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  • Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600-800: A Poetics of Line
  • Stephen D. Houston
Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600-800: A Poetics of Line. By Adam Herring. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 316. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00 cloth.

Like Adam Herring, the author of this fine first book, the reviewer trained at Yale. More than any other place, this was where an art history of Precolumbian imagery became possible. By sheer chance, the university had hired people such as George Kubler, Floyd Lounsbury, and Michael Coe. There was no grand plan. Kubler secured his position as a specialist in colonial and hispanic productions; Lounsbury was renowned for his impeccable scholarship on kinship and Iroquoian languages, Coe as an early researcher on the New World “neolithic.” Gradually, all shifted emphasis, at least in part, to Precolumbian and, more relevant here, Mesoamerican imagery and writing. They helped define the field, attracting graduate students and, in the case of Herring’s professor, Mary Miller, a worthy, eventual successor to Kubler.

Herring’s book builds on that tradition precisely because it reveals the clashes and antipathies of the Yale “program-that-was-not-a-program.” These boil down to two propositions. One is that the task of Mesoamericanists is to decode meaning and trace it over time (Lounsbury and Coe), the other that our work concerns the aesthetics of form (Kubler). The first asks “What does it mean?” the second “Why does it look the way it does?” The questions are linked but the mentalities behind them quite distinct. It is fair to say the first question attracts far more attention than the second, perhaps because it appeals to our basic need to understand messages from the past. The second, with its pretensions to universalism, labors under a real potential for arid intellectualism. At its worst, it transposes Western ruminations about aesthetics to contexts where such thoughts do not apply. At its best, it permits us to see, as Alfred Gell shows, that images are not merely the incidental vehicles of communication. Their shapes, their existence as hard, perceptible objects, represent undeniable facts, a part of their very “quiddity,” a word at home in the luxuriant style of Herring’s book.

Herring, very much an aesthetician of form, seeks in this volume to do two things in a book that focuses on line but also offers a general account of Maya imagery and building during the courtly period we know as the Late Classic. The more overt goal is to balance the extraction of meaning with a careful observation of shape. His claim is that the contours of calligraphic line, and the implied gestural slash and swoop behind it, saturated the design of Maya imagery and built space: it was its “unitary” feature. The line was, in his phrasing, “little more than a painted curve, a hook of pigment,” the artist’s “facture” (p. 2). His second goal is more subtle, a comprehensive rejoinder to the reductive semanticism of Maya studies. He attempts to revivify the example of Kubler and carve out a new place for our materials in the world of art history. For Herring, it is the “poetics” of “visual form” that need [End Page 301] greater attention. Herring does this with chapters that hover around particular, focal objects, along with other pertinent things: a panel from the area of Cancuen, a set of vessels from the central Petén, the sight-lines of the city of Piedras Negras (all in present-day Guatemala), all to show that the “calligraphic formalism of the lowland Maya cities . . . was not simply . . . [a] by-product of the artistic process; rather it operated as an organizing schema of vision and cognition, a medium and means of cultural knowledge” (p. 239).

Herring’s novice effort is impressive. It is a “masterwork” in the original sense of a production showing mastery of skill and, in this case, sources. At times, his spotlight on formalism expresses itself in a recherché, overwritten text. The reader stumbles over “an artifice, a cultural trompe l’oeil, and a graphic allegory . . . of quickening social energies” (p. 6...

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