Remediating the “Famous Indian Artist”: Native Aesthetics beyond Tourism and Tragedy

Abstract

Remediating the “Famous Indian Artist”Native Aesthetics beyond Tourism and Tragedy Joshua Miner (bio) The “famous Indian artist” emerged as a modern phenomenon, a product of his or her American place and time. The twentieth century saw numerous Native artists enter the public eye, many innovating on established styles and challenging Eurowestern prescriptions about what “Indian art” could be, yet they became tokens of the twin ideologies of assimilationism and primitivism anyway.1 US society construed these artists as cultural representatives of a vanishing race; they were portals to a prehistoric state, fabricated via nostalgia in order to corroborate social and aesthetic modernity. A turn-of-the-century “Indian craze” in the US art world had in fact underpinned “the emergence of modernist aesthetic ideas” (Hutchinson 7). This generalized, primitive, “Indian art” style provided the perfect foil for the formal experimentation of American modernism. Celebrity status for Native artists, in turn, came from reproducing “authentic” Indigenous styles and mobilizing tragic motifs of racial extinction in a new economy of sympathy. A trend of Native artists’ entrance into the national limelight on this basis escalated after the birth of the Santa Fe Indian Market in 1922 and the Indian Arts Fund in 1925 and the establishment of art programs at tribal colleges across the country. US institutions began to view Indigenous cultures as a distinct national resource, a usable “past” for modernism’s best aesthetic poachers. Along the way, Native craftspeople began to produce “fine art” and not just “folk art,” yet they had to evoke the traditional in order to survive in a modern art economy whose aesthetic teleology relied on their primitiveness. This dynamic surfaced across all Native art production in the twentieth century. Dean Rader identifies this as a result of “the long and turbulent history of Indians and Indian iconography in the public sphere,” [End Page 79] which positioned Native practitioners similarly relative to the coalescing institutions of modern art and literary modernism (144). It limited those artists’ freedom to articulate the Indigenous modernisms that would emerge later by force: Yanktonai painter Oscar Howe, for example, famously began his career painting in the style of winter counts and ledger drawings before he brought cubist, futurist, and magical realist elements to bear on the ethnographic eye of mock traditional styles in the late 1950s. This essay argues that Native literatures of the early twenty-first century remediate this shift in Indigenous visual aesthetics, focalized through the figure of the famous Indian artist. The figure, which exists as a feature of both production and representation in the Indigenous art world, surfaces as a transmedial literary motif that activates across modalities and levels of experimentation. Four major works of fiction anchor this analysis, each distinct in visibility, market, and literary style: Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water (2001), the title story in Eddie Chuculate’s Cheyenne Madonna (2010), Gerald Vizenor’s Shrouds of White Earth (2010), and Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag (2011). In these stories, celebrity Native artists begin their careers working in pseudo-traditional styles, only to alienate their communities and then transcend their early work to cultivate visionary techniques. Just as Oscar Howe negotiated institutionally prescribed styles with his desire for Indigenous experimentation, fictional artist Dogroy Beaulieu negotiates the same forces in Vizenor’s experimental novella Shrouds of White Earth. The way forward for many is to become what Dogroy calls a “cosmo-primitive” artist, a transcultural troublemaker who disrupts Anglo and Native institutions by ironically smudging the modern and “primitive,” the cosmopolitan and traditional. The transmedial process by which this core motif travels puts the development of formal conventions of painting in conversation with its literary remediations—more importantly, the above authors deliberately juxtapose these modalities to confront the problem of representation from multiple angles. Whereas remediation typically refers to the translation of media-constructed systems of perception and meaning through newer (often electronic) forms,2 I use the term to refer to an interrelation of mediating forms involving story and image, where abstract signs accrue meaning as they play across modal borders. This emphasizes the logic of immediacy, which “dictates that the medium [End Page 80] should disappear leave us the presence of the...