Plant Hierarchisation in Colonial Still Lifes: Decoding and Subverting Casta Paintings
2023
The history of the hierarchisation of plant life is multifaceted. From processes of cultural exchange, to the enormous pressure of market agents, to the extinction of a number of species. Plant Hierarchisation in Colonial Still Lifes: Decoding and Subverting Casta Paintings is a research project about the influence of historical representation and market value in the classification and stratification of plant lives in Latin America. This project is a continuation of A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in the Eastern Plains (Golden Nica 2023), which addresses the loss of diversity from extensive monocultures of GM soy in Latin America. In Plant Hierarchisation in Colonial Still Lifes: Decoding and Subverting Casta Paintings, I investigate clues from historical moments in colonial art, such as casta paintings from Mexico, Peru and Colombia, that I consider fundamental to the idea of the hierarchisation of Latin American plant lives and the subsequent consequences in today's local and international markets.
Before referring to this particular set of paintings, I would like to address the problems that have surrounded this issue going back to the first botanical expeditions carried out since the 16th century. There was a profound influence by the French Illustration on the Spanish Crown, implying that more knowledge collected on the vast number of organisms and curiosities of the new world would welcome more wealth and sustainability for the empire. However, particular emphasis must be given to the standardisation of the Linneo System, which precedes casta paintings, and which became a standard in the extraction, representation and categorisation of plants at that time, setting forth the standard used by all botanists and which continues to this day. Some of the most contentious issues have to do with the fact that taxonomy, and the naming of plants was done in part to satisfy the needs of the king and to enter, for exotic and aesthetic purposes, many of the flowers endemic to the Americas into flower catalogues. Furthermore, Spanish explorers encountered many communities with a sophisticated knowledge of plants. Among Native Americans for example, plants were generally classified according to their cyclical or medicinal utility, or by their religious or spiritual significance. But from the point of view of the explorers, these forms of classification obeyed local practices that were foreign to Europeans and were therefore translated into familiar terms and classifications. They used a classification system that isolated and extracted flowers from their environment, ignoring the symbiosis and dependency of these species on their surroundings. This European taxonomy therefore resulted in a simplistic and incomplete understanding of South American botany.
Casta paintings are one of the most interesting and unknown genres of 19th century Latin American art. Although there are discrepancies among historians as to their origin, in general, they are colonial representations of the different castes under which social stratifications were understood after the conquest. Such a classification assumes a purity of blood of the European castes, which was damaged depending on marital - or kinship - associations with Indians, slaves or, to a lesser extent, with Creoles and Mulattos (terms used to refer to the child of an alliance of Spaniards with Indians and Spaniards with slaves, respectively).
1.José Joaquín Magón, Spaniard + India = Mestizo. I. "Born of the Spaniard and India is a Mestizo, who is generally humble, tranquil, and straightforward." Museo de Antropología, Madrid. 115 x 141 cm
2.Unknown artist, De negra y Español sale mulato (From Black + Spanish comes mulatto), ca. 1770, oil on canvas 72 x 90 cm. Private Collection.
In parallel to the depictions of racial combinations, the paintings showed elements corresponding to the social level occupied by these alliances in the territories of the conquest. Such elements are inherited from the symbolism of 16th and 17th century European still lifes, where the depiction of certain objects and foodstuffs reflects the status of the sitter - or of the person who commissioned the painting. In addition to this, the enormous influence of the European Enlightenment on the Spanish empire gave rise to an interest in the organisation of knowledge and scientific descriptions, that led to a particular focus in the classification of plant life and foodstuffs as indices of the social position of the caste with which they were associated.
In the New World, establishing racial taxonomies clearly functioned as a means of preserving the precarious hold that white Spaniards exerted over an increasing abundance of mixed race peoples. Did this mania for classification and hierarchy extend to the foods associated with the racial types? The answer is clearly yes. On the one hand, the casta painters were asked to represent racial relationships and structures of power among the different social classes along colonialist lines, but on the other, by focusing upon local scenes and foods, they recorded fundamental differences between themselves and the imperial power that governed their lands.
Despite the number of cases within the genre, the most interesting series for me are the paintings commissioned by Viceroy Amat y Junyent (1707-1782). In many letters describing the paintings, he makes explicit comparisons between the productivity of the earth and the productivity of the human races, which he believes both point to a development of ‘nature's plan’. The desire to equate human reproduction with the exuberance of nature is fully illustrated in an incomplete set of Mexican casta paintings from around 1660 in “De Mulato and Albúmina, grifo”. The elaborate ornamentation framing the figures is decorated with gigantic local fruit, including avocado, chirimoya and mamey.
Unknown artist, De mulato y albina, grifo (From Mulatto and Albino, Grifo), ca. 1770, oil on canvas 63 x 83 cm. Private Collection.
Colonial difference pretended to present summarization and categorization of differences as a category of nature. Casta paintings not only became part of the project of global categorisation fostered by eighteenth-century naturalists, but were themselves microcosms that organised the rebound of nature and assigned a specific place to each element. The works become synonymous with the natural world of America and the divine order they purport to represent.
The influence of the ideals of the European Enlightenment was loaded with the same ideological weight that sustained all the processes of colony and conquest. The history of representation is proof of the symbolic weight that the processes of conquest exerted on the indigenous cultures of South America. In addition to being ethnographic instruments, the classifications were also used as tools of education, to impose ways of life, traditions, technologies and even ideas about how to occupy, from the perspective of the symbolic, a place within a social stratification.
“He and his method evolved from a craving of his species to possess a sense of the order of life, to occupy a commanding position in a pattern of existence that they alone understood, and therefore they alone, in the long run, would control.”
W.S. Merwin, writing of Linnaeus and other botanists, of the period.
There are many examples of the whimsical categorisations of fruits, vegetables and objects from the new world. The pineapple was discovered by Columbus on his second voyage, it had been praised for its succulence and sweetness by many chroniclers, but as it is a bromeliad and must propagate vegetatively instead of from seeds, the entire plant had to be taken to Europe in order to cultivate it. This was extremely difficult, given the long voyages and the propensity of the fruit to rot. As the pineapple was so delicious, but also so difficult to grow across the Atlantic, in Europe it came to represent all that was rare, exotic, and costly. And herein lies an important point: in Mexico the fruit was common—it appears in a number of casta market scenes piled on tables with many other fruits—but the painter Cabrera elevated it to elite status to please a European viewpoint. Just as the casta painters stereotyped social relationships to please their clients, in this case we have a similar manipulation of the status of the pineapple in Mexican society. A different case happened with pulque, which from the first representations in the paintings was assimilated as belonging to the poor classes, which had no place in any celebration or everyday life of the privileged.
Plant Hierarchisation in Colonial Still Lifes: Decoding and Subverting Casta Paintings will use Stable Diffusion AI, a novel technology that generates new images based on datasets. These libraries of datasets, which many consider to be ethnocentric and sometimes unjustified in their classifications, very closely reflect the classification systems of the 17th century. For this project I will use datasets created from casta paintings, and combine these with datasets of plants widely considered weeds, but which are actually food staples in contemporary Latin America, for example Cyperus Esculentus, Avena Fatua L. Echinochloa colona and Imperata Cylindrica. I will then create symbolic representations from these data sets in the form of oil paintings, subverting the stratification of these plant lives. Starting from the type and form of the still lifes represented in the casta paintings, I will subvert the use of the elements that denote value and wealth and instead bring to light these wrongly named weeds, endemic South American plants that, far from being minor characters, represent the axes of the agro-alimentary systems of indigenous and farmer communities historically. If the value and classification of many of the endemic South American plant lives are not determined by their nutritional value but by the weight of the market and the history of their cultural importance, then the task of searching for and unveiling the origins of this perversion is urgently needed to dismantle the weight of the history of art and representation of this phenomenon. The resulting artworks of this project, when completed, will be inserted into the art market, as it artificially increases the price and valuation of weeds, questioning the paradox of the market and the systems of representation.
