Turtle Talk

Edited to Add:  The WSJ is not the only publication in fits about modern Native art on display.  The NYT review of the Brooklyn Museum’s display is equally muddled.  It’d be nice if the art reviews were of the art, rather than criticizing it for not being old:

Also in this section is a blue-and-white carved wood piece called “Horse Head Effigy Stick,” by Butch Thunder Hawk, of the Hunkpapa Lakota. A casual viewer might mistake it for a war club, with a horse-head-shaped business end, used in the 19th century when intertribal warfare was a way of life. It turns out that it was made in 1998, which, if you think about it, raises puzzling — but here unanswered — questions. What is the relationship of this rather slick modern object to the historic artifacts? And what about the buffalo-horn ladle with a glossy cube pattern imitating the 20th-century Dutch illusionist M. C. Escher that Kevin Pourier, a member of the Oglala Lakota, created in 2009?

The display suggests that there is no important difference between the old and the new. But how can that be so? The Plains Indian culture that gave rise to these kinds of objects was practically destroyed by the United States government’s campaign to clear land for settlement by white people over a century ago.

Wouldn’t one relationship between the old and the new be to demonstrate that the culture was not actually destroyed by the United States government, hard as it might have tried?

The Wall Street Journal published an article about museum displays of Native art and artifacts today.  It is accessible here.  The article is odd, with a title (“Shows That Defy Stereotypes”) indicating the article might be positive, but is instead full of sideways insults.  For example, the author writes about the Denver Art Museum’s attempt to include contemporary Native art in its installation, and a display of two different shirts:

One of Denver’s great masterpieces is a 1720s Eastern Sioux deerskin shirt embellished with painted abstract designs, possibly representing birds. The curators invite its comparison to a nearby 2010 fringed “war shirt” commissioned from Bently Spang, the suddenly ubiquitous Northern Cheyenne artist whose designs, which are meant to be seen, not worn, are also on view in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The author does not seem to think the more contemporary shirt is at the same level as the old shirt, nor am I sure why she describes the artist who made it as “suddenly ubiquitous,” but the tone indicates the author doesn’t think he ought to be.

While the author also states that “Close connections with current tribe members have not only beefed up contemporary holdings but greatly enriched curators’ understanding of historic pieces,” she also goes on to write that

Contact with Indian advisers, while enhancing displays, can also sometimes diminish them. Because tribal authorities consulted by Brooklyn Museum curators Nancy Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller strongly objected to public exposure of artifacts imbued with a warrior’s power, you won’t find any historic shields displayed in that museum’s deeply informative, child-friendly temporary exhibition, “Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains” (to May 15). By contrast, one of the stars in the permanent collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. (reviewed here last year), is a rawhide Arikara shield from North Dakota (c. 1850) bearing the image of a buffalo bull.

Because the Museum followed the law, and consulted with tribes, the museum isn’t putting sacred shields on display.  This construction reads as if the author believes those tribes were too sensitive, because there was no such problem with displaying a shield in Kansas City.  The author makes no mention of whether any tribes were consulted in the Kansas City case, or whether it’s a completely different type of shield than the ones objected to at the Brooklyn Museum.

The article continues in this manner (contemporary art is “perfunctorily painted,” displays including the old and new are “exasperating,” the Brooklyn museum had to “settle for a contemporary ‘shield'”),  but there is one last shot at Kevin Gover, director of the NMAI.  The author describes him as a “lawyer with scant background in art or museums,” and speculates Gover’s plan to change displays and information to include themes of dispossession and death after European contact will both move the museum “even further from its origins as a showcase for the trove assembled by Heye” and upset Congress.  The Heye collection was assembled before 1957 and is full, as the author earlier admits, of inaccuracies in identification.  The author does not include any indication she has actually talked to a Member of Congress about this issue, but she does mention it controls 60% of the NMAI budget.

While there is obviously room for art reviews and criticism of any contemporary work of art, this author seems confused by the value of contemporary Native artists, and doesn’t seem convinced changing the traditional model of museums full of artifacts taken from tribes years ago is useful.