Buddah in the Andes

GABRIELA SIRACUSANO

Nueva York

Encuentro; The Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting; 2014

Renaissance Society of America

In the last years The Carabuco series has been mostly addressed by art history writings when analyzing the place images have had in the evangelization and conversion processes within the highlands of the actual Bolivia in the Viceroyalty of Peru. All these items have certainly focused the discussion on a historical and anthropological perspective, by which local circumstances were the key for deconstructing some former interpretations of these and other iconographies as, for instance, ?medieval symptoms? in America without much more complexity about how this really matched local purposes and about which artistic practices were involved in their creation. To center the discussion on the statement that this eschatological millenarist medieval iconographic set was a special Spanish American feature, so distant from the European artistic baroque scene, had some risks. On the one hand, it somehow reinforced the conception of these images as archaic and anachronic reappearings of a time when the category of ?art? could be understood under a different status (and therefore neutralized any possible aesthetic judgment on them). On the other hand, it avoided the possibility of thinking these iconographic programs in a more global sense, by which these Andean cases were only one tip of the iceberg in which Europe and Asia could not stand aside.