Arriving Forever Into the Present World

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The essay Arriving Forever into the Present World: Indigenous Time Traditions and the Artistic Imagination was originally written in 2020 for the Heard Museum exhibition Larger Than Memory. This essay is the spark that ignited the development of this exhibition and, with the author’s permission, it has been edited for reprinting in this gallery guide.

Indigenous Time Traditions and the Artistic Imagination

The debate over the definition of “tradition” in Native North American Art goes back to at least the time of Dorothy Dunn’s Studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico during the 1930s, when, according to the Heard Museum: “Dunn’s goal was to establish Native American painting ‘as one of the fine arts of the world.’” Furthermore, “In order to accomplish this, [Dunn] advocated a balance of Native tradition and modern innovation.” In an era defined by the 1928 Meriam Report and the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, tradition was typically thought of as the antipodes of the modern or contemporary. Consequently, the problem that this created for artists, art historians, and curators was how to reconcile in Indigenous art what was considered to be irreconcilable in western art. For many, even today, the difference between traditional and modern is the same as between the archaic and obsolete, on one hand, and the new and innovative, on the other. More to the point, the transition from the Impressionists to the Cubists and Surrealists is exemplary of the radical rejection of the traditional, or classical, for the modern, contemporary, and the future. Insofar as art should liberate the imagination, it is incumbent on the artist to free him- or herself from the shackles of the past, especially bourgeois or orthodox concepts of the beautiful, such as represented by, say, Poussin, David, and Ingres. Such a move, however, is not without its own pitfalls. The definitions of “modern” and “contemporary,” for example, are far from fixed and unequivocal. Indeed, it will be out of this ambiguity that the question of contemporary Indigenous art will emerge from a completely different notion of time and history.

In his 1989 essay “Breach and Convergence,” the Mexican poet and pensador Octavio Paz noted that the linearity of western historical epochs, such as the Middle Ages and the Napoleonic Era, is disrupted by evasiveness of the modern or contemporary:

What is “modern” is inherently transitory; “contemporary” is a quality that vanishes the moment we name it. There are as many modernities and antiquities as there are eras and societies: the Aztecs were moderns compared to the Olmecs, as was Alexander compared to Amenhotep IV. The “modernist” poetry of Rúben Darío was an antique for the Ultraists, and Futurism now strikes us as more a relic than an aesthetic. The Modern Age will soon be tomorrow’s antiquity.

From the vantage point of western historiography, which arranges peoples and civilizations into generations and epochs along the linear index of the Gregorian calendar —now called the Common Era—the metamorphosing of the now into the distant past irreversibly impacts everything in its path. The scientific mind calls this the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Entropy. As such, when the idea of Progress is applied to this concept of time, be it biological entities or technological inventions, an evolutionary narrative from the simple to the complex, the primitive to the advanced emerges from the growth, demise, and extinction of both natural and manufactured phenomena. Consequently, when this “descent of man” discourse was imposed on non-Western Indigenous peoples they soon saw themselves relegated to the bottom of the human evolutionary ladder. Within such a mind-set, the introduction of modern artistic media and techniques, such as occurred at Dorothy Dunn’s studio and Bacone College, was considered “progress” in American Indian “civilization,” whereas traditional art, meaning what was made prior to the intervention of the whites, was a part of the historical and evolutionary past.

Left: DY Begay (Diné), b. 1953, Palette of Cochineal, 2013, Churro wool, synthetic dye, cochineal dye, 33 x 47 inches. Heard Museum Collection, Gift of the Heard Museum Council in honor of Werner Braum, the Max M. and Carol W. Sandfield Philanthropic Fund of the Dallas Jewish Community Foundation as recommended by Normal L. Sandfield and the Bruce T. Halle Family Foundation at the recommendation of Diane and Bruce Halle in honor of Harvey and Carol Ann Mackay, 4732-1. Jared Tso (Diné), b. 1994, Jar, 2023, ceramic, 9 3/4 diameter x 11 inches. Heard Museum Collection, 5041-1.

With respect to Paz’s earlier observation, what he neglected to explore was how the abstractness of time is actually a social convention, complete with cultural biases. Had Paz taken the time to reflect on, say, the Aztec, or Nahuatl, sense of time, he might have seen the question of modernity differently. Similar to the Mayan and Puebloan groups, the Nahuatl-Aztec recall worlds, or rather “Suns,” that preceded the present one, the Fifth Sun, which is the one that the Spanish—and other Europeans—invaded in the early 16th century. With respect to the Nahuatl-Aztec cosmos, Manuel Aguilar-Moreno summarizes this tradition in Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, in which each of the previous suns is a cosmic epoch:

The previous worlds…were each created out of destruction. Each sun’s demise was due to a natural catastrophe prompted by a fight between the two conflicting deities, Quetzalcoatl, representing life, fertility, and light, and the Black Tezcatlipoca, representing darkness and war. Each cataclysm was prescribed by the sun’s ruling element [namely, earth, water, fire, or wind] and would bring an end to the world and death to all of its inhabitants.

Terrol Dew Johnson (Tohono O’odham), b. 1973, Basket, 2006-2007, eucalyptus, bear grass, sinew, 24 diameter x 18 inches. Heard Museum Collection, 4470-1.

Such notions were enshrined in the Nahuatl-Aztec Sun Stone, their great calendar, which marked their ritual, annual, and 52-year rounds of time. That Sun Stone, and the sense of time it symbolizes, still turns. In his 1957 poem “Piedra del sol,” Paz likened this alternate temporal universe to a “turning course of a river that goes curving, advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever.”

From the vantage of the colonized, what the Europeans brought with them was another cataclysm, specifically war and disease. With respect to time and history, the Spanish conquistadores brought the Requierimento (1513), which asserted the authority of the Spanish monarchy, “subduers of the barbarous nations,” complete with the blessing of the Catholic pope, as the inheritor of the church founded by St Peter of Rome, to bring Christian order to the New World. Based on a biblical narrative, which Vine Deloria Jr critiqued in God Is Red (1973), that extended from the creation of the universe recounted in the Book of Genesis to the Four Gospels of Jesus, which Paul’s letters to the Corinthians shaped into the primitive church, the Spanish conquest forced Indigenous peoples into the linear timeline of Western Civilization, which saw itself, especially the conquering nations, as the pinnacle of God’s plan for the world. To this day, while the Spanish empire is a thing of the past—overturned by 19th century revolutions from the Andes to Mexico—the colonial notion of history perseveres among the settler-colonial nations and institutions that endure into the so-called 21st century, including North America. Yet, does anyone know what year it is according to the Sun Stone? Do Indigenous languages even have a word for modern or contemporary? Or do they only have words for suns, moons, plants, animals, seasons, and ceremonies?

From the vantage point of Indigenous time traditions we are still in the domain of the first storytellers, the ones who handed down the epic accounts of previous worlds, the kinship relations that they created, and the ceremonial life that keeps the people centered. In other words, Indigenous people still live in the time of the Fifth Sun, the Fourth World, the Glittering World, and Turtle Island. The Western calendar and its Christian-based epochs is a colonial fiction, including its notions of modernity, which has been imposed on Indigenous nations to make them doubt the validity of their traditions and to confuse their minds. The debate over tradition and modernity in Indigenous art, therefore, is an example of the colonial crisis inflicted upon Indigenous communities. Consequently, asking such questions as “What is contemporary Indigenous art?” is premised on the assumption that one must privilege the definition of contemporary that is stipulated from a non-indigenous historical tradition. What happens when, instead, viewers look at these works through the lens of the Indigenous experience, which is still tied to land and kinship, not to mention language and oral tradition—albeit complicated by generations of colonization?

Jody Folwell (Kha’p’o Owenge), b 1942, Jar, 1990s, ceramic, 7 1/2 diameter x 12 1/4 inches. Heard Museum Collection, 4391-8.

Indeed, the discourse on Indigenous assimilation into mainstream American society and politics goes back to the beginning of the American Republic, when presidents, senators, missionaries, and Indian agents sought to “civilize” the Indigenous populations, thereby reducing their threat to the white settlers occupying the so-called frontier. Thus, just as taking up the plow and developing one’s allotted land was a sign of “Indian progress” per the policies set by the 1887 General Allotment Act, so too was taking up the brush and producing oil and watercolor images of “traditional Indian dances” and “folklore” regarded as signs of the Indian’s adaptation of western-style easel art. Such a blood-quantum approach to assessing the authenticity of “Indian art,” however, is an affront to the artists’ and communities’ right to define themselves, which is beyond the binary logic of Indian/non-Indian, but must include a range of identities informed by a plethora of indigenous and non-indigenous experiences, values, and ideas. Confronted with all of that, it makes sense to say that there is no such thing as Indian art.

So, then, where does that leave us with respect to “contemporary Indigenous art”? For the better part of a generation, Western scholars and thinkers have abandoned the notion of modernity for the equally ambiguous, but less ethnocentric, idea of postmodernism. In the case of art, ever since Arthur Danto postulated the “end of art,” which was heralded by Andy Warhol’s infamous “factory art,” the discourse on art history and criticism has shed its metanarrative skin, as Jean-François Lyotard might have said in The Postmodern Condition (1979), for a decentralized dissemination of discourses stemming from a plethora of cultural, political, and artistic origins. Among these points of origin are the Indigenous peoples that have inhabited North America—not to mention the rest of the Western Hemisphere—since time immemorial, meaning the time recounted in the oral traditions. As such, contemporary Indigenous art is not contemporary with respect to its place on the timeline of western art history—which, in the case of American art, has long marginalized “minorities” and “others”—but rather with respect to where their communities are in terms of their kinship to one another. This is to say that Indigenous art is contemporary to extent that what Indigenous artists are creating is a part of Indigenous communities’ collective efforts at surviving the onslaught of colonization. In which case, artists working in natural material harvested from their historic homelands, complete with arranging these elements into forms and symbols going back generations, are just as contemporary as their peers and relatives working in an array of media and images that their ancestors never

Nathan Youngblood (Kha’p’o Owenge), b. 1954, Jar, late 1990s, ceramic, 5 3/4 diameter x 6 1/2 inches. Heard Museum Collection, Gift of Neil and Sarah Berman, 4393-54. Artist Once Known (Akimel O’Otham), Basket bowl, c. 1910, willow, martynia, 8 diameter x 2 inches. Heard Museum Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry S. Galbraith, 3309-96.

imagined as a part of their world. What matters more, in the end, is that they are each creating in the here and now of their mutual Indigenous existence. It is the experience that Joy Harjo evokes in her 1990 poem “Grace,” in which she speaks with the voice of a survivor: “I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.”

Annie Antone (Tohono O’odham), b. 1955, Basket, 2015, bear grass, green yucca, white yucca, banana yucca root, martynia, 7 3/4 diameter x 7 inches. Gift of the Heard Museum Council, 4828-1. Artist Once Known (Tohono O’odham), wine basket, 1900-1930, martynia, willow, bear grass. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Byron Harvey III, Na-Sw-Pg-B-67

© Heard Museum 2023 heard.org

Lovena Ohl Gallery

June 2, 2023 - March 3, 2024

Artist Once Known (Diné), First-phase Chief blanket, 1800-1850, wool, indigo dye, 71 x 53 1/4 inches. Fred Harvey Fine Arts Collection at the Heard Museum, 196BL.

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