This is the first talk of the six-part series Vital Signs: The Visual Cultures of Maya Writing, presented by Stephen D. Houston of Brown University for the 72nd A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.
What is alive or not, socially interactive or inert, may seem clear. It is not. The ancient Maya created images bursting with social energy and a kind of writing crackling with life. Maya writing is among the few known hieroglyphic systems, a type of script where vitality looms large. In ways both solemn and fun, glyphs touch on wider debates about the nature of matter, representation, and figuration, and how, in past belief, things made by humans possessed a miraculous capacity for action.