Pop Go the Indians

Holy Trinity by Derek No-Sun Brown

I recently attended the annual American Indian Arts Marketplace at the Autry National Center.  For this event, a giant tent is erected and filled with dozens of American Indian artists. They display works that include jewelry, baskets, clothing, painting, and sculpture.

It is always a great event, and I saw one trend that I especially enjoyed: an increase in popular culture imagery in the work by American Indian artists. You know, Star Wars vehicles running alongside horses. Sitting Bull in a Versace scarf. Pixelated portraits of Navajo people.

Three years ago, when I attended my first Arts Marketplace, I saw just one booth that featured this blend of "traditional" arts with popular culture. This year I saw four. I know that is not a lot, but it is sign of a trend that is evident elsewhere.

War Songs Circa 1986 by Derek No-Sun Brown

For instance, Derek No-Sun Brown was at the Autry show for the first time. In fact, it was the first show ever for the recent graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. I really liked his big canvasses that featured American Indian men in war bonnets and on horseback, in the midst of the Great Plains -- with one man holding a large, silver boombox on his shoulder. [Update: I added the Holy Trinity image after the original posting.]

Derek also had the large portrait of Sitting Bull that I mentioned. In it he wears a Versace scarf and has gold chains hanging below that. Chief Blinging Bull?

The image I have included here is from Derek's website. It is titled "War Songs Circa 1986." He had it with him at the Autry. (Out of respect for the artists, I did not take pictures of their work in the booths.)

Dallin Maybee was at the Autry too. His work featured Star Wars imagery, as well as vintage automobiles, and cartoon characters. One of his paintings blended a popular genre in American Indian art -- ledger art -- with some updating. Contemporary ledger art revives the style of drawings made by American Indians in the 1800s on ledgers (old accounting books). Those images continued a Plains tradition of drawing and painting on animal hides. Artists today take the same kind of paper and create images that build upon that rich tradition.

Image provided by Dallin Maybee.

Maybee's booth featured ledger art that included the usual male warriors riding dashing ponies, but among the horses were cars and motorcycles. And in one work, the procession was being led by an AT-AT, those four-legged assault vehicles used by the Imperial forces against the Rebels in The Empire Strikes Back. Oh, and Spongebob is in the procession too. Riding a sea horse, of course.

Dallin Maybee playing his Spongebob drum.

Speaking of Spongebob, Dallin also had a hand drum he had made in the shape of that aquatic hero. The arms detach to become the sticks for beating. (You can see a YouTube video of him playing it.)

Jeremy Singer was the first artist at the Autry show I saw mixing popular culture imagery with his paintings of more widely expected American Indian themes. (I bought one of his paintings that year; it is a geometric study that blends shapes commonly found in native weaving with the graphics of the old Atari Asteroids game.) This year his work concentrated on portraits made in triplicate, mimicking the way 3D images appear when not viewed through 3D glasses.

I have included the poster of a recent show of Singer's to illustrate the appearance of his portraits.  You can see examples his work at his website.

These artists all stated that the popular culture images and themes were extensions of their lives. The artists had grown up with these images, or their children loved these characters, and they had been important influences. Brown, Maybee, and Singer are part of a growing trend in contemporary American Indian art that combines visual vocabularies from two fields generally thought of as distinct from each other (at least in the art marketplace and mainstream art criticism). They combine the signs and symbols from American Indian representational traditions that predate contact with Europeans with signs and symbols that came after that contact. These contemporary signs and symbols almost always originate in the last few decades, when these artists were children or were raising their children.

An entire exhibition of such works was created in Santa Fe in 2012 -- Low-Rez: The Native American Lowbrow. (FYI: "rez" is slang for reservation.)  You can see an excellent blog entry about this show here. Jeremy Singer was an artist featured in it.

The Heart of the Indian by America Meredith

One of my favorite images from the Low-Rez show is by America Meredith. The Heart of the Indian features a drawing from the 1580s, a PowerPuff Girl (I believe this is Buttercup), and, according to Meredith, a Cherokee pottery stamp design.

The words on the painting are from James Mooney, a white anthropologist famous for writing about his experiences in American Indian communities in the late 1800s; this line is from Historical Sketch of the Cherokee. It reads: "There is change indeed in dress and outward seeming, but the heart of the Indian is still his own."

On the one hand, one could say the drawing from the 1580s represents the appearance of the American Indian at the time of first contact and Buttercup represents the way a 21st century American Indian might imagine herself as an empowered female.  The Cherokee stamp between the two figures could suggest the native bond that links the two figures, and the Mooney quote could emphasize the similarities between the two images rather than their differences.

On the other hand, one could see the 1580 image (by John White) as among the first images that started a long history of misperception of American Indians by Europeans and misrepresentations of them.  The image is called "The Conjurer," but here the figure looks to be fleeing rather than conjuring -- perhaps he is running away from Buttercup. (She does look angry, doesn't she?) This reading would suggest that Buttercup, despite not being readily recognizable as "Indian," has been chosen by an Indian artist for her self-representation, and it is chasing away the image that does deploy the more easily understood signs of "Indian" but which is a representation created by someone else. In this sense the native artist is claiming her own agency.

Regardless of which reading one chooses, the Mooney quote suggests that the image speaks from an American Indian experience no matter the surface appearance of its imagery. Simon Ortiz, a distinguished poet from the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, had something to say about such things.  In his essay, "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism," Ortiz writes that some people feel that speaking and writing in English, that participating in cultural practices that originated outside of their native communities, are somehow less Indian. He denies this. American Indian artists have not been forced to "forsake their native selves." Ortiz claims "it is entirely possible for a people retain and maintain their lives through the use of any language." I would add: Whether that language is verbal or visual.

No Locks by April Holder

An artist from the Low-Rez show, April Holder, said it well: "If Native Americans live in two worlds, then Native Pop is the bridge between those two worlds. Native pop art is the combination of the essence of traditional identity and the embrace of the ever changing world around us."

Adventures in Heidi-reality II: Postmodernism and Plastic Surgery

“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” – Andy Warhol

As I wrote in my previous entry, “Adventures in Heidi-reality,” when I saw a tabloid article about Heidi Montag and the continuing saga of her G-cup breast implants, two things came to mind.

Still Life with G Cups (2010)

OK. Four things came to mind.

One of them was Umberto Eco and another was Tom Wesselmann.

Eco was the Italian cultural critic who coined the word “hyperreality,” which seemed to me useful for describing not just Montag’s augmented assets but the whole trend for anatomical enhancement among female celebrities – which can be found in the general population (at least those who can afford it).  The hyperreal is an example of the fake which becomes more desirable than the real.  It is perceived as “more real” than the real.

That this D-cup desire has reached the street is illustrated in the new movie Bad Teacher, in which Cameron Diaz plays a school teacher going to great and improper lengths to purchase a “boob job” so she can land the sugar daddy of her dreams.

Wesselmann, on the other hand, is famous for a series of paintings called Great American Nude.  As I contemplated Montag, I realized that Wesselmann was really on to something way back when in the 1960s.  He foresaw American popular culture’s obsession with an idealized, plasticized female breast.

When Americans think of the early 1960s, they probably think of Happy Days and Mad Men.  They think about Joanie loving Chachi and not fire-engine red nipples on large canvasses.  They think about Don Draper smoking cigarettes – lots and lots of cigarettes – and not a small group of artists in New York City giving birth to Pop Art.

Great American Nude #38

Actually, Madison Avenue and Pop Art go hand in hand, since many of the Pop artists used the visual language of advertising.  Although Wesselmann resisted the Pop Art label for himself, early in his career he was very much associated with it.  Why he was is clear in Great American Nude #38 from 1962.

He combines longstanding artistic conventions with images from American magazines. The basic structure of #38 is that of an odalisque, a painting tradition depicting a reclining nude woman.  Originally these paintings represented attractive young women from a Turkish harem, appealing to a European sense of the exotic and erotic.  But odalisque conventions were transferred to non-harem settings, such as the famous female nude portraits by Modigliani and Gauguin. 

Odalisque and Slave (1839)

Wesselmann’s nude woman reclines in much the same way as the woman in Odalisque and Slave by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, but she also seems to have been literally cut from a magazine ad and then pasted onto the canvas – after he removed her bikini.  Or she is a pin-up girl clipped from a men’s magazine.

This mash-up of high and low culture – the odalisque tradition with a Playboy centerfold – is a hallmark of postmodernism.   

Great American Nude #58

Wesselmann’s borrowing from advertising culture is even more apparent in Great American Nude #58 from 1965.  Here, the entire image could have been taken from a magazine ad -- except Wesselmann has again removed the clothing from the female and again has revealed startling tan lines. (I think I could do a whole blog entry on the meaning of tan lines.)  The revelatory nature of her nudity suggests Wesselmann’s message, if there is one: Beneath the surface of the advertisement’s message, sex is being used to sell the product.

But as his work developed, his nudes became more stylized and the breast became a major focus.  To become stylized, a sign or symbol loses detail.  One or two elements gain in their emphasis and others are de-emphasized or even disappear.  This process is true for what semiotics calls an "icon."  An icon tends to be created when a part of a person or object comes to stand for the whole. 

Great American Nude #85

For example, take Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #85 from 1966.  Note how few lines there are, how few details.  Red lips, red nipples, and a handful of curves have come to the foreground and other details have disappeared.  This is what we would call “an economy of style.”  Saying as much as possible with as few elements as possible.

Great American Nude #38 creates the sign of “visually and sexually appealing nude woman” with many more lines, curves and colors (we see the woman’s entire body, for instance) .  Great American Nude #85 creates the sign for “visually and sexually appealing nude woman” with fewer lines, curves, and colors than does Great American Nude #38.  The breast, or even just the nipple, becomes iconic of "woman," but also sex and pleasure.  Advertising and Hollywood then, in turn, associate that icon with their products.
 

Seascape

By 1967, the breasts become even more pronounced, perhaps swelling in relation to the amount of meaning they contain.  Wesselmann also increased his focus on the individual elements of the female nude until some works depicted just one body part to convey the erotic ideal.  Lips.  A breast.  A foot.

So what does this have to do with Heidi Montag?

I think we can view an obsession with cosmetic surgery as a kind of stylizing of the human body.  In order to achieve some ideal of human physical beauty, certain aspects get emphasized over others – cheekbones, chin, breasts, lips, etc. – sometimes obsessively so.  As with Wesselmann’s increasingly stylized female nude, the pursuit of the ideal human body often eliminates the details that had existed before.  We could say that human “flaws” (or individuality) reside in the details – wrinkles, for instance, or curves that deviate from the ideal.

Those are removed in the pursuit of the ideal.  As the details are lost, the expressions of the ideal begin to resemble each other.  Botoxed faces lose their wrinkles, but also their expressiveness.  As someone who lives in Southern California, I think I can say with some confidence that augmented breasts really do start to look alike.

In Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture, Sara Doris states that post-modern art depicts not encounters with the real but encounters with mediated images, with representations of the real.  (Hyperreality is about preferring representations over the real.)  She cites another critic, Douglas Crimp from 1977:

To an ever greater extent, our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema.  Next to those pictures, firsthand experience seems to retreat.

So women in Hollywood, and to an extent the rest of the country, begin to imitate, through surgery, those images that surround us.

Through its reptition from Madison Avenue and Hollywood, the breast became increasingly iconic for "sex and pleasure."  So a celebrity, such as Montag, could associate herself more closely and immediately with "sex and pleasure" by emphasizing her breasts.

Tony's hangout.

Montag is not alone in this career move.  The Bada Bings of the world are filled with examples, and several web sites are devoted to chronicling which female celebrities have implants.  And it should be noted that Montag has apparently followed through with her desire for breast reduction surgery (recent pics here).

Doris discusses post-modern art’s penchant for imitating advertising imagery and borrowing from other traditions and artists (in a way similar to contemporary musical artists sampling the works of others).  She describes this as a rejection of modernism’s “fetishes of authenticity and originality, as neither form nor subject were unique to the artist.  Thus art making became an act of self-negation rather than self-revelation or self-realization.”

That sounds harsher than I would like.  I do not judge Montag for what she did.  It is her body.  She is free to do with it what she wants.  As is any human.  I am not judging anyone, male or female, who elects to have cosmetic surgery.  I simply am trying to understand the origin of and the influences on the recent mania for mega-breasts.  And I am not saying it started with Wesselmann's art, but I think he somehow saw it coming.

I realize that Montag probably would disagree with applying Doris’s assessment to her.  She might say that her cosmetic surgeries (she has had several) helped her realize her potential rather than negate her individuality.  I also realize she is not indicative of most people who have cosmetic surgery.  A nip or tuck does not make one Cher.

But the extreme lengths to which she went do illustrate, I believe, something in the national consciousness about the beautiful and the erotic.  The ideal being pursued by some people has its origins in our media-saturated lives – or perhaps more accurately, its origins are in our media more than our lives.

Dances with Pez Dispensers

Dreamcatchers.  Wolves on t-shirts.  Broad-shouldered men and women with their arms outstretched to the moon or a mountain or an eagle.

American Indian art, right?

Powwow purchases perhaps.  Or examples of things you can buy at souvenir stands along I-40 through New Mexico and Arizona.  Decorations for a dorm room, maybe.

Fortunately, contemporary American Indian art is so much more exciting and challenging and funny than that. 

For instance, look at a work by Todd Bordeaux.  This display is called Reservation Diabetes Dispensers.

Reservation Diabetes Dispensers

Three dispensers of Pez (now Rez) candies that were distributed for different holidays -- Halloween (the closest to the camera), Easter (a bunny) and Christmas (Santa Claus).

It looks rather low-brow and comical -- and it is.  But it is postmodern and serious at the same time.  It is what we might call Pop Art or Neo-Pop Art. 

Both types of art can simultaneously celebrate and criticize consumerism and advertising.  In this case, despite the serious message that is conveyed by Reservation Diabetes Dispensers, the viewer is immediately drawn to the familiarity of the form.  Their fond memories of collecting the dispensers shape their initial reaction to the piece.  I bet nearly everyone smiles and laughs when they first see it.  The humor here is simultaneously innocent and dark.

Bordeaux's work also is an example of appropriation, where an object has been recycled or revised by an artist.  The everyday object is divorced from its original context.  This makes the viewer see it in a new light.  The work alienates the viewer from everyday objects they have taken for granted.  And it also raises questions about the nature of art.  Is it art simply because someone says it is?

Pop Art also comments on the ways art has been turned into a commodity.  This is done frequently by taking an actual commodity -- a Pez dispenser in this case -- and using it to make art.  Candy dispensers?  Art?  It is all for sale. 

But I see Bordeaux's display also commenting on the way American Indian arts and crafts have become commodities.  You can find this same beadwork on keychains and clothing and other items -- oftentimes at those I-40 souvenir stands.  His items indicate the way American Indian culture is often marketed to non-native audiences.

It also indicates the way non-native cultural practices are marketed to American Indians.  In this case, it is the way poverty and the lack of healthy food choices on many American Indian reservations have resulted in high rates of diabetes.  Nationally, more than 16 percent of the American Indian and Alaska Native population has diabetes, which is about twice the average for the entire United States population.  The rate can be as high as 33 percent among American Indians in the southwestern United States.

Bordeaux's choice of Pez dispensers also suggests the impact of colonization.  The Easter Bunny and Santa Claus evoke Christianity.  The arrival of Christianity to American Indians coincided with the arrival of other things, such as European diseases, devastating wars, coerced boarding school educations that worked to erase native languages, cultures, and religions.  The third dispenser, the one in the foreground, probably was not chosen because Halloween is so popular on American reservations; it probably was chosen because of its scary skull and its suggestion of death.

That is a lot to say with three candy dispensers!

I was introduced to this piece this past weekend at the Native American Literature Symposium in Albuquerque, N.M.  It is an annual gathering of people who study, teach, and/or create fiction, non-fiction, poetry, film, and art from Indian Country.  Bordeaux's work was part of a presentation by Heid Erdrich, a terrific poet who has turned her talents to curating the work of American Indian artists.  You can see more artwork at the All My Relations Arts website.  I will write soon about some of the other artists she discussed.