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http://www.cabq.gov/museum/UnlimitedBoundariesOpeningDay-TheAlbuquerqueMuseum-CityofAlbuquerque.html

Power point Presentation

Nancy Marie Mithlo
Essay, Unlimited Boundaries: Dichotomy of Place in Contemporary Native Art

What We Do and Do Not Talk About: The Place of Indigenous Arts Dialogue

When I first began thinking and writing about Native American arts as a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in the mid 1980s, I did what most aspiring art writers do, I conducted interviews. Eager to be fully prepared, I authored a list of questions that I hoped would elicit the most compelling discussions. Foremost in my mind was the tension I perceived between the audiences for contemporary American Indian arts; between the public that wrote about and purchased the work and the artist’s own community, including the pan-Indian arts community in Santa Fe. It struck me that while the Native arts community I inhabited was immensely vital and explosive with ideas, humor, pattern, style and color, the writing on Native American arts was dry, descriptive and uninteresting. I didn’t want to read the glossy magazine articles, the celebratory arts reviews or the promotional materials galleries produced, so I endeavored to produce my own analysis of the contemporary Indian arts world I inhabited, unaware of the internal checks and regulations placed on what both artists and their public are willing to talk about.

The crux of the problem became apparent with a set of questions I had prepared to discern the motivation and audience for contemporary Native American arts. I was working with a male painter known for his bravado in executing poignant realist imagery. When I asked why he chose to paint Native imagery, he answered in the style of the glossy magazines – his work was spiritually meaningful, it came from tradition, he was inspired by the ancestors. I then asked who owned the work, Natives or non-Natives? The answer, somewhat hesitantly, was non-Natives. When I then combined question A and question B to counter, “So you produce spiritually-meaningful art for consumption by non-Natives?” my friend the painter covered my tape player with his hand and asked “What are you going to do with this information?” That was twenty years ago and I have done nothing with this information, until now.

Ethical standards of research, simple politeness and a concern for the integrity of the Native arts community have inhibited me and perhaps countless others from engaging in what I now consider the “trap door” questions that might expose certain non-marketable values to a consuming public. By consumption, I am referring not only to the naive Indian Market buyer, but also to the academics that consume Indian arts in the form of publications, quotes and interviews, as well as the arts administrators, gallery owners, granting institutions, museums, civil and political bodies, cultural centers, tribal governments, tourism divisions, heritage sites, cultural resource management offices, arts journals, newspapers and any other site of institutional dialogue. These systems of reception are actually powerful conductors and regulators of the concepts utilized to discuss, produce and ultimately understand what is important, trivial or useful in contemporary Native American arts.

I am not advocating that these refusals to converse on certain topics be judged as insincere, cowardly or even deceptive. This is not an essay about the need to expose Native artists as complicit in some questionable and covert effort to inhibit a perceived truer reading of Native arts ideology. The denial to engage publicly in conversations about commercialism, genocide, social dysfunction, or any of the many problems that tribal communities are concerned with has meaning and significance; there is an internal logic and order at play. Borrowing a term from scholar Audra Simpson, it would be more productive to see this dynamic as one of refusal.

By refusal I am referring to the acknowledged silences that surround potentially explosive conversations as a means of containment. These theoretically rich and complex concepts – silence, refusal, containment – need not be singularly viewed as purely dysfunctional. Silence does serve pro-active functions, such as protection from exploitation, securing the privacy of individuals who wish to remain anonymous, and prevention of culturally sensitive knowledges from entering public realms. Native communities have employed silences successfully since contact, yet can silence also serve to harm? When are silences liberating and when are silences oppressive?

In the years since 1992, a dramatic shift in public discourse has transpired in which indigenous perspectives are suddenly appearing in the normative passive tales of domination and conquest. In academia, terms such as multivocality, polysemous, and hybridity are now frequently referenced as standard interpretative tools. The opening of the National Museum of the American Indian, as fantastic a feat as it was to accomplish, was taken to task for its negligence to fully disclose the extent of the horrors of genocide in America. A generational shift, post traumatic boarding school indoctrination, is increasingly reflecting a demand for more explicit disclosure, especially in the visual and performing arts. While these developments are enhanced by increased opportunities to self exhibit via the web and global communications, paradoxically the economic support of Native arts in both public and private realms has gradually receded to a low murmur. For even as public culture, politics and the media may tolerate discussions of cultural, physical and emotional trauma, the market will not, and in a capitalistic market economy, this resistance is felt, internalized and replicated. The pain of exile and extermination is more often referenced only in its manifestations of social dysfunction, poverty and health disparities.

The burden of the representation of racism and its effects then falls to whom? Clearly those artists that make the leap from the decorative to the truly disturbing are doing so at some risk, a risk that is much greater than their non-Native colleagues who are allowed much more latitude to create unsettling art as a privilege of post-modern vanities. We should ask ourselves, even with the self-disclosure of pain, what else is silenced? Strategically, what stories are allowed in the rarified confines of the museum walls are what stories are still refused?

A survey of the works presented for “Unlimited Boundaries: Dichotomy of Place in Contemporary Native Art” reveal a centrifugal pull to issues of health, identity, boundaries and the crossing of boundaries – physical, emotional and racial. Many of these messages are subtle to the point of illegibility by Western readers. Whitehorse’s fluid renderings of texture and color, her signature floating marks, refuse the interpretative models so often employed in standard readings of Native arts. Naranjo-Morse’s creative plays on black, white and brown similarly deny easy access to the beautiful. Irregular drips, confusing textures, an attempt even at achieving ugliness are all efforts to bring awareness to non-uniformity, transitions, blends and denials of clarity, at least that clarity which offers only reassurances. This is a language that requires work, that refuses comfort, that demands more time and effort than most Native art audiences are willing to employ.

Why do Deo’s surreal presentations of non-belongings disturb us so? A refusal of prettiness, a claim to un-working the functional, the suggestion of destruction and the unnatural construction of old shoes and tires, materials we use as tools, unnerves, dissettles and yet leaves a lingering sense of wonder. Technical, aesthetic and interpretative questions float uneasily over the work. These are uncomfortable readings, perhaps willful tugs at the collective amnesia that is the American consciousness. Like Deo, Stevens’s work aggressively pokes the hardened exterior of Native art’s complacency, overwhelming the viewer with a complexity and a pain that only folks on the inside of Indian Hospital experience directly. “Sugar Heaven” jolts the consciousness in a visceral way, reminding the viewer of human frailty and loss, while Niro’s “The Essential Sensuality of Ceremony” evokes a sense of flying right through the roof of Indian Hospital on the air of sweetgrass, cool stones, sweet candies and the flutter of wings in the air. Visceral as well, but Niro’s ceremony is the visceralness of dreams, the remembrance of a song heard in the distance or a memory that drifts just outside our consciousness.

These artistic meditations remind the viewer that images are like a language; without translations the distance one must travel extends beyond recognizable endeavors, muting, some might say silencing. The uneasy and thickly layered recordings do not invite the same celebratory descriptives of indigenous art dialogues past. Could the implied silences be only silences of a certain nature? Could it be that the audience is unversed in hearing or could the artist’s refusal be one of deliberate choice? Is the work alienated or self-alienated?

Contemplating Quick-to-See Smith’s 2006 piece “The American Landscape,” this shifting landscape of meaning is brought forward front and center. The classic feathered Native man looks outward and we look with him over his shoulder as unrelated orbs of significance float without reason. Dizzying icons of death, folklore, modernism and fear reference the slippery identity that challenges each of us to take hold of a perspective, any perspective, just for a moment’s stillness. Becoming one of us, looking out with our Native male companion, our Tonto, for just a moment in time, fails to have the same charm or reassurance of a previous era. This lack of certainty may be our salvation or our burden, depending on where you choose to stand and what you choose to hear.