Reproductive Horror: Sixteenth-Century Mexican Pictures in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Todd P. Olson
Imagine photographs on a black cardboard support (Figs 1–14): human sacrifice depicted in post-Conquest Mexican codices; feather mosaic of St Gregory's mass after German print; early modern engravings Spanish colonial atrocities; seventeenth-century English woodblock reproduction Monteczuma his palace; an Assyrian relief; and Carolingian illumination. The layout is familiar. Violent disaggregation was effect Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas the 1920s as much it strategy European avant-garde journals 1930s. And so identifying modernity through return to extinct pre-modern image world. Warburg Georges Bataille are strange bedfellows who dream primitives. Take folio from Vaticanus 3738, mid- late-sixteenth-century compendium copies pre-Conquest Aztec pictures depictions pre-Hispanic social religious practices. Mestizo culture recovered graphic practices across one foundational divides between modern, Conquest Mexico. We infer material processes white photograph ink paint paper (Fig. 1).1 loaded brush traces path expelled blood. iteration viscous projectiles represents violent impact chest sudden manual extraction beating heart. Each swollen brushstroke suggests physical properties propelled liquid. Round patches pigment register initial application tapering point, release pressure quick flick brush. Below, suspended field, three dispensed corpses with gaping cavities stained by same wash bundle erratically applied overlapping strokes. dense absorbed rag contrasts carefully outlined in-painted figures, which consonant indigenous glyphs made Nahua (Aztecs) that persisted documents. Sequence duration registered figurative iteration: mechanical assailants, serial victims, spurts
Oxford Art Journal