UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) The native as image: art history, nationalism, and decolonizing aesthetics Caro, M.A. Publication date 2010 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Caro, M. A. (2010). The native as image: art history, nationalism, and decolonizing aesthetics. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:04 Oct 2021 THE NATIVE AS IMAGE ART HISTORY, NATIONALISM, AND DECOLONIZING AESTHETICS MARIO A. CARO Cover Image: Larry McNeil , Grandma, We Who are Your Children , 2001. THE NATIVE AS IMAGE: ART HISTORY, NATIONALISM, AND DECOLONIZING AESTHETICS ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op woensdag 30 juni 2010, te 15:00 uur door Mario Andrés Caro geboren te Bogotá, Colombia Promotiecommissie Promotor: Prof. dr. M.G. Bal Overige Leden: Prof. dr. D.A. Cherry Dr. R. Esner Prof. dr. R. Kroes Dr. E. Peeren Prof. dr. C.J.M. Zijlmans Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Table of Contents Preface i Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Reading the Last Image and Beyond 14 A Nationalist Photographic Archive 15 Visualizing the Beginning and the End 22 Pictorialism and the Aesthetics of Nostalgia 33 Chapter 2 Curtis Today: Recuperating Nostalgia 49 Nostalgia and Nation 57 Photography’s Testimonial Effect 61 Conclusion 79 Chapter 3 Disciplining Art History: The Hopi, Aby Warburg, and Visual Studies 81 The Warburg Lecture: A Nostalgic Performance 84 Curtis and Bastian 90 Shifting the Third Man 99 Conclusion 106 Chapter 4 Infelicitous Sites of Exhibition: The Nostalgic Space of the Museum 108 Naming as Possessing 110 Enacting Infelicities 115 Essential Sites 122 Siting Reservation X 126 At Home: Permanence of Time and Place 144 Conclusion 151 Chapter 5 Decolonizing the Native Body: Reconsidering Native Self-Portraiture 154 The Syntax of Self-Portraiture 155 Postcolonial Time 162 Legibility and Irony of Avant-garde Aesthetics 170 Appropriating Postcolonial Theory 177 Native Self-portrait as Allo-portrait 189 Conclusion 194 Conclusion 195 Summary 201 Samenvatting 205 Acknowledgments 210 List of Illustrations 214 Works Cited 216 i Preface “¡No sea tan Indio!” This was an admonishment I heard now and then when I was a child in Colombia. “Don’t be such an Indian!” It was directed at me whenever I failed to observe proper etiquette. A more literal translation is “Don’t be so much the Indian!” This meaning is more telling of a certain anxiety the expression betrays, an unease about Native identity found in much of Latin America. In regions where racial categories are not as easily invoked as a stable marker of identity, Native identity is more often determined by cultural means, such as language, fashion, customs, manners, music, art, and food. Although these signifiers are themselves fairly slippery, it is their instability that produces such anxiety about, and vigilance against, behavior that may allude to Native identity. The difference in the ways in which racial categories function between South and North, between my place of birth, the source of initial cultural identity, and my current home and site of assimilation, has always framed the ways in which I examine culture. It was during a panel discussion held for the opening of “Anticipating the Dawn: Contemporary Art by Native American Women,” a show held at the Gardiner Art Gallery of Oklahoma State University in January of 2000, that, after some decades, I heard the admonishment again. This time it was part of an anecdote told by Ofelia Zepeda, the Tohono O’odham linguist and poet. She recounted how as a little girl she was scolded not to be “such an Indian” when she misbehaved. Unlike my experience, however, hers was part of a history of struggles that resisted, rather than embraced, assimilation. Her warn ing was against behaving like the figure of the savage that the dominant culture had constructed, a warning that highlighted and embraced the specificity of her Tohono O’odham ancestry. The Indian she was warned not to be like was the colonial stereotype of the wild Indian. My reprimand, on the other hand, was a Eurocentric negation of any possible trace of the Indigenous within. The difference between the vigilance practiced by Zepeda’s family and that enforced by mine motivates my discussion in the following study of the uses of the Native image in the production of art and its history. While the admonish ii ment Zepeda recalled invoked a colonial gaze that was immediately sup- planted by her Tohono O’odham perspective on civility, mine reinforced a nos- talgia for a Eurocentric perspective that denied the presence of the Native. My migration north was the kind that many of us have made, seeking eco- nomic stability, educational opportunities, and an overall improved quality of life. However, the successful traversal of the many borders created to maintain an in- frastructure that favors the north has required a great degree of assimilation, a process that distanced me from my Native self. This study is an intellectual journey back to that self. My quest began with my interest in art history, and that most European of cultural periods, the Dutch Golden Age. The analysis of this realistic, and, thus, high- ly effective, imagery allowed me a perspective on how the Native was imagined then, and to a great extent continues to be conceived today, within the project of empire. My engagement with the history of this way of looking was eventually sup- planted by an interest in contemporary visions of Indigeneity, particularly those produced by Native artists themselves. This study is intended as a contribution to the critical analysis of this contemporary vision of the Native. 1 Introduction The agency of the native cannot simply be imagined in terms of a resistance against the image—that is, after the image has been formed—nor in terms of a subjectivity that existed before , beneath, inside, or outside the image. It needs to be rethought as that which bears witness to its own demolition—in a form that is at once image and gaze, but a gaze that exceeds the moment of colonization. —Rey Chow (144) In this study, I attempt to identify various aesthetic strategies employed in the vis- ual representation of Native Americans as part of the function of nation building. Whether used in the ongoing production of the United States as a nation-state or as Native efforts toward decolonization, the discourses that contextualize the Native as image are constantly being reconfigured. 1 I examine the role of art his- tory and anthropology, academic disciplines intimately involved in defining Na- tive visual culture, in order to locate and analyze institutional sites where these discourses are produced, preserved, disseminated, and consumed, namely: the archive, the academy, and the museum. I focus my discussion on case studies that illustrate various efforts by Native artists to decolonize these discourses, ef- forts that often rely on visual self-representation. Ultimately, I analyze approaches to reading the image of the Native body, with particular attention to self-portraiture, as instances in which the body is produced as a sovereign site. My argument is that by considering these aes- thetic practices within the context of nationalism it is possible to recognize the production of a gaze that, as Rey Chow describes in the epigraph above, “ex- ceeds the moment of colonization.” I have limited the scope of my analysis to the investigation of discourses in which the Native as image is actively contested. Although there is much overlap among them, the three institutional sites of my analysis are locations that are de- 1 I am using Michel Foucault’s broad notion of discourse, which he defines as those signi- fying “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (1972 49). 2 fined and organized by disciplinary, thus ideological, schemata. Within these in- stitutions, the Native body is often negotiated by means of an essentialist invoca- tion, whether by imperialist discourses seeking to reify the Native as subject or by avant-garde Native artists looking to disrupt the body’s articulation within the project of empire. Although there are many other sites where discursive produc- tions of Native subjectivity can be found (e.g., legal, popular, religious, medical), I have selected these three locations as primarily invested in defining Native vis- ual culture. My approach is indebted to Michel Foucault’s formulation of discourse. The idea that an object does not precede but is instead constituted by those signifying practices that define it is particularly useful for investigating the discursive produc- tion of the Native as the West’s fundamental other. In order to examine these prac- tices adequately, my study requires an interdisciplinary approach, one that can be categorized as belonging to the practice of visual studies.