Carolyn Dean ranks among the most prolific and important scholars of Inca art over the past generation. In Inside Abstraction: Interpreting Inka Visual Culture, Dean offers a new study of Inca objects in a wide range of media, among them monumental stone carvings, weavings, painted ceramics, woodworks, and objects of animal skin and woven fiber. Dean offers detailed readings of Inca artworks, set against categories of thought and discernment drawn from the deep archive of Andean ethnographic record. One of the great virtues of this study is Dean’s revision of insights she published in previous scholarly contributions: the reader is given the opportunity to reconsider those interpretations, now operationalized in a broad discussion of Andean aesthetic ambition with a sharp focus on individual artworks. Dean presents these works as technically sophisticated, beautiful, and deeply thoughtful. Her discussion clarifies the criteria governing Indigenous Andean understandings of artifice and creation. Drawing—as she has in previous works—on Indigenous categories of objects, ritual practices, and social organization, Dean builds a study informed by a rich lexicon of Andean aesthetics. Ultimately, she implicitly decolonizes the interpretation of Inca art by weighing Indigenous motives against the Eurocentric assumptions of previous art historical discourse.

Today’s art student inhabits an online information economy driven by hidden algorithms and frictionless deliverables. In such a landscape, Dean’s insistence on the process of information-exchange in Andean art—rather than static codes of representation—is particularly welcome and vital. Dean seeks to recover the meaningfulness of aesthetic practice and cultural experience along with iconographic symbolic codes: “in our desire to fix meaning, we misconstrue how motifs and patterns function in the Andes. … viewers would have been prompted to think through pattern guided by the contexts of viewing” (50–51). Dean’s discussion is centered on a sustained critique of Ernst Gombrich, the refugee Viennese art historian. She argues that Gombrich’s “casual dismissal of the art of so-called primitives” traps his theory of representation within a “web of iconocentrism” (10). While Dean is right to challenge his views on nonrepresentational aesthetics, her critique risks flattening Gombrich’s intellectual depth—a complexity that was particularly evident in his 1979 study The Sense of Order. That ruminative, deeply read study prompted the New York Review of Books to declare The Sense of Order “hard to summarize” (28 June, 1979); Dean admits Gombrich’s suppleness of mind in a footnote (188 n. 13). Even so Dean rightly situates Gombrich within a broader current in the Western critical tradition of “unsuccessful attempts to categorize Inka ‘abstraction’ according to Euro-Western taxonomies” (2).

In contrast to Gombrich’s assertion that “all art is ‘image-making’ and all image-making is rooted in the creation of substitutes” (11), Dean employs Andean Quechua terminology to “name the problem” of aniconic Inca visual work—art that functions outside the realm of representation. Dean’s discussion is especially fruitful in her discussion of visual patterns commonly employed in Inka works. Those “thoughtful patterns” preoccupy Chapter 2 of her study: zig-zags (q’inqu), pairs (yanantin), quadripartition (tawantinsuyu), and other formal relations in Inca patternwork. In full agreement with the art historian Esther Pasztory’s Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art (2005), Dean argues that “Inka geometric configurations were not perceived primarily in terms of ‘beauty’ but rather as things with which to think” (79). The Inca state, Dean argues, “encouraged viewers of its imperial visual culture across various media to locate themselves as beneficiaries of it …. Imperial subjects, thinking within decorous rocks, garments, or vessels, understood themselves as essential constituent parts within a design that produced civilization itself” (128).

Dean cites a poem sung by Quechua-speaking roadbuilders in Ayacucho in 1975 (collected by Rodrigo Montoya Rojas and his collaborators):

Casting back to the Incas’ great construction projects five hundred years earlier, Dean notes, “The carver, following the rock’s guidance, produced forms and patterns that the Inka themselves interpreted through analogical reference and intersubjectivity” (128). Dean’s remarkable study brings fresh awareness to those patterned modes of Andean thought and experience.