This Unit 2 project is informed by Mechanical, Natural and Critical Evolution, the fourth chapter of the book Adhocism by Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, as well as the Codex Borbonicus, an Aztec book comprised of a divinatory calendar, a solar calendar, and illustrations of religious rituals and cultural ceremonies (Ter Minassian, 2014). The theory of adhocism as posited by Jencks and Silver, as well as their analysis of the evolution of objects and the real and hypothetical existence of chimeras, forms the intellectual basis of this work. In turn, the aesthetic and narrative content of the Codex Borbonicus forms the visual backbone of the endeavor.
The goal of this project is to use the theory of adhocism to generate a new configuration of the style and narrative of the Codex Borbonicus. In its first iteration, the outcome of this project is the creation of a new codex that begins to tell the story of Donald Trump, a modern day chimera, a figure of evocative symbolism whose existence both figuratively and literally brings into question what it means to be American, and questions what kind of future the country will have in light of Trump’s legacy and continued power within the Republican party.
In Adhocism Jencks and Silver argue that everything is interrelated or, simply put, “nothing can be created out of nothing” (Jencks and Silver, 2013). Each object is part of a subsystem, which in its inception was an “ad hoc combination of past subsystems” (Jencks and Silver, 2013). Each subsystem goes through a natural evolution and finally stabilizes in a form that is totalistic; it becomes an archetype that is no longer ad hoc but can be dissected and reconfigured to form another, separate subsystem (Jencks and Silver, 2013).
The Codex Borbonicus represents the culmination of the pre-Cortesian style of Aztec art, prior to the devastation of their civilization at the hands of the Spanish (Ter Minassian, 2014). Viewed through the lens of adhocism, it can be viewed as a totalistic form of the illustrative and narrative expression of the Aztecs; the final, stable form of their visual style. In order to find a path towards the evolution and use of this style, it becomes necessary to identify its constituent parts, which can then be reconfigured into a new whole. This process aligns with the core assumptions of adhocism, the idea that “dissectibility is the essence of adhocism and critical evolution.” (Jencks and Silver, 2013).
The visual style of the Codex can be broken down into a series of specific artistic choices: 1) thick, black outlines that contain each figure and symbol; 2) the use of bright colors in both a symbolic and decorative fashion; 3) the representation of figures in flattened perspective and in profile; 4) a deliberate lack of background; 5) a lack of shadows and planes to create a sense of dimensionality; 6) an exaggerated proportion of head to body in human forms; 7) a lack of overlapping figures (Ayala Garcia, 2019).
In terms of narrative style, the Codex relies on notations, glyphs and figures arranged on a flexible grid system. The pictorial language of the Codex is byzantine, relying on an understanding of Aztec symbolism within the context of their belief system and socio-political environment (Bowditch, 1900). The complex lexicon is made up of hundreds of different symbols that are either represented alone or in combination with another symbol, thereby creating a secondary meaning (Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, 2022).
Although an understanding of each symbol and figurative characteristic of the Codex is beyond the scope of this project, the essential character of the narrative style can be distilled as a universe of symbols, recognizable by those informed of the cultural and socio-political context of the story being told (Ayala Garcia, 2019). Furthermore, a specific understanding of the visual style of the Codex creates a framework to situate, evolve and experiment with each element to generate a new way of illustrating that remains grounded in the original archetype.
Following from the topic of style is that of content. Both are closely aligned in that style informs content, it is an integral part of what is communicated and how it is perceived by the audience (Sontag, 1961). The challenge of this project, once the visual language was understood, was to choose appropriate content to illustrate. The first half of the Codex Borbonicus is a tonalamatl, an astrological calendar used by Aztec priests to make predictions about future events (Bowditch, 1900). Each page depicts a deity surrounded by glyphs representing the thirteen-day week that made up their 260-day year (Bowditch, 1900). The second half of the Codex is comprised of a solar calendar, and scenes depicting rituals and ceremonies performed for the nine Lords of the Night, deities central to Aztec mythology (Young, 2000).
Throughout the Codex, gods are depicted wearing headdresses and adorned with animal furs, feathers and other regalia. Many of the gods were correlated with animals, which were used as figurative symbols to highlight a certain aspect of the deities’ character (Young, 2000). The rich imagery and psychology of this concept, essential to the representation of both humans and animals in Aztec codices, forms the basis of the visual character of this project. This concept dovetails with the account of chimeras in adhocism, and the symbolic power of their existence throughout human history. Jencks and Silver argue that modernity, through advances in science and society, has superseded the natural order allowing the very real existence of heretofore impossible hybrids (Jencks and Silver, 2013). Chimeras thus become a lens through which to understand modern phenomenons that were unthinkable in the past.
The choice of Donald Trump as a central character of this project is predicated on two ideas. The first is that he is himself a chimera. On the surface he is a man who represents a set of values and ideologies that are central to a conservative understanding of the American character. However, percolating below this mirage is a dogmatic hybrid of -isms and phobias: racism, ethnocentrism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and misogyny (Alterman, 2019). The schism in how Trump is perceived mirrors the polarity of the United States as a nation. He is at once a pugnacious demagogue and an affable leader, a racist fear monger or a truth teller, a dangerous lunatic or a “very stable genius.” (Diaz, 2018).
The second reason Donald Trump became the focus of this project is that his story has an affinity to the narrative intent of the Aztec codices. The codices were a document of the Aztec way of life, their beliefs, their mythology, their daily rituals (Ayala Garcia, 2019). Following the Spanish Conquest, very few codices remain, and those that do are preserved in museums around the world (Ter Minassian, 2014). The content of the codices is thus suspended in time and space through their context as museum pieces. This project brings the form of storytelling of the Aztec codex to the modern era, using Trump’s chimeric presence as a historical fact and an allegory of American power and politics, in much the same way Aztec artists used the codices to record life as they experienced it, as well using the stories of their gods to understand the world around them and divine future events (Ayala Garcia, 2019).
Using this project to illustrate the duality of Donald Trump as a way of understanding his broader effect on American culture and the future of American politics, is a goal that has crystallized after various iterations attempting to grasp a core focus and line of enquiry. While it is not entirely apparent in its current iteration, this is something that the author endeavors to further explore in the future. The goal of the project, as it stands, would be a retelling of the rise to power of Donald Trump, his years as President and his continued stranglehold on power within the Republican Party.
Given the time, it would be interesting to explore the formal qualities of political cartoons to further push the aesthetic created through a study of the Codex Borbonicus. This would also inform the way in which modern audiences read and respond to symbols, given the necessity of political cartoons to distill large amounts of information into pithy illustrations. Ultimately, the form of the project would be an illustrated, large format book, grounded in an aesthetic that combines Aztec illustration with political cartoons to understand how a homo monstrosus such as Donald Trump ever came to be and what it means to the future of the country.
Bibliography
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Ayala Garcia, P., 2019. A Contemporary View of the Aztec Art Education and its Transformation After the Conquest. MA. Columbia University.
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Diaz, D., 2018. Trump: I’m a ‘very stable genius’. CNN Politics, [online] Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/06/politics/donald-trump-white-house-fitness-very-stable-genius/index.html [Accessed 29 May 2022].
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