Since Europeans stepped foot onto the shores of the Americas five-hundred years ago, the history and fate of indigenous communities has been shaped by, for, and through the vision of the Western colonizer, and nowhere has this manifested more potently than in the history of art.[1] A brief timeline of the discipline proves this to be true: for what does Benjamin West’s Portrait of Colonel Guy Johnson and Karonghyontye (1776), or Thomas Cole’s idealized and figure-less landscape painting of Indian Pass (1847), or E.A. Burbank’s portrait studies of Geronimo (1890s) announce other than a system predicated upon unequal power relationships between the artist and their chosen subject, colonizer and colonized?
Paintings and sculptures of indigenous Americans abound, yet it is the medium of photography that holds the most recognizable and potent visual representations of indigenous Americans—a reminder of photography’s crucial role in the evolution and maintenance of the European colonizer’s vision of non-Western civilizations.[2] Early advocates of photography in the 19th century often emphasized the medium’s great advantages as a means of reproduction and documentation, and underscored the efficiency and fidelity of the new genre as a means to represent regions and peoples under Euro-imperial dominance, thus facilitating what photography historian Ali Behdad calls the medium’s “illustrative and constitutive” role in reinforcing colonial power structures. For those of us who understand Western cultural production to be a complex but nevertheless materialist outcome of many of the patriarchal structures that fashion our world, it is impossible to disavow the ways in which images belong and respond to those structures, and more impossible still to ignore the ways in which representations of native persons created by Western subjects have shaped and reproduced the structures of inequality that form our collective histories, experiences, and imaginations. While it is clear that artworks are neither mere reflections of European racial prejudices and dominance and do not operate uniformly—as cultural theorist Stuart Hall reminds us, artworks are “entanglements” bound to historical practices of Western-European violence and discrimination as well as the dynamic forces of history and interpretation that imprint artworks in visible and invisible ways—there remains the question of what happens when the tools of the master are seized by the marginalized, as has happened in the work of many indigenous contemporary artists working in the photographic medium.[3] How have Native American artists harnessed the medium as a way of presenting a revised self-image? What is at stake in the presentation of a revised self-image and a re-tooling of existing visual codes that have marked the visual history and politics of indigenous American life?
Multimedia artist Wendy Red Star’s photographic work provides rich responses to these questions. Mining the visual languages of American colonialism, ethnographic and popular photography, and indigenous experience, Red Star’s deeply biographical and intersectional feminism manifests within her work as a powerful manifesto against the photographic medium’s false assumptions of truth, authenticity, and factuality in the shaping of indigenous subjectivity. While Red Star’s practice runs rich with formal and conceptual diversity, self-portraiture stands at the heart of her practice, and is reflected in this presentation by three bodies of photo-based work: Four Seasons (2006-2007), four photographs of Red Star dressed in traditional Crow regalia posed in the midst of kitschy seasonal environments, a pointed critique of “primitivist” claims that stereotype Native Americans as “closer to nature;” Apsáalooke Feminist (2016), a colorful and touching series of portraits of Red Star and her daughter Beatrice who, dressed in ceremonial Apsáalooke garb, pose in classically-derived stances on a simple Ikea sofa, their familial connection reverberating amidst a collection of vibrant Crow textiles; and White Squaw (2014), a series of appropriated images culled from a series of ”adult western” novellas of the same name whose sexually suggestive captions and storylines call out the racist and sexually degrading iconography of Native American women present in popular culture. A testament to Red Star’s capacity to engage the general and particular problematics of identity as both a lived condition and a socially-constructed phenomenon, these series reverberate on and against one another, telling and un-telling us what Crow subjectivity is and isn’t.
While each series of works operate in their own unique ways, Red Star’s bodily presence in the work is the thread that embroiders them together—a post-colonial and feminist strategy of reclamation and defiance (what feminist critic Lucy Lippard has called “image independence”) against the racist and paternalistic culture that has managed the visual and corporeal bodies of indigenous women for 150 years.[4] This self-presentation based in conditions of autonomy is announced most forcefully in Four Seasons. Red Star sits carefully within the artificial environs, arranging her resplendently-dressed self on floors of unmodulated green astroturf or a smattering of fake fall leaves. Clearly ignoring or refusing the viewer’s gaze, Red Star does not smile for the camera as women are so often told to do in photography studios or city streets, nor does her body or face turn completely towards the viewer; the result of this defiant withholding produces feelings of impersonal detachment despite Red Star’s proximity to her loud and cluttered surroundings of seasonal decor, blow-up animals, and mass-produced animal carcasses. Legs crossed at the knee or ankle and arms extended slightly away from the torso, each image of Red Star works to “ground” the artist within these diorama-like settings, but not naturally or comfortably. The store-bought totems and kitschy seasonal motifs (such as the arrangement of fake snowballs in the winter scene, for instance) reverberate in their fraudulence when placed in relation to the traditional objects of Crow tribal culture (a feathered fan or woven pouch, for instance) that appear across each image. Red Star’s strategic juxtapositions of genuine Crow culture and manufactured nature exposes the ways in which authenticity and personhood is circulated and assumed in photographic images and encourages the viewer to connect these false medium-specific claims to the aestheticization of Native Americans and nature in colonialist imagery.
The apparent resistance that Red Star attenuates in Four Seasons magnifies the ways in which self-presentation and Western modes of portraiture are rendered unstable across the trajectory of the artist’s oeuvre. This is accomplished by Red Star’s powerful engagement with archival photography of indigenous cultures and individuals and the specific formulas that structure subjectivity in ethnographic photography. Think of the categories of Crow subjecthood present in the oeuvre of turn-of-the-19th-century photographer Edward S. Curtis, whose photographs of tribes in Montana have solidified a constellation of formal and conceptual expectations about Native American identity and experience that live on with us today. Curtis’ particular vantage points, which often depict the indigenous person from above, force the viewer to look down on the sitter, while the photographer’s minimal set of compositional structures entrap the individual in a shallow depth of field within a romantic and dramatic color palette of bright lights and deep shadows. With a focus on the physiognomy of the facial features and details of Crow ceremonial garb, Curtis fetishizes the sitter’s surface appearances, trading on the long-held belief in Western art that attendance to the physical characteristics of the sitter renders the inner life of an “Other” knowable, the result of which never moves far from the set of general typologies that accompany the racist visual and political rhetoric of indigenous persons.[5]
Red Star’s theatrical settings in the Four Seasons series are thus structured tautologically—that if one is eager to deflate the anthropological typologies (and by consequence, the sociopolitical conditions that have destroyed indigenous history and culture) that structure a visual discourse like ethnographic photography, that one must do so within the parameters of its own visual language. Looking at Red Star’s work, it is impossible to escape the realities of photographic history and the anthropological fantasies and motivating desires for empirical knowledge that photography was/is predicated upon. In a way, Red Star defies what Roland Barthes described as photography’s “pure spectorial consciousness”—the belief that the photograph is bound to the truth of human perspective—as a way to claim that photography is always-already a fantasy of selective framing and staging, artificial to its core, eager to render what is most authentic (in this case, Red Star’s tribal customs and history) into mere image, mere surface, pure simulacra.[6]
by Dr. Jordan Isabella Amirkhani, Professorial Lecturer in Art History
American University ~ Katzen Arts Center
Dr. Jordan Amirkhani's research and writing reflect her commitment to intersectional feminist critique and the contextualization of issues of gender, class, and race within the development of European and American art from the nineteenth century to the present.
She is a regular contributor to Daily Serving, Artforum, and Burnaway, and serves as a Professorial Lecturer in Art History at American University in Washington, DC. |
[1] I would like to thank Michael Dickins, Curator of The New Gallery at Austin Peay State University, for his rigorous curatorial vision, collegiality, support of women artists and artists of color, and professional generosity during the writing and researching of this essay. I am so proud to be a part of this exhibition. In addition, I would like to extend my greatest appreciation to artist Wendy Red Star for the rigor of her practice and the rich conversation that evolved as I worked on this essay. I can only hope that some of her magnanimous brilliance is represented here and am grateful to be reminded in this project of how crucial it is for white feminists to listen, stay open, check their privileges, continue to learn, and work to make space for others.
[2] See Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan’s “Introduction” in Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013, pgs. 1-10.
[3] See Stuart Hall’s chapter “Can a discourse be ‘innocent;?” in “Chapter 6: The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” republished in Formations of Modernity, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992, pgs. 203-205.
[4] See Lucy Lippard, “Independent Identities” in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, and Histories, ed. W. Jackson Rushing III, New York: Routledge, 2013, pgs. 134-135.
[5] See Shamoon Zamir, The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
[6] See Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Alan Trachtenberg’s edited volume Classic Essays on Photography, New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island, 1980, pgs. 278-279.
[2] See Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan’s “Introduction” in Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013, pgs. 1-10.
[3] See Stuart Hall’s chapter “Can a discourse be ‘innocent;?” in “Chapter 6: The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” republished in Formations of Modernity, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992, pgs. 203-205.
[4] See Lucy Lippard, “Independent Identities” in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, and Histories, ed. W. Jackson Rushing III, New York: Routledge, 2013, pgs. 134-135.
[5] See Shamoon Zamir, The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
[6] See Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Alan Trachtenberg’s edited volume Classic Essays on Photography, New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island, 1980, pgs. 278-279.