Picturing Race Inside and Outside the Grid

This article is a part of a series of responses to Episode 2.5 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.

I first encountered casta paintings while preparing to teach my Literature of the Americas course at the University of Pittsburgh. As a scholar of Early Modern Literature, I wanted to structure the course in such a way that we could pair pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial texts from Mexico with contemporary texts of the Latinx Diasporas. As I researched texts and experimented with thematic juxtapositions, I found J. Michael Martinez’s Museum of the Americas, his National Poetry Series winning collection of poems that explore Mexican American identities and histories through family, image, race, language, and traditions. I found the poems’ subjects and the density of imagery—both within the poems’ language and through the inclusion of photographs—difficult, seductive, poignant, and full-throated. I have to admit, though, that I was drawn into these poems by the cover image. It features Martinez’s name with the book’s title overlayed on it. A painting fills the cover, showcasing elaborately dressed and staged family units encased in square frames. The upper third represents civic life and ceremony and the lower third displays the abundance of natural goods growing in Mexico spilling out of the frame. Anchoring this tripartite representation of life in the Spanish colony is the Virgin of Guadalupe superimposed on the images from above. From the book’s back cover I learned the title of the image: Virgin of Guadalupe and Castas, 1750, which is housed in the Museo de America in Madrid. I’d found another point of reference for understanding the collection’s title, but casta remained a word whose meaning I could guess while still unaware of this genre of painting. As I often tell my students, the point of learning is often to ask better questions.

Las Casta, anonymous, (1700s)

I began asking questions with Martinez’s poem “Casta Paintings, An Erotics of Negation,” which included a note citing a scholarly work on casta paintings by Ilona Katzew. I followed this trail and read Katzew’s Casta Paintings: Images of Race in Eighteenth Century Mexico. Among the many granular and all-encompassing claims I gathered from Martinez and Katzew, two shared ideas emerged that Professor Christopher Nygren’s podcast also makes plain: race is a constructed category that nonetheless produces material effects on bodies. As Martinez writes in “Casta Paintings:” “Language & oil combine to boundary / the body into ‘race.’ Ideologically or conceptually activated upon the / represented body through oddly poetic proper noun, ‘race,’ at times, / manifests not as nouns, but verbs ostensibly held in stasis:”

Casta paintings offer visual spectacle as an entirely arbitrary visual system to construct race in a colonial setting to enforce class and racial hierarchies, push market demands for new world goods, and establish a narrative of sexual voyeurism elided in the smooth surface of the painting. To quote Martinez again: “The cast: kinky historiographical exhibitionism. Sextastic.” Martinez’s collection uses poetry’s forms and proclivities to bring visual spectacle and language closer together—as a casta’s captions do—and to shift our expectations of grammatical form.

Martinez uses poetics to question the blunt force of the casta—their spectacular obviousness, blatant bodiliness, and materiality; the unironic invocation of “types” that couldn’t possibly move in a linear fashion or be known by naming. Lobo? Return-backwards-through-the air? Here there are racial offenses alongside poetic points outside the frame toward the exigencies and contingencies of desire and categorization. Confronted with the one-to-one correspondence of “language & oil,” we may find it difficult to say more about the racialized and historical uses of the casta. The collapse upon materiality literally appears to be so final.

This collapse and the subsequent understanding of how skin color and hierarchies ordered toward whiteness influence modern conceptions of mestizaje as well as racialized and racist spectacle derives from an art and rhetorical device inherent to casta paintings: the grid structure. It is with the grid that I think casta paintings and this podcast episode offer another genealogical intervention.

Viewing and contextualizing casta paintings also offers a genealogy for the grid system in art and in doing so brings visual spectacle and narrative closer together around the boundaries of racialized bodies. Nearly all casta paintings are arranged in a grid layout. As Katzew indicates in her book and in this episode, there are arbitrary schemes—some are 4x4, 4x3, or 4x2. The varying and illogical total number of squares within the grid points to the arbitrary nature of these racial classifications and their performance of linear progression. Yet while the total number of squares and family units depicted vary, the form in which they are presented rarely does. The grid remains. The Enlightenment project of classifying and charting is surely present here, but I was provoked in a “medium is the message” direction with this episode, with the grid as the medium posing as a noun while actually performing the verb’s role.

Agnes Martin, Little Sister (1962)

I’m fascinated by the grid’s role in casta paintings in part because grid systems are so closely identified with twentieth century art as to be the hallmark of the modern art movement. Much of this association comes from what is still a foundational article on the topic. In her 1979 essay, simply titled “Grids,” for October magazine, Rosalind Krauss pulls no punches identifying grids as the definition of modernity in art. She looks to Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, the de Stijl movement, Jasper Johns, Josef Albers, and Agnes Martin as the prophets of the grid and sees no prior precedent for the grid in visual art. She makes a sustained connection between twentieth century grids and nineteenth century windows, and she concedes that the superimposed perspectival lines of Paolo Uccello, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albrecht Dürer in the fifteenth century offer much earlier evidence for the superimposition of the grid. (I will also add that sixteenth century educational “tables” that displayed rhetorical techniques for students were also close to the grid system in the service of language.) However, Krauss is quick to note that perspective is not a grid. Perspective is mimetic and attempts to draw a relationship between reality and representation. A grid, according to Krauss, is antimimetic, antinarrative, and antinatural. In its flattened surface, a grid operates “insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves.” She continues bluntly: “Considered in this way, the bottom line of the grid is a naked and determined materialism.”

What is a casta painting but a grid expressing the bottom line of capital, that “naked and determined materialism” masquerading as families, natural goods, arts and culture, and a well-ordered civic life? Reconsidering the grid layout of casta paintings not only complicates the by-now, well-worn narrative associating the grid with modern art but allows the grid to do things—making it the verb—with race and imagined realities that Krauss claims the twentieth century grid can’t do.

Bringing casta grids into the art historical conversation concerning the grid form also shows that the grid, anti-representational though it may be, does shape reality. It reverses the reality/representation direction of knowledge present in perspective. Casta painting grids use visual art in a descriptive fashion to convince that skin color determines race and that race can thereby be considered a natural, rather than constructed, category of identity. Grids, as a visual heuristic that encourages sequential reading, have a stake in the perception and meaning of color. How? As seventeenth century scientists knew, optics involves both physical properties and perception. Nineteenth and twentieth century color theorists, philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, and contemporary neuroscientists agree: there is an unbridgeable divide between the physical properties of light as color and our experience of that color. Color is always the function of interaction and juxtaposition. Color produces an afterimage. Color is the backside of the casta painting grid.

The casta grid is an attempt to fuse this unbridgeable gap between physical color properties and the subjective experience of color. Casta painting grids intervene in genealogies of race and art history—the grid produces mestizaje through afterimage, color interaction, and the instability of our color perception. This does not render melanin as an index of identity. Instead, the mythic contradiction that the casta grid seeks to resolve is, to quote Martinez’s final poetic line, a “purer erasure.” 

Elise L. Ryan is Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches and writes on the word-image dynamic, the relationships between design and literature, and Renaissance literature.