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Native Art Stretches Out

By Carol Amoruso

IMDiversity

“Remix—New Modernities in a Post Indian World” is a problematical yet mostly satisfying exhibition currently on view at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Haye Center in New York (through 21 Sept., 2008).  In video, painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media, “Remix” presents the works of artists of mixed Native and other heritage. (Why only artists of mixed heritage have been included is not thoroughly explained.)  Most of the pieces are provocative and engaging, while others cause this viewer to question their inclusion.

The themes of borders, open space, wilderness are recurrent, while specific issues of current import to Native America (life on the reservation, for example, or deteriorated social conditions) are not a focus.  In addition, the artists eschew the forms and iconography they inherited from their forebears, working instead with imaginative genres and images inspired by contemporary, globalized trends. 

Kade Twist’s The Way the Sun Rises Over Rivers is no Different From the Way the Sun Sets Over Oceans, is as commanding of reflection as a muezzin’s call to prayer.  It evokes in vast, luminous stillness the relative oneness First Peoples feel with the earth.  The installation opposes 2 large, yet like, photo images, one of the sunrise over Oklahoma’s Illinois River, the other of the sun setting over the Pacific.  They are separated by slick, shiny black plastic flooring.  Mid-floor is a hearth (or campfire, if you will), a pyramid of simulated burning logs.  The incandescence of the logs, their position as the focal point of Twist’s installation, suggest more a quiet, middle ground resting place for a weary traveler than humankind’s violation of Nature’s stillness.

Hector Ruiz’s works are manifestly socio-political.  The most arresting of four, Forty One Bullets, is a carved human figure in the style of African sculpture; its form is blocky, the face marked by iconic exaggerations of African physiognomy.  The rough, painted wood of the statue is riddled with drill holes, representing the 41 bullets torpedoed into Malian immigrant Amadou Diallo by the NYPD.  Ruiz  is making an audacious statement here: by distilling the martyred Malian into his perceived “Africanness,” he is vaunting that composite that perversely deemed Diallo worthy of eradication while indicting the racism behind it.

Franco Mondini-Ruiz’s wall display, Los Mestizos, reminding me of my great aunt’s dizzying rococo living room, takes tacky and fussy European porcelain figures, beheads them, recapitates them with gobs of pinched, raw clay and baptizes them fancifully, most with Spanish names.  It seems a puerile gimmick at first, but deceptively so: in essence the reimagined figures are highly ironic; they suggest that the brown (and here we must assume he meant this to include both Native and Latino) “heads,” as ad hoc and crude as they may appear, nevertheless provide the brains for and final ascendancy over the well-finished yet frivolous Europeans.

“Remix” forced me to revisit my reaction to earlier shows I’d viewed of contemporary African artists, many of them abstract expressionists in whose work I could discern few of the rich iconic forms or themes of their ancestors.

Ultimately I had to lay aside my judgments and accept the artists’ decision to place their need to explore ahead of perceived constraints to adhere to traditional, long-standing artistic forms.  I must do the same with “Remix.”  The several exceptional works of the exhibit stand on their own as challenging, often pleasing and humorous contemporary art.

“Listening to Our Ancestors,”  down the hall from “Remix,” dramatically contrasts and complements it.  (It closes unfortunately on the 20^th, July.)   Mounted by community curators from eleven North Pacific nations, in stunningly executed artifacts and implements accompanied by written accounts, the exhibit underscores the interconnection between the perpetuation of a culture and its art.  The power of the pieces, and the installation as a whole, underscore that, clearly manifest in their work or not, the artists of “Remix” have inherited a defining understanding of aesthetics.

If you can’t get to the museum to see “Remix”—it’s worth a visit no matter what exhibit is up, for the beauty of the building, its fitting location at the tip of Manhattan island, and because rarely does the museum mount an unsatisfying show—go to the website for a comprehensive overview:

http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/remix/