Subverting Visual Discourses of Gender and Geography: Kent Monkman's Revised Iconography of the American West

Abstract

In interviews, Toronto-based Cree artist Kent Monkman has expressed desire to look at history as it was written by Europeans, but to look at it through an Aboriginal lens (Contempo Abo 22). He accomplishes this in a series of playful scenic paintings by reconfiguring images and forms from previous Euro-American art movements: landscape painting, American Western art and neoclassicism, in particular. Of course, Monkman is not only toying with established genres by producing these canvases; he is also challenging visual narratives upon which Western expansion and settlement by Europeans is historically based. His work has garnered much recent critical attention, particularly in North American art circles, for its provocative intrusions into dominant-culture aesthetics in ways which subvert colonizing power of viewer's gaze and reinsert a presence into very images which colluded in earlier artistic works to erase it. This is, most certainly, a survivance tactic - to use a term borrowed from Gerald Vizenor and other contemporary theorists - an example of dynamic, ongoing practice of continued indigeneity within supposedly conquered landscapes.1 As Vizenor writes, Native imagination, experience, and remembrance are real landscapes of liberty in literature of this (7). Monkman's canvases suggest that similar landscapes of liberty exist within North American visual culture as well. If typical rhetorical features of aforementioned European-derived art movements construct Indianness as a state of disappearance, dependence or savagery, then Monkman's present-day disruptions of embedded aesthetic and social codes signal a shift in this state: a shift from objectstatus to subject-status, from victimhood to action, from elegiac absence to living presence. These artistic disruptions both powerfully assert indigenous perseverance and playfully reject colonial sexuality. What's more, they also indicate Monkman's ability to creatively engage imperial systems of discourse while simultaneously challenging stories they continue to convey about indigenous bodies, cultures and nations, enacting sort of artful imaginative liberation that Malea D. Powell points out in work of earlier intellectuals like Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Charles Alexander Eastman (Rhetorics of Survivance 399). The first artistic movement which Monkman mines in his efforts is nineteenth-century landscape painting. It is important to remember that wide, sweeping vistas popularized in American frontier paintings we now know, are not historic reality encountered [w]hen English first landed in North America, where they found much of coastal region heavily populated, write Dinnerstein et al. Estimates of indigenous population across continent vary, but even in United States alone, many scholars now accept figure of three to five million people prior to European colonization (5). (By way of comparison, population of Britain at time is estimated at around four million.) If Europeans did not privilege cultures, comparatively speaking, these numbers would have at least given some Britons pause before attempting to displace a population as large as their own. Hence a rhetoric which emphasized emptiness of North American landscape coupled with a sense of Indian's inevitable retreat into history - was often employed by those who romanticized colonialist project in Americas.2 By promulgating among Europeans idea of America as a vast wilderness, relatively empty of human occupants, nineteenth-century landscape painting took an active visual role that partnered with verbal rhetoric of period, rhetoric imbued with what Lawrence Buell calls the aesthetic of not-there (69). Landscape came to dominate American art in 1820s. The vistas reinforced a European need to see wilderness at edge of (their) civilization as empty; what's more, they borrowed from aesthetic style of European landscape painting itself, conflating two territories in a visual sense (Byerly 52). …