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A few words in remembrance of James Luna and his artistic fearlessness.

The world of performance art suffered a great loss when artist James Luna passed away at the beginning of this month. A resident of the La Jolla reservation, Luna was a highly respected figure of the California Native community. As someone who considers La Jolla and its surroundings somewhat of a second home, I have seen first hand how revered and admired Luna is in those parts. His importance, however, transcends geography and his work has been particularly relevant to recent discussions of cultural misrepresentation and appropriation. With a president who casually refers to his Native American co-workers as “Pocahontas”, the current political climate needs every strong voice of objection and protest it can summon. Luna was indeed one such voice and many of his pieces were conceived to actively disrupt the romanticized commodification of Native culture. In the performance “Take a Picture With a Real Indian”, for instance, Luna targets the gap between the popular image of Indians and Indians as actual human beings.

 

Luna originally staged the performance at Union Station in Washington D.C. in 1991. The performance consisted of Luna taking up a spot and proclaiming to bypassers: “Take a picture with a real Indian. Take a picture here, in Washington, D.C. on this beautiful Monday morning, on this holiday called Columbus Day. America loves to say ‘her Indians.’ America loves to see us dance for them. America likes our arts and crafts. America likes to name cars and trucks after our tribes. Take a picture with a real Indian. Take a picture here today, on this sunny day here in Washington, D.C.”

Being photographed together with strangers who saw him primarily as an object would not surprisingly take a toll on his pride and Luna would end the performance when he felt too upset or humiliated to continue.

 

The video above is from a more recent recreation of the performance but here too the discomfort is clearly visible. This discomfort seem to be shared by performer and participants alike. Sometimes it’s unclear why the people in the audience want to have their picture taken together with Luna. Are they clued into the motives behind the performance or do they respond to the exotic nature of the offer, as if being photographed with an Indian is an opportunity as rare as meeting a lion. Maybe the participants themselves don’t really know. And this confusion and uncertainty is testament to the success of the work. The performance opens a space for the audience to question their own reception of exotic constructs.

Luna was reportedly trained by the mythical Bas Jan Ader who disappeared at sea during the creation of one of his art pieces. Although he didn’t go to quite the same extremes as Ader, Luna did make his own body his primary artistic medium. This made Luna’s work particularly challenging. Other Native artists may have tackled the same subjects as Luna, but the fact that he used his own body lends an confrontational and physical poignancy to topics and themes that might otherwise remain confined to the intellectual realm.

Luna’s physical methods were particularly effective when he located his critique to the institutional practices of museums. In “The Artifact Piece” (performed in 1987 at the San Diego Museum of Man) Luna put his own body on display, laying it down in the museum among other historical objects. Thinking he was a lifeless object of exhibition, some visitors would touch his body and experience a slight shock upon finding it a living and breathing entity. It is one thing to verbally point out the discrepancies between the Native American as historical artifact found in museums and Native American as a living and thriving culture. But to stage this discrepancy through one’s own body is quite another thing and the piece had a huge impact among Native artistic communities.

Personally, I knew James Luna only very superficially. A few years ago James Luna reached out to me with the proposition of collaborating on something in Sweden. Nothing materialized, however, and I sadly regret that the opportunity now has passed. Among many of the artists represented by Kiva Gallery, James Luna is spoken of with the highest admiration and respect. Luna struck a rare balance of fearlessness, humour and sensitivity in his art, and for this his influence will doubtlessly live on.

 

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Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World

The 28th edition of Stockholm International Film Festival starts tomorrow and there is one film in particular I would really like to see. It is a documentary called “Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World”. The film explores the contribution of Native Americans to the evolution and history of rock and roll. As is evidenced by the many accounts from Rock and Roll superstars in the film, such as Steve van Zandt, Steven Tyler and Iggy Pop, Native American rock has had a significant influence on many popular musicians. Rarely has this influence been spelled out as specifically Indian, however, or contextualized in a coherent story about Native Americanness. The idea for the film came from Native American Stevie Salas who has himself been a professional musician for decades and played for many for big names. He knew the industry was full of Indians who were really influential but that not many people knew about outside the industry. For four years the filmmakers collected accounts from Native American musicians and other artists who had one way or another been influenced by rock by Native Americans.

Many of the rockers interviewed for the film talk about one track in particular: Link Wray’s Rumble from 1958. The track has a riff that Stevie Van Zandt calls “The Sexiest, toughest chord change in all of Rock and Roll”. In that chord change lay the foundation to the history of Rock and Roll and one can easily trace it through the sound of The Who, Black Sabbath, Stooges among countless others.

To get an idea of the monumental impact of the track you only need to watch as Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page puts it on and gets so overcome by its power that he cannot refrain from busting out some air riffs along to it.

 

Rumble has had a pop-cultural impact that stretches beyond the world of music. Film buffs may remember Wray’s tune as an indispensable addition to the mood of Pulp Fiction.  The song appears during the famous (well, aren’t pretty much all scenes from Pulp Fiction famous) diner scene during which John Travolta and Uma Thurman have their “uncomfortable silence”. Since the dialogue is here put on hold for a large part the music is what primarily carries the scene.

“Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World” is directed by Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana and has earned numerous awards from other film festivals. Tomorrow November 8, it can be seen at Stockholm Film Festival at 7 pm. There are additional screenings on November 12 and 16.

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Different times.

Buffy Sainte Marie said of her experience working on Sesame Street that it was ”Wonderful all around. I was on for over five years (until Reagan cut the budget for the arts). We took Big Bird to Taos Pueblo, did multicultural programming in my backyard in Hawaii, and lots in New York. They never stereotyped me, always listened to my script ideas, and stayed truly child-centered. I was breastfeeding my baby in 1976 and suggested we do a segment on it, and we did and it was perfect. (We) also did sibling rivalry, and I taught the Count to count in Cree. As a songwriter who really believes in the power of the three-minute song to change the world for short-attention-span audiences, ”Sesame Street” was right up my alley, and I’m grateful for every minute of it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65AdU7w-Hg4&t=33s

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Chris Pappan

CP_applesauceIt is with great delight that Kiva Gallery finds the face of Chris Pappan adorning the cover of the latest issue of Native Peoples Magazine. Pappan is one of the Gallery’s favourite artists and we are proud to have several of his works in our collection. A truly accomplished draftsman, Pappan brings a modern sensibility to the tradition of ledger art. He would rather be called “big city Indian” (he lives in Chicago) than Native American and this progressive stance shines through in his art.

Like many other contemporary artists – for instance Douglas Miles, Ryan Singer and Frank Buffalo Hyde – Pappan’s art engages with what I would call second-order representations. They are, in other words, not primarily trying to convey a “truth” about Native culture but are rather concerned with representations of representations – of movie stars and actors, and how Native culture has been represented by people outside of it. Needless to say, when representation of a culture lies in the hands of people who know nothing about it, the result is often skewed and misguided. Nevertheless, these images have entered the collective consciousness of popular culture, and the task many contemporary Native artists have taken upon themselves is to point to the fallacies of these images.

If we are to believe Michelle H. Raheja, this is far from an easy task. Raheja suggests in her book ”Reservation Reelism” that when the Bildhegemonic culture work its hardest to deny and suppress Native Americans, any evidence of their existence becomes cause for celebration. Hence for a Native American audience starved on images of their culture, the fact of visibility has sometimes overridden concerns about the hurtfulness of distorted representations. This could explain why many Native Americans of the older generation have taken even obviously negative representations and characters such as Tonto to heart. Simply put, it was all they had.

Pappan often relies on stereotypical imagery of Natives. Far from enabling a facile identification with these images, however, Pappan employs aesthetic strategies that make them slip from the viewer’s grasp. Pappan’s drawings often include distortions that disturb the proper reception of them. As Chris Pappan explains: “My images are distorted to reflect the distorted image of Indians in contemporary culture and the way Indians themselves are distorted by images.” When looking at a Pappan drawing, therefore, one gets the feeling that, according to the laws of perspective, it does not cohere. It’s as if a single figure is being viewed from different spatial positions simultaneously.

Bild 19There is art-historical precedence to this technique. Ever since the laws of perspective became an artistic institution, artists have liked to play around with them. The art of turning perspective on its head almost became a genre of painting unto itself and it became known as “anamorphosis”. Leonardo Da Vinci was a avid practitioner. Historically, anamorphic distortion in painting has been used to simultaneously present and disguise a content that some might regard as controversial. It was a way to sneak burlesque and sexual imagery as well as political commentary past a possibly censorious establishment. This was made possible by the way an anamorphic picture has to be viewed from a specific angle to make sense. From a frontal position, an anamorphic picture appears an incomprehensible mess. But viewed from a particular perspective, the content of the image clearly appears.

This historical background to anamorphosis serves Pappan’s purposes of subverting stereotypes well. It’s as if Pappan uses the device of distortion to suggest that beneath stereotypical imagery lies another reality. One that is only attainable by changing ones perspective and outlook on the world.

There is a poetry of instability and elusiveness to Pappan’s images. While rooted in past and possibly damaging representations, his art also suggest that these are not the final word. The image of the Native American is open to revision, and changing it is what a new generation of Native artists have set out to do.

 

Chris Pappan and his art can been seen at SWAIA – Santa Fe Indian Market August 18-24.

 

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The Exiles

 

 

 I’ve quickly realized that I want this blog to be not just a document of the Gallery’s activities, but somewhat of a posterboard for scattered thoughts on cultural artifacts related to Native culture and americana in general. Let me therefore draw some deserved attention to an unusually stark and uncompromising depiction of American Indians – Kent Mackenzie’s film ”The Exiles”. Like the fate of many Native Americans themselves, the film has suffered from cultural invisibility for many years. I first came across clips of it in Thom Andersen’s essay film ”Los Angeles Plays Itself” and was struck by the rawness of the images. As was many others. The film has since been restored and released on DVD.

”The Exiles” begins with a sequence of Edward Curtis’s photographs of traditional Indians set to tribal drumming and chanting. But this is no return to times past. We are soon landed in 1960s Los Angeles among a group of Native Americans who have exiled from the reservation only to find themselves in an urban limbo of sorts, passing their unemployed time by drinking, fighting, flirting, and gambling. The film follows the group throughout twelve hours of their lives, beginning at nightfall and ending as a new dawn rises. It will be a night of thunderbird-guzzling, drunken joy, drunken resignation, romantic missteps, drunk driving, air-piano playing, bar-brawling, but also of retying old collective bonds as the night is ended on the hilltops above Los Angeles where Natives young and old come together to sing traditional Indian songs.

Not a documentary in the strictest sense of the term, the individuals of the film nevertheless more or less play themselves. The visual footage is complemented by a voice-over consisting of authentic interviews of the ”actors” voicing their real-life attitudes and concerns. This device supplies the apparently carefree antics with an undertow of complexity. The effect of the voice-over is particularly striking when coupled to Yvonne’s beautifully stoic face.

 Yvonne is the most judicious of the bunch. Being pregnant, she goes to the movies while the others go out drinking, dreaming of a brighter future where husband Homer will change his reckless ways and become a responsible father for his child. If not, she’s sure she’ll manage on her own. Somehow.

In ”Los Angeles Plays Itself”, ”The Exiles” was celebrated for its respectful treatment of the city of Los Angeles. Indeed, the attention to detail makes the city come alive, taking in ambient sounds and the rundown charm and maze-like layout of the now vanished neighborhood Bunker Hill, which has been the setting for many a Film Noir. Historically, Bunker Hill was for long disconnected from the rest of Los Angeles due to its elevated placement. Later, the two areas were connected by a long tunnel through the hill. This historic background provides some opportune fodder for symbolism. The tunnel figures prominently in the film. It thereby underscores the transitional in-betweenness suggested by Homer, of being transplanted from one culturally segregated, but cohesive, community into an urban diaspora.

For some, the film is problematic for seemingly contributing to the stereotype of the drunken Indian. I think this is to miss the point. ”The Exiles” is primarily a poem of the night – of its lures and pitfalls, sure, but also of it as medium for a class of people without means to exercise a bit of freedom, however destructive this freedom may be. The darkness of night belongs to them because they are invisible even during the day. As such, ”The Exiles” stands next to Bruce Springsteen’s ”Night” as a melancholy paean to the liberations of night.

As the sun rises and the twelve hours draw to a close, the group of friends – exhausted – stagger home. The last words before the film fades is ”tonight we’ll do it all again.” Springsteen sang: ”you run sad and free until all you can see is the night.”