| August
2007 | RESUME
While
the factor of commercialization continues to vex the reception of
Native American arts as fine arts in America and Canada, the variable
of prestige informs the equation in international contexts. The
Biennale circuit (Venice, SÃo Paulo, Sidney, Johannesburg,
Kassel, Dakar) is all about presence – who can manage to exhibit,
who can manage to attend. As the Native American arts presence
in sites like Venice continues to grow, attendance and therefore
prestige alone does not suffice – an analysis is called for.
No longer can simply showing up ccount for much if a contemporary
Native American presence at international arts contexts is not conceptualized
in light of other frameworks, whether adhering to or rejecting those
standards.
My scholarship looks at the
shift in conversation from one of colonial control and commercialization
to that of indigenous competition over resources and varying internal
methodologies and value systems at play. I am interested in what
happens when the equation is less about powerful elite non-Natives
censoring Native people to one where Native elites can (and do...)
censor non-Natives and even each other. In the broadest sense, I'm
asking what it means when minorities enter the mainstream. Tracking
a model of indigenous arts curation born of the tribal cultural
center movement in the 1970s and tested at the Venice Biennale over
the past ten years, I suggest that indigenous curation, like indigenous
arts, is less about a product and more about a process- less about
content and more about intent.
I believe the exposure of key
conceptual differences in Native American exhibition practices,
particularly aspects of audience and institutionalization, will
lead ultimately to an increased legitimacy of contemporary Native
American art theories, in all their complexities. Until these segmentations,
these unspoken boundaries are communicated; the field will remain
forever caught in the celebratory mode of Indians as showcases of
exoticism alone. Recognition of our internal differences is a necessary
pre-cursor to the movement beyond objectified and colonized victims
to empowered post-colonial subjects.
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