Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsVandana BawejaVandana Baweja is an associate professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She is the current coeditor and incoming editor of Arris: The Journal of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians and a recipient of grants from the Florida Humanities Council and the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative.

This article revisits the eighteenth-century pinturas de castas (caste painting) tradition by juxtaposing it with the artistic production of contemporary Latinx artist Michael Menchaca. Enigmatic and haunting, casta paintings blatantly reveal the workings of colonial miscegenation. The paintings have been interpreted as souvenirs for wealthy European patrons, as “exotica” for eclectic Wunderkammers, and as ethnographic confirmation of mestizaje (racial mixing). Regularly incorporated in art history courses and texts about global early modernisms, casta paintings are invoked as evidence of a deeply troubling colonial past in which racial taxonomies placed a hierarchical premium on “whiteness.” Arguably one of the most important contemporary Latinx artists, Menchaca explicitly summons the canonical type in his suite of sixteen screen prints, La Raza Cósmica 20XX. Bold and graphically appealing, Menchaca’s series visualizes the colonial sistema de castas (caste system) as a world populated by animal hybrids and surveilled by Big Tech. Menchaca’s interpretation of and dialogue with the casta painting tradition calls attention to the endurance of casta thinking in the twenty-first century. By interrogating the multivalent layers of Menchaca’s images alongside their early modern “sources,” it is possible to better understand the mechanisms of a modern process of mestizaje. In this way, contemporary artists like Menchaca animate the art of the past and, as this essay suggests, redirect our art historical gaze toward a more just future.

In 1982 the Polish American artist Jan Sawka executed an extraordinary painting, 15 Strange Things on the Clean Morning Sky. Contradicting the title, the sky depicted is covered with sketches and cryptic writing. This suggests a common hallucinatory experience had by pilots navigating an empty sky, the ganzfeld effect. When vision encounters any undifferentiated field, such as total darkness, it will create something to see, in the form of hallucinations. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has asserted that hallucination is an integral part of visual perception: it is a kind of preseeing, which Jacques Lacan calls the screen. For Lacan, the screen is a “locus of mediation” between actual perceptions and the expectations or models that shape our seeing; it works without any conscious awareness on our part. This is not so with the “15 strange things” of Sawka’s title: small, framed images in a dusky cluster near the top of the painting. Their subjects reflect three modes in which conscious thought is conceived out of the torrent of visual impressions: diagrams, words, and clouds. Sawka plays with the screen in various ways, making it visible in other works of his. His preoccupation with the nature of seeing is not confined to images from the material world but has implications as well for memory, fiction, and painting itself—since a canvas is also a screen.

This article discusses the Australian artist Paula Dawson’s (b. 1954) landmark work of art holography To Absent Friends (1989), a triptych of an empty bar, devoid of life except for streamers and abandoned champagne glasses cluttering the countertops. The largest analog holograms ever made, Dawson’s work pushes the limits of holography in both scale and subject matter. By attending to the experiential aspects of Dawson’s holograms––the interplay of looking, touching, and moving that they elicit––I situate holography within a longer history of art and aesthetic experience than is typically lent to this medium. By extension, I consider the relationship between the optic and haptic senses in both making and viewing holograms, which recall earlier artforms and theories of haptic viewing. I emphasize holography’s similarities to relief sculpture and trompe l’oeil painting and draw on ancient theories of extramission as well as nineteenth-century aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung, or feeling-into) to discuss the haptic sensation and somatic movement activated by these elusive images. I suggest that holographic images draw the beholder into a dynamic, bodily, and intersubjective relationship that happens in neither virtual nor real space-time but somewhere between the two. While viewers are denied physical entry into the virtual space of the holographic image, by feeling into the image and acting on their tactile impulse in real space, they effectively collapse the distinction between what is real and what is virtual. While Dawson’s holograms are not moving images, I suggest they are animated images that move their viewers, both physically and emotionally.