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Decolonizing Landscapes: Indigenous Belonging in John Walsh’S Paintings

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Decolonizing Landscapes: Indigenous Belonging in John Walsh’S Paintings Decolonizing Landscapes, Merkin Decolonizing Landscapes: Indigenous Belonging in John Walsh’s Paintings Sophia Merkin, Columbia University Paintings by contemporary artist John Walsh feature lush and ethereal scenes, often populated by figures both human and mythical. Half Māori (Aitanga a Hauiti) and half Pākehā (of white settler descent), Walsh’s eerie paintings are suffused with a devotion to and kinship with the natural world of Aotearoa, New Zealand and its Indigenous peoples. His paintings lay bare the complicated and partial qualities of landscapes as an artistic genre, providing a counterpoint to centuries of European colonial tableaux. In spite of their pastoral and bucolic traits, landscapes are and have never been neutral; as anthropologist Nicholas Thomas argues, “[in] a settler colonial world, the evocation of an empty land awaiting some sort of meaningful inscription or spiritual definition cannot be seen as a purely pictorial or aesthetic statement.”1 Indeed, Walsh resists the traditional understanding of this genre, as well as the characterization of his paintings as such; in an interview conducted for this paper, he stresses that his paintings are “not pure Landscapes.”2 Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory as well as the vexed history of landscapes, I argue that Walsh’s canvases function as decolonizing agents. They destabilize and challenge the legacy of European landscapes and encounters, offering a distinctly critical and Indigenous rearticulation of the genre. 1 Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/ Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 22. 2 John Walsh. E-mail interview. Conducted by Sophia Merkin, December 17, 2019. 123 Symposium Proceedings, 2020 Decolonization and Landscapes: a Theoretical Primer In various Pacific contexts, the word decolonization often denotes the historical events and processes that followed independence from European powers.3 Here, I embrace a two-part definition of decolonization, drawn from both Indigenous education scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith and historian Susan A. Miller. The first is the reclamation and revitalization of Indigenous practices, which Tuhiwai Smith suggests can function as “spaces of resistance and hope.”4 The second connotation is, as Miller writes, “the utilization of non-Indigenous practices for Indigenous purposes.”5 Walsh’s artistic practice exemplifies this simultaneous continuity and transformation. In this context, the redirection of European genres such as landscapes for Indigenous purposes is a critical practice. However, the relationship of landscape painting to colonization is an historically vexed one, as scholars working across geographies have emphatically demonstrated. W.J.T. Mitchell proposes that “we think of landscape, not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.”6 Krista Thompson refers to colonial landscapes as “‘operational;’”7 often considered benign, she argues that landscapes are both politically motivated and inherently biased. Thomas further states baldly that “landscape painting must be the form of settler visual culture that relates most directly to the practical struggle of colonization, which is, first and foremost, about the occupation of the land and attachment to country.”8 Each 3 Tracey Banivanua-Mar crucially points out the inadequacies of decolonization’s political history. She explains that initially, ‘decolonization’ was coined by M.J. Bonn “as a negative [term], referring to an undoing or a moving backwards along the path of colonial intrusion.” However, she argues, “it now increasingly signals failure… decolonisation was a form of imperialism through retreat rather than invasion.” Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 11. 4 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books Ltd., 2013), 4. 5 Susan A. Miller, “Native America Writes Back: The Origin of the Indigenous Paradigm in Historiography,” Wicazo Sa Review 23, no. 2 (2008): 15. 6 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1. 7 Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 19. 8 Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/ Colonial Culture, 53. 124 Decolonizing Landscapes, Merkin of these theorists emphasizes the socio-political power and influence manifest in landscape paintings. Given the loaded relationship of landscapes to colonization, the adoption of the genre by an Indigenous artist is therefore complex. In his seminal essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Homi Bhabha writes that the mimicry of the colonizer by the colonized is a significant consequence of colonization, positing that “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other.”9 He maintains that there is always a “difference between English and being Anglicized,”10 arguing that the colonized can never become English, only an English version of Indigenous. Bhabha articulates the attraction that the colonized can feel for the colonizer and for colonial institutions and practices. Elizabeth Harney and Ruth Phillips take this a step further, drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon. They maintain that “decolonizing societies and their intellectuals required authentic traditions to attain legitimacy, while their desire to attain the status of modern nation-states required that they reject the past.” As a result, “visual artists often weighed the efficacy of looking backward to partly remembered, partly invented traditions against the value of forging new forms of participation in the shared spaces and times of modernity.”11 Writing specifically about decolonization and art, Harney and Philips propose an implicit binary, and theorize that the fascination with coloniality functions in opposition to purely Indigenous forms. These theoretical frameworks provide a framework through which to consider Walsh’s work; however, the proposition of a pure duality of Indigenous and Western is limiting. In the colonial setting, people and cultures interacted regularly, influencing and transforming one another in an environment marked by unequal power relations and violence. This complicated dynamic is often oversimplified and Indigenous artists are too frequently portrayed as having only two options when it comes to European genres: either “mimicry or subversion”,12 in the 9 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis (1984): 126. 10 Ibid., 130. 11 Elizabeth Harney and Ruth Phillips, “Introduction: Inside Modernity: Indigeneity, Coloniality, Modernisms,” in Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism, eds. Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 18-19. 12 Ian McLean, “Modernism and the Art of Albert Namatjira,” in Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism, eds. Elizabeth Harney and Ruth Phillips (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 195. 125 Symposium Proceedings, 2020 language of Ian McLean. In her brief discussion of Michael Parekowhai’s 2011 Venice Bienale exhibition ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, He Korero Purakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of. New Zealand River, Megan Tamati-Quennell shrewdly refers to his carved piano as a “made-over readymade,” featuring simultaneously Māori and European qualities. She argues that the result “explores concepts of the local and the global, but does not make a distinction between the two, instead appearing simultaneously as being from New Zealand and evocative of the many histories that come together within it, while also seeming extremely foreign.”13 Indigenous artistic practices need not be either native or Westernized; rather than static and insular, Indigenous peoples are dynamic, diverse, and creative, and so too are their modes of expression. Figure 1. John Walsh, It’s not art, it’s just a scene, 2014, Oil on canvas, Gow Langsford Gallery 13 Megan Tamati-Quennell, “Decolonial Documents: Part Four,” Frieze, Nov. 21, 2018. 126 Decolonizing Landscapes, Merkin Walsh’s Landscapes These tensions and possibilities are palpable in Walsh’s work, which takes up and revises the paradigm of Western landscape painting for the expression of indigeneity. Many of his canvasses, including It’s not art, it’s just a scene (2014) [fig. 1], function as a commentary on colonialism and on the Indigenous-settler relationship that continues to play out in Aotearoa today. This work features a rocky, tree-covered, mountainous landscape in varying shades of brown, beige, green, black, and white. In the background, in alternatingly brighter and darker shades of blue roll hills, clouds, or waves; it is difficult to identify what the white and violet crests and peaks represent. On a brown outcropping in the foreground stand two figures with their backs to the viewer: one stands on the left, wearing dark blue pants, a blue shirt, and a dark backpack. To the right stands a figure with reddish hair wearing a purple dress, legs bare and starkly white against the dark trees. The brush in this canvas is tangled; no easy way through it appears, while the peaks in the farground are wild and roiling. Meanwhile, the two figures in the foreground appear to have come almost from another canvas,
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