Vital Voids: Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture, by Andrew Finegold; and Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots, by Mary Weismantel

Abstract

Rarely do two books arrive in such quick succession that seem so meant to be read together as Andrew Finegold’s Vital Voids: Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture and Mary Weismantel’s Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots. The authors—one an art historian, the other an anthropologist—address apparently unrelated subjects. Finegold centers his study of the “ontology of holes” (VV, 1–6), openings, and enclosures on a painted Maya dish from seventhto eighth-century Guatemala. He situates this core case study more broadly within Mesoamerica, a culture area defined in the twentieth century that encompassed most of what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of El Salvador and Honduras. Weismantel’s book on the roughly coeval Moche “sex pots” is set on the north coast of what is now Peru, with comparative perspectives from other parts of the Americas and beyond, as she theorizes an “archaeology of sex” (PwT, 12) and its many entanglements. Ancient Maya and Moche communities do not seem to have been in direct contact with each other, although they would have been connected—perhaps unknowingly—through indirect relays of materials, cultigens, and ideas that circulated between the Americas north, central, and south.1 And yet, beyond their provocative titles and their shared attention to ceramic vessels as primary subjects for inquiry, these books have much in common. Vital Voids and Playing with Things wind dynamically around shared axes of interdisciplinary method—across art history, anthropology, and archaeology—while never fully converging. The two books oscillate in harmonious ways as they approach, depart from, and then approach again, shared interests and commitments to their objects. Maya art has long been recognized in art history for its sophisticated works, elaborate aesthetics, textual traditions, and complex cosmographies. Despite its similar age, parallel emphasis on anthropomorphic figuration, and what may have been comparable structures of societal stratification and internal political rivalries, Moche art has had a different academic fate: more often a subject of anthropology than art history. Maya artists were often self-reflexive—at times signing their works or depicting courtly scenes of artistry in action. Moche artists did not use text and only very rarely depicted acts of artistic creation. Violence and sacrifice—both depicted and real—were present in both traditions. But it is in Moche scholarship that there remains an “overemphasis” on violence and blood sacrifice that “plays into racist stereotypes about bloodthirsty savages” (PwT, 163–64).2 Vital Voids and Playing with Things both take the reader beyond these respective expectations to query the broader philosophies of Indigenous life and ecology enacted and revealed by these objects. Each is an important contribution to ancient American art history and visual studies, but they are even stronger in tandem as multimodal, empathic, and generatively “slow” object studies that will appeal to a broad audience of readers. These books arrive at a time of relative drought in the field of ancient American (or Pre-Columbian) art history. Since 2016, there have been few single-author books published on art historical topics set long before the sixteenth-century European invasions of the Americas.3 There has been a somewhat steadier flow of titles on very late pre-Hispanic traditions—especially on maps, manuscripts, and other works on paper—as artists continued or transformed those traditions during the early decades of Spanish colonization and evangelization. Rarer have been books on deeper antiquity. My review of the field4 also shows that there has been a dramatic slowdown in the publication of “dissertation books”5 in ancient American art history since a groundswell in 2015–16.6 Analysis of this generational gap and the field-specific factors that contributed to it, as well as the effects of the global financial crisis of 2007–8, not to mention the present crisis of COVID19, exceed the scope of this review essay.7 Causes aside, this trend has created a situation where the books that have been published in recent years are more often than not the second or third books of well-established Reviews