December 12, 2020
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This Week's Contents
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Indigenous Artists Elucidate the Trump Era
Dakota Noot’s Performative Explorations of Queerness
What Are You Going Through? |
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Indigenous Artists Elucidate the Trump Era
by Lynn Trimble
Rafer Johnson about to light the Olympic Torch at the Los Angeles Coliseum, 1984 Olympic Games.
Political pundits have spent years exploring the rise of Trumpism, postulating explanations for the populist movement steeped in racism, sexism and xenophobia. They’ve dissected American history and contemporary life, seeking to understand how our democracy could have elevated Donald Trump to power, as if his election was an aberration of American culture rather than an embodiment off it. Meanwhile, indigenous artists working in North America during the last two decades have been visualizing the factors that helped to make the last four years possible. More than 20 of their works are featured in “Larger Than Memory: Contemporary Art From Indigenous North America,” an exhibition that elucidates historical and contemporary manifestations of colonizing culture even as it prompts consideration of ways it’s been amplified during the age of Trump. Curated by Diana Pardue and Erin Joyce, the exhibit at Phoenix’ Heard Museum continues through January 3, 2021.
Several of these artists consider the ways indigenous people have been misrepresented and marginalized. Lewis deSoto’s “Suburban Skookum (Self-Portrait)” (2018), a towering sculpture of the artist holding an asthma inhaler in one hand and a microphone in the other, subverts dolls originally designed by a white woman that heightened negative stereotypes of American Indians. With “Miss America” (2012), Ken Monkman shifts the colonizer gaze to an indigenous lens by appropriating and recontextualizing art historical motifs, flooding landscapes with indigenous bodies, and adding iconic imagery such as a temple ruin and remains of the Twin Towers after 9/11. The exhibition also considers exploitation of natural resources, climate change, and habitat destruction — all hallmarks of Trump policies that prioritize profits. During his time in office, Trump’s administration permitted expanded oil drilling and increased work on the wall along the southern border of the U.S., displacing both indigenous people and animals that live on the affected land. |
Lewis deSoto, “Suburban Snookum (Self-Portrait),” 2018, plasticized painted and printed cloth, printed Tyvek, 3D printed plastic, electric fan, 140 x 45 x 45” |
Cara Romero’s “No Wall” (2018) pictures four indigenous children wearing aviator sunglasses with dark lenses, standing in front of a brick wall, painted white, that bears black text reading “No Wall.” For “This is Not a Snake” (2017-2018), Cannupa Hanska Luger created a winding serpent using refuse from exploitive extraction and trade practices.
Defining moments in Trump’s presidency include his assertion that there were “good people on both sides” after confrontations between white supremacists, who gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 to protect a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and those who counter-protested against them. It’s a flashpoint that reverberates through two works by Ian Kuali’I, including “Monument/Pillar” (2020). The piece comprises a portrait of King Kamehameha III alongside a portrait of Captain James Cook. The Hawaiian ruler faces upright, but the British explorer is shown upside down, forcing the viewer to adopt a different perspective.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Neal Inuksois Ambrose-Smith, “Trade Canoe: Fry Bread,” 2018; wood lathe, artificial sinew, fry bread, varnish, 19 x 120 x 18” | A number of works are layered with meaning, due in part to the ways they channel particular challenges of the Trump years, including the pandemic that continues to rage on his watch, taking its greatest toll on indigenous communities and people of color. The round red price tags that slowly cover a man’s face in Mike Patten’s “Little Red Dots” (2017) allude to not only smallpox, but the COVID-19 virus, and the role commerce played in spreading each disease. Patten’s “Native Beating #1” looks like a white baseball bat partially covered in bright red blood. The red beads form a map of Canada when they’re laid flat. Amid COVID-19, the piece also serves to remind us of the ways sports have been prioritized over other aspects of community life, and the ways that leisure activities for the privileged are valued above necessities like food and shelter for the impoverished. “Larger Than Memory” also includes works that reference the impacts of trade and Western diets on indigenous health, such as a canoe layered with fry bread in Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Neal Inuksois Ambrose-Smith’s “Trade Canoe: Fry Bread” (2018). |
Colonizer mindsets and practices existed long before Trump was elected in 2016, of course. But this exhibit demonstrates that thoughtful consideration of contemporary works by indigenous artists can lead to a greater understanding of this particular moment in American life, including the Trump phenomenon.
Mike Patten, "Little Red Dots,” 2017, digital slide show, 0:40”
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Lynn Trimbleis a Phoenix-based art writer whose work ranges from arts reporting to arts criticism. During a freelance writing career spanning more than two decades, over 1,000 of her articles exploring arts and culture have been published in magazine, newspaper and online formats. Follow her work on Twitter@ArtMuseror Instagram@artmusingsaz. |
Dakota Noot’s Performative Explorations of Queerness
by David S. Rubin
While the Covid-19 pandemic has caused many to feel depressed or exasperated from isolation and boredom, Dakota Noot, a young Los Angeles artist who earned his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2017, has found lockdown to be liberating. Shortly before the health crisis changed all of our lives, Noot was preparing for an installation using cutout shaped drawings that were to be mounted on a wall and placed freestanding on the floor. When his show was cancelled, he decided to repurpose the cutouts, turning them into what he calls “wearable drawings.” With Instagram as his main exhibition platform, Noot has been producing a series of intriguing performative photographs that continue his ongoing series of imaginative narratives on the subject of non-binary gender and sexual identity. Growing up queer in Bismarck, North Dakota must have been particularly challenging for Noot as a child and, in a recent interview, he remembers the overall environment as being very conservative and even violent. Fortunately for him, his father taught art, so Noot was able to find solace by making things in his dad’s classes. |
Dakota Noot, “Don’t Have Kids,” 2020, performative photograph, dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist |
Influenced by the comics of Clive Barker, Noot has been painting and drawing monstrous human/animal hybrids over the past few years in a style that he refers to as a “pop political cartoon aesthetic.” For Noot, the monster is a metaphor for how the “other” is viewed by hetero-normative culture. In his performative photographs, he inserts himself into carefully staged settings, both indoor and outdoor, where he assumes the persona of one of his hybrids, adorned with and surrounded by an array of coded symbols that suggest disturbing or offbeat narratives filled with implicit sex and violence. In this respect, he is exaggerating his notion of how hom*ophobic individuals tend to perceive queerness, while also pointing to the history of the self-loathing gay stereotype. This is in full view in the recent remake of “The Boys in the Band.”
Dakota Noot, “I Am the Ocean, My Flesh Is the Stars,” 2020, performative photograph, dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist
| In Noot’s photograph “Don’t Have Kids,” he presents himself as a tribal monster wearing a body garment adorned with multiple drooping forms that he views as nippled testicl*s, fusions of female and male sexual anatomy. An umbilical cord emanating from his mouth attaches to an infant who appears over Noot’s lower body and wields a knife for protection, while two slightly older child-monsters suckle near the artist’s neck. Hunting and kitchen knives are recurring symbols in Noot’s oeuvre because they reflect his upbringing in rural farm country, where brutal slaughtering of animals for food or sport is commonplace. In “Save Some for Mama,” Noot’s head is transformed into that of a sacrificial lamb, with his lower body covered with sensuous open mouths that symbolize lustful desires. In that he is encircled by a threatening assembly of knives, one of which is carried by a devilish visitor, we may be reminded of the tragic fate of Matthew Shepard, who in 1998 was tortured and beaten to death in Laramie, Wyoming, simply because he was gay. |
Some of the most captivating of Noot’s photographs resemble Tarot cards. One example is “Gotta Catch Them All,” where a death figure is shown having just cut its own throat with an abstracted Pokemon Pikachu (pet monster) card. Poised beneath an arch formation made up of emblems signifying sexual desire, the victim’s heart, one lung and multiple nippled testicl*s are expunging from its body. In “I Am the Ocean, My Flesh Is the Stars,” stars inspired by the set of the 1902 Meliés animation “A Trip to the Moon” possess eyes that watch over the protagonist, providing reassurance that being queer is not a matter of choice, but of destiny. Noot is not the first artist to address issues of sexuality and gender through performance-related animal personas. In 1969, Paul Cotton (who now identifies as Adam II, the Late Paul Cotton [born 1938, Fitchburg, MA]) performed at the People’s Park in San Francisco in his “People’s Prick” costume, a furry pink bunny suit with a cutout section that exposed his penis. In the 1990s, Nayland Blake introduced his rabbit-as-trickster costumes in performances addressing hom*ophobia, racism, and misogyny. While Noot’s new work may be viewed within this art historical lineage, his imaginative imagery brings a fresh spin to the genre, while reminding us that there are still many hurdles to overcome in the battle to eradicate hatred towards non-normative people. |
Dakota Noot, “Gotta Catch Them All,” 2020, performative photograph, dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist |
| David S. Rubinis a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed toArts Magazine,Art in America,Artweek,ArtScene,Glasstire,Fabrik,Art and Cake,andVisual Art Source.He has published numerousexhibition catalogs, and his curatorial archives are housed in theSmithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. |
What Are You Going Through?
by Margaret Hawkins
Sigrid Nunez speaks at the National Book Festival, 2018, with her National Book Award winning "The Friend"
This is the title of Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel, her follow up to“The Friend,” which won a National Book Award in 2018. That exquisite book was about suicide, writing, the sticky insides of the literary world, a dog.This new book, which came out in September, too soon to have been based on the coronavirus pandemic yet with a weirdly prescient title, is about helping someone in the last stages of cancer who wants to end things on her own terms. It’s also about friendship and a cat. These books are not as unremittingly sad as they sound. They’re funny, too, and juicy with barely veiled literary gossip. They range widely in subject and tone, coolly considering issues we might not want to admit we’re thinking about.
Simone Weil (1909-1943) | Nunez’s titular question quotes French philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943):Quel est tontourment?Roughly translated: What are you going through? More literally, what is your torment? Weil says that compassion demands we ask the question. I hate asking personal questions over Zoom. I hardly need to, though. School on Zoom is called remote teaching but the medium can be jarringly intimate. Students tell me things they never would in a normal classroom, without being asked, or they do so in emails or in their assigned writing. They’re going through a lot. They’re young — some weren’t even alive in the twentieth century — but they write about death all the time. I had them read“The Friend”on a hunch they’d understand and they voted it their favorite book of the semester. “It’s about loss,” one said, simply, in explanation. Question: What are you going through? Answer (all): Life, until you’re not. |
At one of the schools where I teach I’m supposed to be getting students to write about art, but galleries and museums are closed and many students are back in their childhood bedrooms, some in far away time zones. When they write instead about what they’re going through — physically, mentally, financially — who am I to tell them not to? The creative writing students, at the other school, almost all write about death. Most everybody is battling the one thing that connects us: technology, including me.
Nunez quotes Franz Kafka: “The meaning of life is that it stops.”
What is anyone going through?I spent Thanksgiving weekend on an island in northern Wisconsin in a place so remote it is only accessible by ferry. There is one grocery store that also sells liquor and one other store that sells everything else, which is called the mercantile. In late November, three bars were also open, and the Lutheran church. The performing arts center is closed for now. So are the fiber arts school and the independent bookstore.
The author and friend in northern Wisconsin
| Even in the summer there aren’t many people on the island.By late fall, it’s just residents, a few peace-seeking visitors, and some guys in orange hats who come from the mainland for deer-hunting. There’s something about an island that requires people to get along, the art people and the hunters, for instance. Despite the occasional crack of gunfire, people seem kinder there, more tolerant. Maybe that’s because there are so few. If you take a walk with your dog you have two choices, the beach or the road, and if you choose the road you might see a car and if you do it is guaranteed that the driver will slow and raise four fingers from the steering wheel in a laconic wave. I saw a few Trump banners still fluttering in the wind weeks after the election. The Biden folks had taken theirs down, maybe out of respect for others’ disappointment. Here’s something: the island phone book lists 700 or so residents alphabetically by first name.At first this seems amazing, funny. Later the sense of it comes clear, like first light. If you meet a Bob, say, at the mercantile while shopping, say, for a socket wrench, and want to track him down, you can look him up — under B. And if you see him in trouble later, you’ll probably help, whatever sign he has or had on his lawn. Because hey. There’s nobody else around. Is that such a bad reason? |
In addition to fiction, I had my class read essays and a memoir. I tried to explain how those are different from novels, and not just because they’re “true.” We talked about interiority. In a novel you might come to know the thoughts and secrets of many characters, not just one.
A classic art assignment: set up a still life and tell the class to draw the negative space. Tell them, don’t look at the objects, look at the space around them and draw that. Pay attention.
Sometimes you can only see something by looking at something else. We talk a lot now about what we aren’t seeing – art, galleries, museums, concerts, faraway places we intended to visit, our friends and family. It’s a drag, yes. But whatarewe seeing? What if we paid attention to that, to them? Simone Weil also said: Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Question: What are you going through?
Answer, maybe: Negative space.
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MargaretHawkinsis a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015),“How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mentalillness, and others.She wrote a column about artfor theChicagoSun-Times, was Chicagocorrespondent forARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications includingThe New York Times, theChicago Tribune,Art & AntiquesandFabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University. VisitMargaret Hawkins' website. |
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