An archaeology of abstraction: Ollantaytambo

Abstract

This paper examines the deep history of abstraction in the literature of Inca studies. The author wants to hold a lens up to the problem, though not to clarify what pre-contact Inca artworks achieved as cultural discourse in antiquity. Instead, the paper is concerned with examining the ways the interpretative discourse of abstraction emerges from certain conditions and tensions in the West's comprehension of the pre-contact Inca and their visual expression. This essay examines Edward Ranney's Ollantaytambo, a large-format photo in black and white taken in the early 1975; and the work is employed as an optic to address abstraction's deep-historiographic stratigraphy in the literature of the Incas' Western reception.

Keywords:

• Inca art
• Ollantaytambo
• Edward Ranney
• photography
• Baño de la Ñusta

Notes

1. Museum of Modern Art (New York), Projects 12: Martín Chambi and Edward Ranney, 23 March 1979–3 May 1979.

2. ‘El ojo maternal de la ciudad qui mira [al monolíto] cada día, buscará lo que pueda hacer para protegerlo contra las fuerzas destructives de la naturaleza,’ the author cites Ostermann (2002: 18).

3. Penhall likens Chambi's image to earlier images of the stone associated with travel literature, such as in Fuentes (1905: 141) and Wright (1908: 58). Chambi's elision of folkloric staffage in favor of the stonework alone indicates his incorporation of new Modernist aesthetic ideals championed in Perú's intellectual circles at the time. On photographic production and intellectual culture in early twentieth-century Cusco, see Poole (1992; 1997: 168–97).

4. Ranney would exhibit his photographs with those of Martín Chambi at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1979, in the exhibition Projects 12: Martín Chambi and Edward Ranney, 23 March 1979–3 May 1979.