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Shape Shifters.Pdf rERS i ART AND HUMOR AS A TOOL BY STACI GOLAR rseveral days in 1987, visitors to San Diego's Museum of Man witnessed something unexpected. After winding their way around exhibits typical of an anthropological museum, they found themselves in a gallery featuring an American Indian man adorned in only a loincloth, lying in an exhibit case filled with sand. Didactic labels explained the exhibit, including bodily scrs(the result of excessive drinking), the man's name even his dorce papers. "Is he alive?" some questioned under their breath. ledt tifact Piece," it was all a carefully conceived event by (eLuisefio)that woke the world up to another mode of expresion for contemporary Native people: performance art. Performance art is hard to define. It challenges audiences to break down preconceived ideas about what art is, and what it isn't. It always includes the artist's own body as a medium, but unlike theater, it's not always meant to be performed night after night or with the same script. Often, it's not scripted at all. According to timelines deduced by mainstream art historians, performance art has its origins in the Futrrism and Dada movements of the early 20th century and "hap- peni•gs" of the 1950s, but it became more clearly defined in the '60s as an offshoot of conceptual art. While many Native performance art- ists remind us that their ancestors have been doing this type of work for centuries, the numbers who have been recognized for such work in a contemporary context have grown only in the past 25 years. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20M9 29 created "Emendatio," a multi-layered per- formance and installation piece. After he uncovered the story of Pablo Tac, a Luisefio Indian who traveled to Rome in the 1800s to study and become a missionary, but who also wrote historical accounts of the Luisefio from a Native perspective, Luna focused on exploring Catholicism-with its unpleasant, complicated history of the forced conversion Sof Native peoples-as the thread connect- ing his tribe to Italy. Luna's performance alluded to ritual, something perhaps more familiar to a Catholic-European audience; after blessing and laying a circle of stones, commodity foods, sugar packets, insulin vials and syringes, he danced in place for four hours on each of the beginning four days of the international event. It might surprise onlookers to know that Luna approaches performance art with a healthy dose of discipline, perhaps a result of taking a performance art class at the University of California, Irvine as a college student. "Performance art can come across like something with seemingly no rules, but I don't believe that just anything goes," he states. Therefore, if one is to witness his work and feel a certain way upon leaving, it is almost certain that Luna was thinking about all of those components when he conceived it. Lately Luna has been touring "La Nostalgia-Our Greatest Hits" with long- time collaborator Guillermo G6mez-Pefia. He also is performing with Little Big Band, a musical group founded by artist Preston SSingletary (Tlingit). In the future he'd like to start directing and wants to create a Sperformance ensemble. "I'm also thinking about writing a musical," Luna admits. "It will be tongue-in-cheek, about a Mickey Top: Bear mask and "We Become Them: Bear" a presentation by James Luna. Above: Bently Rourke-type burned-out artist who could Spang in "One Go Native" in 2005. have been a 'wrastler,' and I'll perform songs in various styles as a new way to present my monologues," he states, dryly. "Since retir- ing from my day job I have been busier than ever and more artistic James Luna is one who has been recognized, but who also has opportunities are coming to me. Life is good." paved the way. He believes that performance art "offers an oppor- If it isn't yet evident that humor is a significant component of tunity like no other for Native people to express themselves with- most Native performance artists' work, Northern Cheyenne artist out compromise in the Indian traditional art forms of ceremony, Bently Spang will help clarify that. His "techno-powwows" feature dance, oral traditions and contemporary thought." Beyond his semi- a character that enters the stage wearing a skin-tight, gold lamý suit nal "Artifact Piece," where he turned mainstream modes of Indian with platform boots, silver cowboy hat, braids and a bright blue face. representation upside-down, Luna has constructed countless other The comical elements catch the audience off guard, providing "a pieces that deal with themes of ethnicity and identity, the hypocrisy way in" in order to talk about serious, sometimes painful issues, he of the dominant society of the United States, and more. explains. Spang believes humor is a great leveler in performance art, In 2006, as the first artist to represent the National Museum following in the Indian tradition of clowning that has kept Native of the American Indian at the prestigious Venice Biennale, Luna people humble and on their toes for millennia. Spang, who was 30 NATIVEPEOPLES His "Blue-Faced Indian of the Future" (Spang has purposely not "HUMOR IS SUCH named the character, but alas, others have) evolved out of a reac- A HUGE PART tion to the stoic, always-in-profile Native male of the mainstream. OF "Rather than fight the national identity that has been crafted for OUR COMMUNITIES. Native people, I decided to replace it with my version of the Indian of the present and the future," Spang says. The character has its I'M TRYING TO origins in his "Temple of Enit," a piece that explored the power of the ordinary (as Native life is so often presented as mystical), and a UNDERSTAND IT performance he videotaped to show with an installation at the Tang Museum (at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York) titled TO A DEGREE IN "Boutique of the Damned." MY WORK, Now a visiting professor of video at the School of the Museum of BUT Fine Arts in Boston, Spang states that he didn't pursue performance ALSO UNDERSTAND art, but rather it found him, and now he's hooked. "Every time I per- form there is a certain amount of trepidation and anxiety," he says. ITS POWER IN THE "But what keeps me coming back to it is the power of that temporal moment during a performance. There are epiphanies where every- WAY THAT IT OPENS thing is perfectly aligned. It has the potential to restore things-you have a chance as a Native artist to clarify things in a way that has PEOPLE UP." never happened before." Lori Blondeau (Gordon First Nation Cree/Saulteaux) is another - BENTLY SPANG (NORTHERN CHEYENNE) artist who likes to use the power of the absurd to confront stereotypes about the Native experience. Whether it's her campy character "Belle Sauvauge" (loosely based on the Indigenous women who performed in the historic Wild West shows, as well as a spoof of the 1950s film Calamity Jane in which Doris Day performed as a cross-dressing, gender-bending, white cowgirl) or her saucy "Cosmosquaw" who loves to gamble and pose provocatively on magazine covers, her work actually comes from a deeply personal place. "Sometimes I develop a piece or a character from a thought, something that is hap- pening in my life or the reality of being an Indian in Canada. I am very influenced by my family and their stories," says Blondeau. Her work often explores the impact of colonization on the roles and lifestyles of Native women. She says her "performance personas refer to the damage caused by colonialism and to the ironic pleasures of displacement and resistance." At the INDIANacts: Aboriginal Performance Art Conference in Canada in 2002, Blondeau seemed to illustrate this by gorging herself on McDonald's hamburgers, one after another, while a video in the background showed footage of her crushing berries and scaling fish, a more traditional and balanced approach to food. While Blondeau keeps a busy schedule as director of Tribe, a First Nations arts organization in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, she con- tinues to develop her own work. She will be in a group show titled BADLAND with Erica Lord (Inupiaq/Athabascan), Bonnie Devine (Ojibway) and Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), at the Museum of >- Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe (see "Museums," this issue) through early 2010. The performance work "Cosmosquaw," by Lori Blondeau (Gordon First Nation Cree/Saulteaux) of Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe) has been described as beautiful, complicated, haunting and politically defiant, but its underlying themes are consistent: identity, memory, born in Montana and grew up on and off the Cheyenne reservation, history and place. There is uneasy equilibrium in her work as she says, "Humor is such a huge part of our communities. I'm trying to points out something forgotten or symbolically rights a wrong. With understand it to a degree in my work, but also understand its power her 1991 "Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowen: Speaking to Their in the way that it opens people up." Mother," for instance, Belmore built a giant megaphone that was SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2009 31 a "Fringe," by Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), 2008. Below: Buffalo Boy's "Do Not Feel the Buffalo Modern Fuel," by Adrian Stimson (Siksika Nation). and knees, she scrubbed the concrete with soapy water, later shouting out the names of the missing women while dragging roses through her mouth and spitting out the petals. In the second part of "Vigil," Belmore nailed herself, using the skirt tails of a bright red dress, to a telephone pole and then thrashed until she tore herself free, her dress left in tattered shreds.
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