityy

 

[sus]

Sunstone is a circular poem based on the circular Aztec calendar, and consists of a single cyclical sentence reflecting the synodic period of the planet Venus. The poem has 584 lines in hendecasyllables, corresponding to that 584-day period, and its ongoing thrust is emphasised by having no full stops, only commas, semi-colons and colons. The first six lines of the poem repeat themselves again at the end of the poem in a movement that "doubles back, and comes full circle,/ forever arriving".[3]

 

[sus]

I liked galaxias better.

 

[sus]

He talks too about wind drawing on desert sand and sea drawing on basalt. Natural inscription. Time become trace and texture. Which ties into the stuff in Op, about how spacetime is a merged concept in Mesoamerican cosmology.

 

[sus]

For the Mayan or Zapotec artist, space is fluid; it is time that has become extension, and time is solid: a block, a cube. Moving space and frozen time: two extremes of the cosmic movement.

I think this is why sunstone is such a weird metaphor

Time as moving cycle, Apollo's chariot, and also a block of stone being carved. (By wind, by sea.)

A lot of the metaphors in Paz are like this, they're both fluid and static, spacial and temporal. It's incredibly weird to a Western eye but I'm going back in to reread it and try to get a handle

 

[sus]

OK I think I've figured it out, the spacetime thing is key. It allows the equation SUN = STONE. That's the prototypal knot and all the other knots come undone a similar way.

Every moving temporal process (every Bergsonian flux) is mapped against a spatial form (Lewis-shape) that results from or facilitates said process.

(The process and result coterminous, inseparable.)

So by extension/analogy we could say the central knot is

MOVEMENT = FORM

or

MOVEMENT (THROUGH TIME) = (leads to) SHAPE (IN SPACE), e.g.

 

[sus]

a poplar of water

you rain on my bones, a tree of liquid
sending roots of water into my chest

RIVER (process) = (waters; leads to; creates) TREE (form)

(and by extension)
BLUE = GREEN, e.g.

wave after wave till it covers all,
a reign of green that knows no decline