“Super-Artifacts: Displacing Ex-votos from the Traps of Art History”

Ex-votos are small tin plates depicting scenes of suffering individuals praying for one or more saints to intervene during moments of hardship such as accidents, sickness, or disasters. For the past half a century, a series of exhibits in the U.S. and Mexico have effectively placed them as “popular” manifestations of Mexican religious culture, based on art-historical categories that have failed to encompass their potentiality beyond artistic merits. Their position as neither fine art objects nor historic(al) documents arrest them to a fixed place as “curious” and “naive” works of the past. This logic stems from the European Enlightenment and affects our understanding of this body of work. By inserting ex-votos, and other so-called “popular” manifestations of religious painting into a system of material culture, defined by Anthropologist Victor Buchli as “super-objects,” art historians and anthropologists have effectively reinforced colonial hierarchies of artistic production. Ultimately ex-votos as “super-artefacts,” fall below European classifications of art and assert a colonial order that arrests indigenized Mexican communities, their art and artists, as stuck in the past.

In this presentation I will demonstrate how much of the visual culture of “popular” Mexican religion represents the culmination of pictorial technologies introduced in the Americas in the early sixteenth-century. By inserting ex-votos and retablos into a larger history of Spanish colonial painting, and by displacing obsolete artistic categories, one can re-assess the importance of this genre of art, which continues to be practiced to this day.