I made this piece to mark 1992, the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean.
I had just read Carlos Fuente's Terra Nostra, and was wondering how the world would have been different if Europe had been conquered, and if her cultural treasures had been melted down for currency beginning in 1515, the way the Spaniards destroyed the sacred art of the New World after the conquest of Cortez. I’m always shocked that Europeans don’t or won’t make the connection between their present cultural inheritance and what was destroyed in the New World. |
They’re directly linked: the great artistic and scientific expansion of the 16th century, and the flood of gold that came from the destruction and enslavement of the Aztec and Inca civilizations. What we’ve come to know as the flowering of the Renaissance throughout Europe after 1515 was bought and paid for with the blood of the New World. And the further economic and cultural expansion of Europe in later centuries was funded by the enslavement of Africans, and the exploitation of Asians. How I’d like to see that in a European tourist ad: “Come see what your ancestors bought us!” |
The images in this piece come from works by El Greco, the warp (vertical), and Mantegna, the woof (horizontal), and depict Mary and Jesus.In this picture I thought about iconoclasm, about the destruction of religious images. I thought about how Incan gold and silver ritual objects were melted down to make gold and silver objects for Christian altars. I wondered about taking back from Europeans their own ritual objects, their pinnacles of civilization, their masterpieces, and turning them into new objects, for rituals focused on justice and memory. |
