New Art Examiner
November, 1989
Bridging two worlds
The challenge facing Native American artists
by Claire Wolf Krantz
The contributions of Native Americans to contemporary U.S. culture remain more in the realm of possibility than actuality. Traditional Native American arts will receive a sizable boost if the proposed National Museum of the American Indian, to be located on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is funded by Congress. However, this exciting development would be set against a backdrop of struggle: that of contemporary Indian artists striving to locate their work squarely within a national art scene without losing sight of their origins and viewpoints. Native American artists are still relegated to an outsider status -- the reasons for which are many and complex, as I learned when I recently interviewed some American Indian artists.
1 spoke to artists living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, an influential center for Indian art. Nestled in the valley between the Sangre de Cristo and James mountain ranges, it is surrounded by Indian reservations and Spanish communities dating from the sixteenth century. The city's old world charm and adjacent stark landscape attracts artists as w ell as tourists, resulting in a proliferation of high-priced galleries for Southwestern and Indian art and a thriving annual Indian art market. Finally, the establishment of a studio school for Indian art in the 1920s, eventual1y evolving into the present Institute of American Indian Arts, was the basis for delineating a particular stylistic definition of Indian art which has influenced many Indian artists and patrons. Although the school's policies are now more progressive than those at its beginning, narrow stylistic definitions for Indian art persist in the Indian art market. Those I interviewed are highly respected artists whose art reflects their dual relationships with Anglo and Indian cultures. Ranging in age from their early 30s to late 40s, these artists have achieved considerable success within the Indian art market, and often in the mainstream New York and European market as well.
The issue of self-identification is the major thrust of Native American art. Like other ethnic minorities in the U.S., Indian artists must define themselves within societies of shifting boundaries: between old and new, native and Anglo. Native Americans have a long history of cultural achievement with which to come to terms, even though many of the forms and meanings of this material culture have changed. Hailing from different tribes and widely varying backgrounds in upbringing, education, and goals, they nonetheless share a surprising number of attitudes about creating and presenting their artwork, perspectives which constitute a distinctive mindset about art and aesthetics. Often reared on reservations and educated, at least partly, in Indian schools, their primary identification is with Indian values, social systems, and points of view. Yet their decision to enter fully into contemporary Anglo life and compete for a place within this larger sphere prompts new and different questions about themselves and their art-making. Ultimately, they must define themselves as artists within a national art scene in terms of both embeddedness and difference.
Who may identify themselves as Indian, let alone what constitutes Indian art, are subjects of intense debates among Indians and are important subjects for Indian art. These issues are made cloudy by the fact that any search for an unchanging, essentially "Indian" culture is futile: There never was one. Throughout history wide variations have occurred from tribe to tribe, with cross-tribal cultural exchanges taking place long before contact with whites. Compounding and accelerating these evolutions were deliberate attempts by the United States government to destroy Indians as a cultural group. These efforts were, in many ways, successful: governmental policies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries permanently changed long-established political, social, and ceremonial structures. By setting up the reservation system, they dislocated many tribes from their lands, sometimes combining disparate tribes and even obliterating whole populations. Children were forcibly taken from their parents and educated in special boarding schools, where they were taught to reject their cultural heritage. In addition, continual contact with white anthropologists, bureaucrats, historians, and teachers on the reservations has subtly inculcated white attitudes and fantasies into the Native American self-image.
Despite tribal differences, Native American artists share certain key attitudes concerning art and its societal role. The predominant view is a relative security about art's validity, stemming from art's traditional embeddedness within Native American societies -- that art and aesthetics are never separated from other human activities. While Anglo artistic identity frequently centers on questions that confront art's importance in society, and therefore their own efficacy as artists; Indian artists don't see that as an issue. More often they explore questions regarding how to live the "good life -- which they define as a physical (or material) and spiritual harmony between the individual and his or her tribe.
As a necessary component to cultivating the good life, Native Americans work to activate a spiritual sense -- to periodically evaluate the direction and priorities of their lives. They see a variety of experiences as facilitating this process: participating in tribal ceremonies, creating a work of art, or the active viewing of art, which they regard as a participatory activity. These artists expect visual art to function in a similar way to ceremonial dances in helping people of all cultures to confront issues regarding life's meaning and value.
In this vein, painters Dan Namingha (Hopi), Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo), and potter Rosemary Lonewolf (Santa Clara Pueblo) abstract figures and the landscape into visual documents about the sense of being Indian. Although their lives often seem indistinguishable from non-Indian artists in Santa Fe, they claim that their upbringing on the reservation influences their sense of space, time, and human relationships. Using the bright light and clear pastel colors of his Southwestern setting, Namingha's painted forms refer to elements in his tribe's communal life: kachinas (dolls which symbolize ancestral spirits), fetishes, songs, ceremonies, daily activities or landmarks on the reservation. These elements interact on the canvas in an abstracted space, recognizable as landscape, to produce a glimpse into another world at once exotic and believable. A more personal use of figuration characterizes Whitehorse's pastel, map-like canvases. Tiny, abstracted forms symbolize people, events, or places in her life, and become markings in large expanses of atmosphere. These artists' sense of space and its demarcations document their Indian experience of being: places are regarded as a kind of presence, punctuations in an overarching harmony.
Namingha and Whitehorse intend for their work to be understood on a
non-discursive level, and experiences they've had in showing their work support such a supposition. For their relatives, the specific abstract markings read clearly as reference, rather than textual material, to their personal lives. Artistically unschooled Indian friends and relatives can understand their images on visual and kinesthetic levels -- communication different from the primarily linguistic framework for thought, largely shaped by Western metaphysics, which dominates Anglo art discourse. For Westerners, press releases, artists' statements, critical discussion, and catalogue essays are seen as necessary explanatory accompaniments to the visual material which Indians are more inclined to read directly.
Rosemary Lonewolf's use of narrative in the decoration of her pots joins a profound spirituality developed through her process of working with the clay. By per-forming her tribe's traditional rituals and prayers, she simultaneously pays homage to the material and to the act of creation. Relating this process to contemporary themes of living and creating meaning in today's world, she focuses on ideas related to change, exploring the relationship of tradition to innovation and that of the individual to the group.
Lonewolf makes change concrete by rearranging and altering traditional connections between size and shape of pot, function, and decoration. She may use a traditional shape-such as that of a seed basket-and shrink it to the size of a postage stamp to refer to its new function as an art object. Other shapes may be altered or enlarged to serve as the basis of a narrative: her -story pots." Using colored slips, she incises on the surfaces precise drawings of animals, plants, landscape references, and figurative scenes interspersed with geometric de- signs. Some of her animal drawings, such as butterflies and deer, refer to tribal rituals, others, such as cats, refer to events . in her personal life. Narratives on her larger -story pots" may reflect symbolic or ritualistic experiences or everyday ones, such as the birth of a chili or a rafting trip down the Rio Grande. Namingha's and Whitehorse's pursuits of a direct pictorial representation of their experiences as Indians -- including ceremonies, events of everyday life, and a close relationship to the land -- provide a useful alternative to the individualistic relationship to the collective pervasive among whites.
Other Western attitudes foreign to Indian society center around dualism. Indians tend to see the world in terms of a synthesis of multiple facets, in balance within a whole, rather then comprising conflicting and contradictory elements. This viewpoint encourages general attitudes of cooperation and incorporation, rather than exclusion, leading to interesting ramifications for so-called political or socially aware art. The Anglo (particularly the male) artist's dialectic and adversarial attitude causes him to place himself in an alien relationship to his society. In order to develop his position as an artist, he stands outside the group when evaluating or criticizing it. Indian artists deal with themes of alienation versus connectedness from a collective point of view: When criticizing his own community, the Indian generally includes himself in the criticism. Social or politically oriented art tends to express the whole community's differences from white society, while maintaining the individual's sense of connectedness to his or her roots. Personal visions and solutions to life's problems are expected to be communicable and relevant to others because of this relationship of individual to community. In this light my informants' desire to use their art for self-definition can be seen in part as benefiting the whole community's self- understanding, as well as communicating such knowledge to Anglo society in order to be better understood and accepted.
Because of the complex relationship of Indian artists to the group, much of their strongest work takes the form of social satire. Wit and irony are a strong element of Indian social interaction and are seen as contributing to their survival in a hostile world. Three of the men -- Bob Haozous, David Bradley, and Barry Coffin -- use humor, irony, narrative, and figuration to provide a biting commentary on Indian stereotypes, the Santa Fe social scene, and the art world in general. Neither Bradley nor Haozous learned to make what they call their "anti-social" art in art school. They were making such work as children to help them cope with prejudice and other difficult facts of Indian life. Haozous explained that making art is also a way for the Indian male to regain his manhood in a hostile Anglo society which long ago deprived him of the traditional male roles of hunter- and warrior, and simultaneously has prevented him from acquiring many of the skills necessary to compete in Anglo culture.
Haozous, a sculptor now working mainly in steel, exposes some of the myths which were invented by whites to divide and debase Indians, and points out that these very myths are now also subtly incorporated into the Indian self-image. The "Noble Savage" myth, for example, refers to values such as honesty, 'healthy" attitudes toward work and play, and nourishing human relationships -- values which Anglos have lumped together under the rubric "primitive" or "natural" (as opposed to cultural), thereby ascribing a narrow view and a lesser status to largely positive traits. As is true of many other Native Americans, Haozous feels a natural ambivalence about attitudes to which he largely ascribes, but which carry questionable connotations in the larger society. In order to express his own moral stance, which has been shaped by the myths, Haozous has fashioned a complex vocabulary of figures and landscape elements which operate in a kind of flattened planar, pictorial space -- much like that of a comic strip. Playboy images of female nudes intermingle with stylized earth forms, symbols of technology, such as airplanes, and animals associated with Indian fetishes and ceremonies to comment on and poke fun at contemporary Indian and white attitudes and behavior.
Barry Coffin's figurative ceramic and bronze sculptures also refer in some way to the Noble Savage myth. Dressed in traditional Indian garb or other costumes of a stereotypical Old West, his figures simultaneously reaffirm and poke fun at this contemporary myth and his own investment in it. David Bradley's paintings refer to specific individuals in the Santa Fe scene and their interaction in the art world at large. He groups figures in contemporary spaces oddly reminiscent of Mexican mural painter Diego Rivera's work, in which the environment and placement of the figures are as important to the narrative as the stock personalities and their costumes.
A second myth, which Haozous has aptly named "The Great Environmentalist," refers to the stereotype of the Indian being an embodiment of raw nature. The myth transforms the Indian's culturally formed respect for the land into a "natural" tie to nature and thus subtly emasculates a genuine, thoughtfully conceived concern for environmental issues. Haozous explores this theme repeatedly. For example, his juxtaposition of voluptuous female bodies, sometimes taking on the form of landscape elements, with such man-made technologies as airplanes, mocks the Western "woman-as-nature" equation while pointing to modern man's disregard for the environment.
Sculptor Doug Coffin's abstract, Modernist totems synthesize environmental and technological symbols through the use of materials and stylistic devices. His often large-scale sculptures combine a Modernist interest in the exploration and meaning of materials with a particularly Indian viewpoint. He combines organic materials such as painted wood, skulls, and bones to create totems and other forms that refer to his Indian tribal past and its relationship to nature and to history. Often he combines the organic with the technological to refer to Indian and Anglo attitudes toward the human being in an industrialized society. Here, steel becomes an important material for him, used in high-tech, minimal shapes.
Indian concerns about their identity also impact upon the marketplace, where the imprimatur of authentic Indian art carries a high price tag. Nowhere is this more evident than in Santa Fe's bustling art and Indian communities, where various cultural and religious events, as well as the annual Indian art market, continually demand a definable Indian identity. But this identity is often mistakenly identified by criteria developed by whites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for evaluating traditional Indian art. Many of the elements of these stereotypes -- banal pastel colors, decorative flattened planes, and pleasing linear designs -- were developed by white patrons from a partial reading of some item of Indian material culture, such as pictographs and sand paintings. As traced by JJ Brodie in his book, Indian Painters and White Patrons, these well-meaning missionaries, educators, and collectors in positions of power marketed this style. To take Brodie's ideas one step further: In their zeal to create an arena for Indian merchandising which would not compete with white endeavors, they encouraged this particular amalgamation of stylistic elements to the exclusion of all else. A recognizable style was thereby created and simultaneously authenticated as traditional Indian art -- the widespread recognition of which hampers the creative development of some Indians.
Complications arise in aesthetic evaluations as well. The fact that Indians don't separate and valorize aesthetic issues does not imply that aesthetic criteria are nonexistent: in fact, they are embedded in evaluating every aspect of the work's manufacture. This has important implications for contemporary Indian attitudes toward art, attitudes often misunderstood by whites. For one, the shift of much artistic production from use within the tribe to sales outside the tribe is not viewed as the radical change ascribed to it by whites because the concept of use always included trade. Lonewolf, Namingha, and Whitehorse all maintained that there were always members of their tribes who were judged better artists than others and who used their artistry to augment their family's income in some way. Lonewolf describes pots found in her ancestral burial sites which originated from other tribes; they were obtained in trade. More recently, her grandmother's woven blankets were considered so beautiful, and her Aunt Grace's use of design elements on her pots so unusual, that they were easily bartered for goods the family needed for survival. Namingha says that the same carver is valued for his kachinas by his tribe and outside buyers, although they use them differently. Many sacred and personal symbols are not shared with outsiders, of course, but there is a wide degree of overlap.
Indian artists often treat the connection between idea and style differently. Dividing style into the two camps of traditional and modern, they equate choices of style with definitions of themselves as artists, instead of with ideas about art. Thus, If an Indian artist appropriates a Modernistic style, he or she is unlikely to be using it as a Postmodernist reference, but simply as a sign to define him- or herself as a contemporary artist. The resulting art can look derivative and/or naive to cultivated Western consumers, who may be willing to accept appropriation of styles for meta-art messages, but not for the personal purposes that many Indians use them. These problems lead much of Indian work to be relegated to objects of decoration and nostalgia and rarely valued for any ability to contribute to an active voice in American culture.
Another erroneous assumption among whites is that traditional cultures are static. As Lonewolf counters, the creative process as a continual rethinking of traditions is integral to the Indian culture. The difference centers on the definition of originality. Among Native Americans, traditional media, styles, and subjects are used and altered to make them relevant to contemporary life --thereby focusing on creative means of extending tradition. The Anglo artist schooled in Modernism defines originality as the destruction of the old to be replaced by the new, although this belief generally is not mirrored by actual practice. Originality for most Anglo artists is really played out in narrow confines. While media and style are often invented anew, the central subject matter -- the nature of art itself -- largely remains fixed. Thus, the notion that so-called traditional cultures are dormant is an Anglo conceit tied to misperceptions of both cultures.
In the present climate of serious doubts about the arts' efficacy (beyond a commercial one), the Indian ability to use art as a cohesive device for their communities can be enlightening: and the ongoing involvement of the arts in the spiritual lives of those communities presents a refreshing alternative to our largely elitist ideas about culture. The arts are an integral part of the Indian struggle to forge a new life and a new identity, and it is in this struggle that the excitement lies.
Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.