Shifting Grounds

Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art

Kate Morris

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295744827
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

A distinctly Indigenous form of landscape representation is emerging among contemporary Indigenous artists from North America. For centuries, landscape painting in European art typically used representational strategies such as single-point perspective to lure viewers—and settlers—into the territories of the old and new worlds. In the twentieth century, abstract expressionism transformed painting to encompass something beyond the visual world, and, later, minimalism and the Land Art movement broadened the genre of landscape art to include sculptural forms and site-specific installations. In Shifting Grounds, art historian Kate Morris argues that Indigenous artists are expanding and reconceptualizing the forms of the genre, expressing Indigenous attitudes toward land and belonging even as they draw upon mainstream art practices. The resulting works evoke all five senses: from the overt sensuality of Kay WalkingStick's tactile paintings to the eerie soundscapes of Alan Michelson's videos to the immersive environments of Kent Monkman's dioramas, this art resonates with a fully embodied and embedded subjectivity. Shifting Grounds explores themes of presence and absence, survival and vulnerability, memory and commemoration, and power and resistance, illuminating the artists' engagement not only with land and landscape but also with the history of representation itself.

CHAPTER ONE

The Lay of the Land

Like life, landscape is boring; we must not say so.

W. J. T. MITCHELL

IN THE SUMMER OF 2000, WALLA WALLA PAINTER JAMES LAVADOUR HAD AN epiphany. Two strains of his work that had for some time run parallel suddenly converged with tectonic force. The first strain, which has been described as Lavadour’s “signature” style,¹ is exemplified by works such as Salamander (1997; figure 1.1): built up of hundreds of layers of oil on wood, these paintings depict primal landscapes shrouded in haze or consumed by fire, arranged in multipaneled compositions that resonate as whirling vortices of energy.² The second strain, which emerged more recently in Lavadour’s practice, is far more abstract, characterized by pronounced drips and flows of paint and overlays of opaque washes. The material itself is more viscous than in the signature panels, so much more so that in works like Untitled (2000), Lavadour employed a squeegee to create broad gestural wipes of fluid paint. These later works were inspired in part by Lavadour’s experimentation with printmaking processes, through which he learned to “separate the stages of an individual painting and conceive of [it] as being formed of many successive layers, like a print.”³

Both of these strains of Lavadour’s painting are inspired by the landscape, the forces of nature, and the physical properties of paint. As Lavadour puts it, “In paint there is hydrology, erosion, mass, gravity, mineral deposits”; his intent is to “display the occurrence of landscape inherent in the act of painting.”⁴ While these forces course through all of Lavadour’s work, the artist perceives the variants described above as distinct enough to refer to the more imagistic paintings as “landscapes” and to the more abstract forms as “architectural abstractions,” “structures,” or “interiors.”⁵ It is tempting to interpret Lavadour’s two forms of imagery — and his early hesitation to let the two streams merge — as connoting a shift in his vision, from a more outward and objective view of the landscape to a more expressionist, even visceral perspective. Yet Lavadour maintains that none of his paintings are truly objective views of the landscape; instead his paintings are records of fully kinetic experiences, of walking in the mountains of the Umatilla Reservation, where he lives in eastern Oregon, and paying close attention to the “elemental aspects of the world” he encounters there. “I realized that what I was looking at and what I was doing were the same thing. . . . As a physical being, I was an event of nature myself. I could become a conduit for making art, a conduit of nature, a conduit of the extraordinary event.”⁶

1.1James Lavadour (Walla Walla, b. 1951)

Salamander (1997)

Oil on board, 48 ½ × 60 inches

Copyright James Lavadour. Courtesy of the artist.

Portland Art Museum

The intention of this book is to draw on the language that Lavadour and other Indigenous artists use to describe their art and their experience of place to build an inclusive theory of contemporary Indigenous landscape representation — one that can account for both strains of Lavadour’s work and especially for the convergence of the two forms of perception that they seem to represent. In this chapter and the two that follow, I will revisit Mitchell’s question of what a landscape painting is and what it does; however, while Mitchell sought answers in the European landscape tradition, I adopt key concepts regarding land and Indigeneity from sources well outside the realm of art history. I have already indicated that the broader discourse of Indigenous sovereignty heavily informs this study. In this chapter I trace the migration of the legal concept of sovereignty first into Indigenous cultural studies, then more specifically into visual culture theory. I also take into consideration the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (undrip), which provides ample evidence for the centrality of land in Indigenous culture and self-governance. The language of the undrip codifies an Indigenous view of land that encompasses much more than physical territory — a view that was echoed by George Longfish and Joan Randall in their influential 1983 essay, “Contradictions in Indian Territory,” where they defined “landbase” as “the interwoven aspects of place, history, culture, philosophy, a people and their sense of themselves and their spirituality, and how the characteristics of [a] place are all part of a fabric.”⁷ Taken together, the language of Indigenous visual sovereignty and the undrip provide new insight into the question of what a landscape painting is, what it does, and even what it pictures. In its contemporary and Indigenous form, a landscape painting is an assertion of Indigenous presence, a transmission of place-based knowledge, a depiction of landbase. It is a chronicle of what Lavadour terms the “extraordinary event.”

CONVERGENCE

It was Lavadour’s relentless pursuit of the extraordinary event that led him to interweave the two strains of his imagery in 2000. Recognizing that each form had a unique expressive power and inspired in part by the improvisational techniques of jazz music, Lavadour began to juxtapose his panels in multipaneled compositions. The process began tentatively at first: in Flag 2 (2001) and Scaffold (2000), for example, five “landscapes” and four “structures” are woven into unified compositions, yet the individual panels remain basically true to type. In the latter example, however, a few panels edge toward a hybrid form in which structural drips or wipes are laid over the surface of a landscape.⁸ One of these hybrid forms centers the composition of Deep Moon (2004; figure 1.2): the hazy, atmospheric landscape of the central panel is transformed by the addition of streaks of vibrant color in the middle ground. After Deep Moon Lavadour embraced the energy of the new forms, and gradually the distinction between the landscapes and architectural abstractions ceased to apply. Landscape and structural elements are fully integrated in each panel of Blanket (2005), Wash (2007), Cache (2007), Straight Ahead (2010), Tiicham (2013), and innumerable individual panels produced in the past decade. In these works, it is the convergence of the two strains of imagery, like the fusion of separately charged particles, that Lavadour credits with generating an explosion of energy.⁹ To some extent, Lavadour’s epiphany in 2000 was an extension of earlier innovations, such as his arrangement of individual panels into larger compositions. He likened this action to composing a poem: “I realized that like poetry, you put one against the other and they enhance one another and they do something larger than the individual pieces do.”¹⁰

1.2James Lavadour (Walla Walla, b. 1951)

Deep Moon (2004)

Oil on wood, 72 × 90 inches

Copyright James Lavadour. Courtesy of the artist.

Private collection

The kind of resonance that Lavadour’s compound compositions produce is also felt in the multipaneled paintings of Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick. For more than thirty years, WalkingStick has worked in diptych format, pairing what she calls “imagistic landscapes” with “pure abstractions” — forms that are analogous to the two strains of imagery that converged in Lavadour’s work in 2000.¹¹ Describing the two types of panels that make up diptychs such as On the Edge (1989; figure 1.3) and The Abyss (1994), WalkingStick echoes Lavadour in asserting that “one is not the abstraction of the other, one is the extension of the other. I want the two portions to resonate with one another like the stanzas of a poem.”¹²

In WalkingStick’s case, the impetus to pair canvases came as a way to mitigate the specificity of the landscape imagery, which emerged gradually and unintentionally as a by-product of her working method. For years WalkingStick had been painting with layers of saponified wax and acrylic, laying down the material with her bare hands and scratching through successive layers to reveal the colors in the layers below. Though her imagery was resolutely abstract, employing a minimalist vocabulary of lines and arcing forms, she found that the thick layers of material were increasingly suggestive of the landscape. As she explained to interviewer Lawrence Abbott in 1991: “The paintings became more and more about the earth, the landscape, and they looked, many of them, like seeing the earth in the geological diagrams one sees of the different-layered remains of the various eons of the history of the earth. The paintings had this feeling of accruing the way the earth has accrued with layers of rock and sediment.”¹³ As the association with landscapes in her work became more prevalent — evolving by 1985 into “imagistic landscapes” — WalkingStick recalls that she was reluctant to abandon abstraction. Instead, she began to pair the landscape panels with purely abstract counterparts, and she found “a kind of symbiosis there that was quite remarkable, that [she] would not have predicted.”¹⁴

Perhaps the two canvases of WalkingStick’s diptychs resonate with one another because they both stem from the same source, namely the artist’s love of paint’s material properties and her search for archetypal or universal imagery. Rather than negating the qualities that WalkingStick strongly associated with abstraction, the pairing of abstract images with imagistic landscapes enabled her paintings to “encompass more of the visual world.”¹⁵ Nevertheless, it was important to WalkingStick that the balance in her diptychs remained weighted slightly toward the abstract side. Simply put, she did not want the viewer to regard the landscape imagery as representational in the sense of describing a specific place because that kind of particularity ran counter to her more metaphysical approach to painting. In her view, “They are paintings that are about landscapes, they are about land. The subject is the land, the earthscape, but [these are] not pictures of a place.”¹⁶ Thus, the joining of images in WalkingStick’s diptychs both enhances and mitigates the properties of the individual canvases, allowing her work to speak of one subject in two different idioms. Over time, WalkingStick has articulated how each of the two types of images contributes to expressing “two kinds of perceptions of the earth.”¹⁷ She feels the imagistic landscapes are inspired by the visual world and rooted in the present, albeit in a fleeting moment. The abstractions on the other hand are everlasting, referring to “both the past and the future.”¹⁸ In WalkingStick’s view, the diptychs “represent a balance between the spiritual and the temporal — between our inner and outer selves.”¹⁹

1.3Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee, b. 1935)

On the Edge (1989)

Acrylic, saponified wax, oil, and oil stick on canvas, 32 × 64 inches

Copyright Kay WalkingStick. Courtesy of the artist.

Private collection

WalkingStick’s bridging of the threshold between physical and metaphysical realms in her paintings is strongly reminiscent of Lavadour’s integration of landscapes and structures, which art historian W. Jackson Rushing has characterized as a “determined fusion of internal and external realities.”²⁰ The relative ease with which artists and critics came to reconcile these differences between strictly visual and more broadly phenomenological forms of perception in the early 2000s is reflective of the ways that landscape theory had shifted in the previous decade from regarding landscapes primarily as social hieroglyphs or textual systems to something much more subjective and integral to the individual human experience. To better understand the significance of this paradigm shift, we return to Mitchell’s groundbreaking study of Landscape and Power.

SETTLER LANDSCAPES

In the first edition of Landscape and Power, Mitchell articulated the thesis that landscapes — and landscape paintings, though this distinction is not always as clear as it could be — are not simply objects of contemplation but also “a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.”^2...