Wheel: Lucy Lippard

All Six Legs
Lucy Lippard (European-American)

Lucy Lippard examines the factors that make Native art partly invisible in her essay “All Six Legs.” Lippard is sensitive to the challenges of being a non-Native writing about Native art and wonders if Native perspectives are “even available to non-Indians?” (128) She points out something very crucial in Native art writing, that “non-Indian writers tend to depend on our own culturally approved taste, education, and background, which is rooted in Western civilization” (128), which, possibly unconsciously, promotes assimilation to the Western mainstream. She encourages Native writers to examine and question Western influences on their work.

The space between cultures is a liminal space — a threshold or, in Gerald McMaster’s Reservation X, “a socially ambiguous zone” (133) African, Asian, Latin, as well as Native American artists move around the long-entrenched Eurocentrism of the art world. Oscar Howe demonstrated this by creating new expressions of abstraction that drew upon his own tribe’s art history. “It is history, whether or not it’s written down by white people” (131) – Lippard pretty well nails it with that statement. Most tribes have predominantly oral cultures, and Native scholars have struggled for decades to have oral histories recognized as valid in academia. Tribes reflected upon the art they created, even if they did not write everything down.

Lippard brings up the reoccurring notion of the indigenous artist versus the artist who “happens to be indigenous” (131) (kill the Indian, save the artist, to paraphrase Captain Richard Pratt). I’ve long noticed how the artists who say that they are “artists who happen to be Native” tend to show in Native venues and speak to Native audiences quite a bit. Lippard observes that Fritz Scholder was a prime example of “a non-Indian Indian but was not adverse to reaping the rewards of Native affiliation” (139).

Agreeing with Mithlo that modernism (or post-modernism) and tribal traditions are not incompatible, Lippard writes, “…for many Native artists, tradition is not the antithesis of modernism, but its mulch” (131). Sometimes what passes for “traditional art” becomes so romanticized in non-Indian circles that some young artists break away from their traditional arts just to avoid the sentimentalization, commercialization, and trivialization of those arts.

Ghettoization is a concern among many different groups, not just Native Americans, and while some Native artists aspire to show in the global art world, Native art shows and venues still hold value. “[I]f a woman artist makes a big reputation under a male name or Native artists never mention their tribal affiliation, nothing is gained for the constituencies we care most about” (133). Artists should not have to hide who they are to make it in the mainstream.

"One of the most effective weapons against stereotypes," Lippard writes, "is recontextualization" (136). She agrees with Mithlo that stereotypes can be springboards for new communication; however, she also warns that, “Obsession with the cruelties and stupidities of the dominant culture—even as it remains meaningful as a warning—is related to what we in the feminist movement used to call ‘being ruled by the opposition,’ or forced into a position that’s reactive rather than proactive, cliché rather insight. At some point it may become more challenging to construct intricate criticisms of internal as well as external problems, fueled less by individualism then by collective energy” (136). Being simply reactionary is throwing away much of our power as artists. Native artists face the question of art world individualism and tribal collectivism, but “[o]ver the centuries, tribal traditions themselves have been flexible and open to change without damaging the core” (139, 142).

Although identity politics have detractors in the mainstream art world, identity remains an important, reoccurring theme. Lippard suggests that if identity is a central part of an artist’s work, it should be analyzed, not ignored. “The problem of too much attention being paid to Native identity and to little to art” (142) can be solved by bypassing romanticism and nostalgia and studying contemporary Native art in its indigenous art historical context.

As an aside, on the subject of liminality, Edward De Bono’s great and accessible book, I Am Right, You Are Wrong, demonstrates how the grammar of English language that hinges on anagrams (opposites) encourages artificial dichotomies.

Image: Act, Don't React, America Meredith, gouache on paper.

Wheel: Nancy Marie Mithlo

A Realist View of Image Politics Reclamation of the ‘Every Indian’
Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache)

In Nancy Mithlo’s essay, she examines the role of Native women artists and stereotypes of Native Americans in her “an attempt to define a critical indigenous arts theory” (105).

Asking if negative stereotypes of Native Americans in popular culture matter, Mithlo answers, “Yes” – a view backed up by cognitive science. She sees mascots and other stereotypical caricatures of Natives as having real world ramifications, including violence; however, she argues that artists can use stereotypes as tools for cross-cultural communication, and cites examples of artists using the two most common stereotypes of Native women, the “squaw” and “princess,” to educate their audiences.

Mithlo points out that tribes and Native people themselves sometimes contribute to these stereotypes. For instance, the poster child of the "Indian princess" stereotype, the Land O’ Lakes butter maiden, was actually designed by Red Lake Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait (Anthes 99).

Often non-Native’s ignorance of diverse tribes is blamed for the stereotypes; however, this has not proven to be the case, especially in areas where non-Native peoples are competing for limited resources with high concentrations of Native peoples (114). In the art world, this means when Native artists are designated by tribe and exhibiting in their own venues, such as Indian markets, prejudice is reduced; however, when Native artists seek to show their work in elite, mainstream environments, prejudice is more likely to occur. Mithlo provides several appalling examples of the backlash that occurs when Native artists exhibit in the mainstream arts arena instead of “knowing their place.”

Over and over the discussion of “segregation” of Native art comes up, but Mithlo puts things in perspective: why should the contemporary arts world be a place devoid of any ethnicity? It’s “an odd kind of segregational racism” (114). I think it’s important to hear about experiences from Latino, Black, Asian, and other artists and writers with similar experiences – they are also often directly or indirectly asked to downplay their own cultural heritage to “make it” in the mainstream.

“To talk about Indian art, you must talk about race,” (107) she writes, and “a negation of ethnicity also implies a negation of history.” Besides being an ethnic definition, “Native American” is also a political definition, with rights and access to resources relayed through citizenship in sovereign tribes.

The Native women Mithlo interviews discuss being part of a tribe – a communal approach to art making that flies in the face of the iconic mainstream Rugged Individualist Art Hero. Mithlo argues that in contemporary Indian art the communal aspect should take precedence over the individual. Instead of trying to separate the art and the artists from the fabric of their daily life or home, their “extended lives as mothers, tradition-bearers, and wage earners” are important components to examine in interpreting and appreciating their art (111). It is not that the artists Mithlo profiles do not express individually, but their work gains depth and meaning when seen in the context of their respective community circles.

However, many Native artists are clear that they cannot speak for their tribes; it’s a more nuanced matter of seeing the individual as a community member – in Diné artist Gloria Emerson’s words, "a case study, of what’s going on throughout the reservation" (111).

Mithlo admits, “Both the motivation to alter preconceived notions of the Native as well as the availability of counternarratives are strikingly missing from general discourse…” (121) Mainstream media and the global art world tend to simply ignore real Natives in favor of the stereotypes. Native artists in the mainstream art world defy preexisting categories and are therefore threatening and subsequently ignored.

"Native artists who move in both mainstream fine arts and rural reservation communities defy the dated analysis that strictly sees the tribal as separate in time and space from the modern. The concept of Native Americans as mobile, contemporary, and, simultaneously, tribal has not yet been recognized by the non-Indian public," she writes (121).

It is not enough to simply study the aesthetic qualities of Native art – to take the formalist, Modernist approach of the mid-20th century. Mithlo concludes, “To fully engage in Indian arts, one must participate in a fairly rigorous intellectual exercise in which personal doubt may productively serve to further one’s depth of understanding. Counterintuitive measures such as an embrace of stereotypes, generic Indian identity, and realism are reasonable places to start the difficult process ahead” (123).

• Anthes, Bill. Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
• Blomberg, Nancy J., ed. [Re]inventing the Wheel: Advancing the Dialogue on Contemporary American Indian Art. Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2008. ISBN 978-0914738596.