rebecca belmore and james luna on location at venice

REBECCA BELMORE AND JAMES LUNA ON

LOCATION AT VENICE: THE ALLEGORICAL

INDIAN REDUX

C H A R L O T T E T O W N S E N D - G A U L T

The ‘Indian’ has always been allegorical, long used and abused in other people’s

allegories – diversionary, admonitory, spectacular. In The Truth About Stories (2005)

Thomas King, the Mohawk writer, expresses this received idea succinctly,

asserting that Native American identity has been formed around a few famous

nineteenth-century images: Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Crazy Horse.1 These images,

used repeatedly, parodied, then reduced again to Frederic Jameson’s pastiche,2

have constructed ‘the imaginary Indian’.3 Ironic play with flattened-out pastiche

has characterized the work of many of the best-known twentieth-century Native

artists.4 In uneasy tension, anything but flat, is that other discursive role: the idea

that Natives and their expressive culture, their material culture, their oral

culture, are portals to otherness. It is suggested here that these defining contra-

dictions are themselves now being allegorized in works that are indicative of the

complexities of their own ontological association with indigenous cultural

knowledge, its dispersal or protection, and the play of subjectivities in projections

of others’ desire.

Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain (plates 8.1–8.6 and col. plate 7) and James Luna’s

Emendatio (see plates 8.22–8.26), both exhibited in 2005 at the Venice Biennale,

knowingly complicated the fact that both artists are ‘Indians’, making it possible

to consider how two of the most consistently productive and provocative

Native North American artists over the past twenty years are enacting corrected

allegories of their own.5 It is fortuitous that these artists, whose work is defined in

an important sense by their ancestral territories at opposite ends of North America

– for Luna, a Luiseno, the La Jolla Indian Reservation in southern California,

for Belmore (who now lives in Vancouver), the Anishinabe land near Sioux Lookout

in northern Ontario – should have been part of the same Biennale. Luna

and Belmore first came to prominence in the late 1980s. Respective works

from that period have become canonical, both within the emerging area of

ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 29 NO 4 . SEPTEMBER 2006 pp 721-755& Association of Art Historians 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 7219600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

contemporary Native art and the closely linked but wider realm of performance

art.6 To experience their work together in an international location is to get a

sense of how their trajectories through local communities and increasingly

transnational art worlds have done much to shape the direction and discussion

around Native art of the past twenty years in both Canada and the United States.

This should not be taken as career progress from the local to the global – both

artists have always insisted that their first allegiance is to their own communities,

as both source and audience.

The Fountain and Emendatio works are rooted both in Indigenous histories and in

the discursive history that has allegor-

ized the centuries-old predicament of

Native encounter with the non-Native.

This essay takes the allegorizing into

account and shows these works antici-

pating and circumventing the predict-

able response to identity-politics-art

to which audiences have become over-

habituated. Belmore’s work has come

to be marked by its increasing reticence

about visible cultural marking. Jolene

Rickard, Tuscarora scholar, writes:

Belmore understands the significance of

and connection between power and water.

Her Anishinabe heritage has taught her

about the Micipijiu or the ‘great horned

cat or underwater lion, the night panther

who could raise storms with a flick of his

tail.’ The Micipijiu lives in the waterways

of the Anishinabe memory and embodies

the unthinkable tragedies of human

existence. Belmore may never mention

this spirit, but she knows the significance

and role it has in her culture.7

Luna, however, has consistently drawn

attention by deploying unmistakable

cultural signifiers. But if the signifiers

are easy to recognize, they are not so

easy to understand, there being no

simple correlation between signifier

and signified. So more important than

the link between them that comes

8.1–8.6 Rebecca Belmore, Fountain, 2005. Production

stills. Photo: Jose Ramon Gonzalez.

B E L M O R E A N D L U N A O N L O C AT I O N : T H E A L L E G O R I C A L I N D I A N R E D U X

722 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2006

from being Native is the shared reticence (because

there is much that needs to be protected), shared

defiance in the face of demands for ‘translation’,

and a shared interest in the dramatization of reti-

cence and defiance. Paul Chaat Smith, speaking of

himself (he is of Comanche descent) as well as Luna,

invoes what he calls ‘Durham formulas’: ‘He [the

Native artist Jimmie Durham] advises that we must

speak and listen well, and remember everything,

especially those things we never knew.’8

In Venice the two artists’ works were allegories

about, as well as for, the location: reliant on Venice

as a city of allegorical certainty, reliant on alle-

gories, skewed and traduced, about the Native.

Venice as its own allegory was reiterated and

disturbed by them, as they drew on its modes to

confirm their own sources of authority; Venice also

as the container of countless allegorical tellings – on

roundel, niche, ceiling and triptych, canonical sites

of Western art history – of the stories that held the

whole operation together, the engines of its power.

Many of them were re-tellings of the moral systems

of other great powers: Greece, Rome, Byzantium,

conjoined as the allegorical force of Christendom:

Titian’s Wisdom (c. 1560), in the centre of the ceiling

of the vestibule in the Libreria Marciana; Jacopo

Tintoretto’s The Repulse of Mars by Peace, Concord, and

Minerva (1576), in the Sala dell’Anticollegio; or Paolo

Veronese’s Arachne or Dialectic (1575–77), in a space

between the carved and gilded woodwork of the

ceiling in the Sala del Collegio, both in the Doges’

Palace. I suggest here that, on location at the Bien-

nale, a hub for cognoscenti with some presumed

collective memory for reappraisals of allegory by

Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, or James Clifford,9

Fountain and Emendatio are allegory adjusted and in

progress; that they are not so much stories as

episodes, circular iterations, allegories of loss but

also of knowledge retained, repeated suggestive

disclosures – repeated, but restricted. They are

reflexive about whose allegories, if any, are reliable,

and what the sources of their authority might be.

An insistence that there is an essentially 8.4–8.6


723& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2006

Indigenous way of doing things converging with a way of doing things that is

endemic to the history of Venice became palpable. In this sense the location

helped the work to work. The divergences, meanwhile, could be understood for

what they are – ontological. That is to say that authority derives from sources that

are explicitly asserted as being qualitatively different from those accessible to the

non-Native. These performance/installations mark a move from Native art as

definitionally associated with Native stereotyping and epistemology to art that

allegorizes a predicament, a state of being. And if this cannot easily be stated, nor

everyone in the audience be persuaded, or wish to be persuaded, about what

Charles Taylor calls ‘purification discourse’,10 it can be felt.

Chaat Smith, with Truman Lowe, the Native curatorial team for Luna in

Venice, wrote in the catalogue:

There are several ways to describe James Luna. He is a contemporary Native American artist. He

is, undoubtedly, a conceptual artist. He works these days in the disciplines of performance and

installation. In order to carry out these activities, however, he must also be an escape artist. The

traps that lie in wait for Indians like Luna are endless and lethal. Avoiding these traps is nearly

impossible.11

To avoid these traps, Luna and Belmore make work about, and through, them.

The traps have been set by a predominantly visual regime, common to

settler societies with Indigenous populations. As identified by Terry Smith, who

generalizes from his work on Aboriginal art in Australia, Native people are

subjected to a more or less predictable sequence: calibration, obliteration

and symbolization or aestheticization.12 In so far as Native cultural production

fits this sequence, Native artists have become increasingly effective at exposing

it. The classification, authentication and display of the Native in terms derived

from anthropology and museology has been widely discussed.13 Luna’s per-

formance Artifact Piece (1987) – in which, on sand and draped with a beach towel,

with some significant possessions, he lay as if modelled, or dead, in a museum

exhibition case (see plate 8.21) – embodies the detached avidity of collection

and calibration and provides a guide to the priorities of many explorers, traders,

missionaries, anthropologists, collectors and museum professionals, as well

as various types of connoisseur.14 In Artifact 671B (1988), supplementing Luna’s

work, Belmore took collecting and display to a political denouement. Acqui-

sition number attached, she sat immobile, inscrutable, in a blanket – all

requisites for ‘the imaginary Indian’15 – in a museum vitrine, exhibiting

herself. Her performance was in support of the Lubicon Cree’s boycott of The

Spirit Sings, a major exhibition that reconvened, in order to ‘celebrate’, the

international diaspora of Native North American treasures during the Winter

Olympics in Calgary in 1988.16 Her number, one of those inscrutable museum

codes, was in fact the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s code for a cheap red wine.

Artifact 671B belongs to a small group of contemporary works that have sharpened



the pointed end of First Nations artists’ political engagement in, and with, the

Canadian state.

That ‘the primitive’ was endemic to modernism, rather than being its polar

opposite, has been widely argued.17 Native artists have been imbricated in the

retroactive articulation of this particular insight. Jimmie Durham, whom Chaat

Smith describes as ‘our Houdini’ – the artist who escaped the traps and moved to

Europe – was also able to set traps to catch viewers, mocking primitivism by

portraying himself as a mock-primitive.18 The autonomy of the modern art object

is parodied or undercut in nearly everything that Luna has done. And it is

depended upon by Belmore as she shapes Anishinabe-specific modes and mat-

erials in, for example, Wana-na-wang-ong (1993).

While the discussion was going on, the people who produced ‘primitive art’

were being systematically obliterated, or, at best, overlooked. The fascination with

material and visual culture, conveniently detachable from colonial, neo-colonial,

or neo-liberal realpolitik over several centuries, has given what now tends to be

called Native ‘art’ its prominence. It is present, it is on display, it is often spec-

tacular. With Take a Picture with a Real Indian, Luna took advantage of his inclusion

in the Whitney Biennial of 1991 to complicate the spectacle, to amuse, perhaps to

educate, the art world with its contradictions. He was available for posing in an

assortment of Indian (dis)guises. The delicate matter of how to introduce anything

about the life, or history, or culture of a Native individual without being accused

of doing anthropology, or something even more sinister, rather than art, has long

been a component of the art itself, a feature which has been identified not least by

Native scholars and curators.19 The worldwide resurgence of identity politics,

troubling the past as well as the present, has set its own kind of trap. As Chaat

Smith puts it: ‘This is the challenge facing Indian conceptual artists: being

outside the official narratives, to even assert the relevance of an Indian past and

present makes one hostage to identity politics, multiculturalism, and other

narrow and suspect agendas.’20

As for the trap of the ‘symbolization’ or ‘aestheticization’ of the Native, the

symbol of the Indian maiden or princess was used recursively by Belmore in Rising

to the Occasion to lime another generation. Possibly more self-reflexive than their

forefathers about aestheticizing the Indian, they made it her first public

success.21 And there is little about the absurdist aesthetic of beads, feathers and

the Native body that Luna leaves out in his Dream Rider character from the

performance In My Dreams of 1996–97 (plate 8.7).22 He is savage about the lethal

stupidity of the ‘discoverers’ of America, with their wild ideas about Indigenous

values. Yet the choreographed beauty of his dancing at Venice was a full-on

composite: misunderstandings and their corrections, emendations, Emendatio.

This allegorizing has found patronage akin to that of the Doges and merchant

princes. Belmore and Luna were officially funded, in Belmore’s case privately too,

in Venice. Belmore represented Canada and was promoted as the first Native

woman to have done so.23 Embarrassing as the notion of national ‘representa-



8.7 James Luna, Dream Rider character from In My Dreams, 1997, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,

Canada. Photo: William Gullete, courtesy of the artist.



tiveness’ at the Biennale may be, it can at least be said of Canada today that,

unlike some other countries, it is not immobilized by the contradictory paradox

of being represented by its own repressed. The National Museum of the American

Indian, giving itself an international presence, was Luna’s patron in Venice. The

newest of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, it was legislated into being by

the United States Congress in 1989. This explains how the colonizer’s term

‘Indian’ comes to be enshrined in its name. Its historical moment arrived just in

time for the NMAI to take the last available space on Washington’s Museum Mile,

where it opened in 2005.

Belmore’s history is as a performance artist, with each performance fiercely

specific to a location and moral aspiration. She has consistently nailed moments

of crisis in public debates in Canada while the issues are all over the media. The

exclusionary policies of an officially multicultural liberal state, and more than a

century of repressive paternalism, have led to official blindsiding, corporate

hypocrisy and criminal negligence. These are old themes, but each is treated

specifically, locally, with economical precision of gesture and material.

Belmore’s stance has shifted from the assertiveness necessary to be noticed as

a contemporary, art-school-trained, Native artist, to the assurance of being ‘just an

artist’. It was in the late 1980s that she announced herself to a timorous and

largely ignorant public as being A High-tech Tipi Trauma Mama (1985, Thunder Bay,

Ontario). Although the original performance was not seen by a large audience,

the title preserves the gist. Its sardonic refrain ‘A plastic replica of Mother Earth’

has echoed through her career. Puncturing the portentousness that comes with

the territory has served her well. Belmore has always been clear that she is not ‘a

traditionalist’. She was raised rather as ‘a small-town Indian’ in Sioux Lookout,

which is in the Anishinabe territory of northern Ontario. She maintains a keen

eye for the traditions of contact, including language loss, racial stereotyping and

the commodification of sewing. She shows zero tolerance for the ludicrous or

lethal compromises made between authority and those whom a paternalistic

colonialism entrusted to its ‘care’.

Ten years after Artefact 671B Belmore again made her body the surrogate for

others’ suffering. This is also the tradition worked since the late 1960s by perfor-

mance artists such as Marina Abramovic and Carolee Schneeman. Ana Mendieta is

an important influence. Belmore dedicated a performance to the young Native man

Dudley George, who was shot to death as he joined twenty unarmed protestors

occupying Ontario’s Ipperwash Provincial Park in 1995 to protest against the

provincial government’s destruction of traditional burial grounds in the park.

Belmore wore a sweeping red dress and stripped a young tree of its leaves and

twigs, systematically dismembering it with her own hands. Then she stripped

herself naked. Nevertheless, self-abnegation before causes, however desperate, is

not enough if the ambition is to be ‘an artist’ unqualified by ethnicity.

There are recurring themes and usages in Belmore’s work, and this corporeal

involvement is one of them. She habitually cites Luna as her mentor. Luna in



turn cites Bas Jan Ader as amongst his more influential instructors at the

University of California, Irvine. In a piece that Luna has never forgotten – I’m Too

Sad to Tell You (1970–71) – Ader trained a camera on his face and eventually wept.24

Ader, who was no more than a competent sailor, also enacted his own death-wish

when he set out alone to sail across the Pacific. In the public declaration of the

breaking of a private taboo, Luna seems to have found permission to expose and

make a fool of himself, playing the dead Indian, to show up collective folly.

In his famous Artifact Piece Luna made fools of his viewers. In Take a Picture with

a Real Indian – offering a choice of three Indian images in the form of life-

sized cut-outs of Luna, variously garbed, to the enthusiastic participants who

responded to his invitation during the Whitney Biennale of 1991 – he did much

the same thing.

With such a lineage, and with the work of Abramovic and Schneeman and

Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987) as antecedents, there

is characteristically an act of penitence in Belmore’s performances. The repeated

references to the pain of the traumatised body link closely to her interest in

embodied knowledge, in memory and storytelling, and, as many of her perfor-

mances attest, in working out who the stories were for. In 1992 she made Mawu-

8.8–8.9 Rebecca Belmore, The Named and the Un-named, 2002. Installation: video projection, screen,

light bulbs. Projection screen: 224-274 cm. Photo: Howard Ursuliak.



che-hitoowin (A Gathering of People for any Purpose), which publicized First Nations

stories, but also First Nations subjectivities, in a user-friendly way. Ayumee-aawach

Oomama-mowan (Speaking to Their Mother, 1991–present), which is a huge wooden

megaphone that enables direct address to the earth, exactly as any speaker might

want it, tempered personal ambition with a discernment of the needs of other

performers and different audiences. Its combination of hubris and embarrass-

ment (without the comforting irony of ‘plastic replicas’) suggest that Mother

Earth continues to be a dangerous figure with more to her than pan-Indian

schlock. These works are part of Belmore’s long-standing engagement, since

leaving the Ontario College of Art, with audience problems. She wants, some-

times, to reach those for whom the mores of gallery-going have little value. But

she is no less interested in the demands of those habitues of the art world for

whom the urgencies driving identity art in the late 1980s and early 1990s have

inevitably been replaced by others.

As with bodies, and audiences, counting nature into any human calculation

has also been a long-running constant. To use one of Bruno Latour’s phrases,

Belmore does not ‘bracket nature out’, she brackets it in – it is part of every

calculation.25 A rather literal reading of Wana-na-wang-ong (1993) could think of

its enclosing screens, offering a vole’s-eye view and the smell of a dense webbing

of roots and mosses, as brackets. Temple, at Toronto’s Power Plant (1996), a massive,



translucent, wedge of plastic bags filled with water from the city’s various water

sources, was both stern lecture about, and worship of, the element with which

Toronto, like any city, is unheedingly implicated.

Vigil, a performance presented as a video in her exhibition The Named and the

Unnamed in 2002 (plates 8.8 and 8.9),26 was in important ways a precursor to

Fountain, the work for Venice. The title both gives away and fixes the secret, a good

example of what Michael Taussig has called the ‘public secret, that which is

generally known but cannot be articulated’.27 Taussig wrote of the atrocities of

Colombia’s police state: ‘Wherever there is power, there is secrecy, except that it is

not only secrecy that lies at the core of power, but public secrecy.’28 He suggests

that it is through the act of defacement, of desecration, that the (public) secret

makes itself apparent. Desecration, spoiling and defacement were all implied in The

Named and the Unnamed, as was the sluggish indifference of the authorities to more

than twenty years of ‘disappearances’. Belmore was making a connection between

the violence against these unnamed, apparently unimportant women – sex

workers, addicts, many of them First Nations, all of them relatively powerless – and

the exercise of the ‘power of the nation’. What prevents grandiloquence, or bathos,

on such large topics is her focus on the local tragedy – personal and juridical – on

Vancouver’s streets. That a trial is now under way does little to account for the fact

that no action was taken between the first ‘disppearance’ in 1983 and 2000.29

The video of Vigil recorded Belmore’s half-hour-long performance, acted out

on 23 June 2002, at the corner of Gore and Cordova Streets, at the core of

Vancouver’s downtown East Side, two of the tawdry streets that are common sites

of abduction. The performance included all the elements of a classic ritual:

establishing a bounded, liminal space; cleansing – a purification which puts the

protagonist in a vulnerable or dangerous position; the body marked out in some

way or identified by special clothing; endurance, repetitive action, release; a

closing sequence with a return to the ‘real’ world. The street corner is scrubbed

and votive candles lit, one for each woman. Then their first names are written in

black marker all over Belmore’s arms as cues, prompting her to yell them at the

top of her voice, and, after each name, to draw a long-stemmed rose, and its

thorns, through her closed lips. The crimes against the body, the Native body, the

woman’s body, are embodied in, enacted by, or inscribed on her own body, as if in

an act of atonement. Then comes the ritualised violence of the disrobing.

Belmore is wearing a long, flowing red dress. She takes up a hammer and, many

times, nails the skirts to a nearby telegraph post. Pulling and tugging back with all

her force, little by little she tears off the dress. Repeatedly, the fabric, pulled and

stretched to a point of unendurable tension against the full weight of a woman’s

body, rips and then relaxes. Repeatedly, attention is drawn to the way that the

material behaves. It is an empirical experiment, demonstrated for all to see, felt on

the body. No representation, this is the phenomenology of material under stress.

But the phenomenology of driving nails through fabric to wood, of nailing and

tearing, cannot deflect the metaphors from crowding in: this is bodily stuff, this is



the fabric as flesh; this is the alluring red dress of the scarlet woman; these are

trauma’s re-enactments; these are tests of endurance, sacrifices – the Sundance, the

Crucifixion. A too-familiar overload of culturally conflicting allusions, and irre-

solvable epistemological confusions, almost threaten to overwhelm the perfor-

mance in a splat of emotion. Except that Belmore is in control. Hence her focus on

the fine grain of the physical, of touch and of sound. And then the sensation segues

into ethics, clearly. Aestheticized identity politics are nowhere to be found. In

closing, Belmore, now in jeans and T-shirt, leans up against a looming black pick-up

truck, with all the male signifying options (it has been there all the time) parked at

the periphery of her action. James Brown’s ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s World’ (U.S.A., 1966)

booms out from the truck’s stereo: ‘This is a man’s, man’s world / but it wouldn’t

mean nothing, nothing / without a woman or a girl.’

The continuous projection of the video was pierced by naked light bulbs,

mimicking the candles in Vigil’s performance, one for each disappeared woman.

Its looping repetitive re-enactment, also the re-enactment which characterizes

trauma, was to become a kind of shrine or memorial to The Named and the

Unnamed. The remainder of the installation consisted of a sequence of tableaux

picturing violation. They did so in simple terms, drawing on a polyglot repertoire

of symbols: the lightness of air, the heaviness of water, the purity of white, the

incomprehensible blackness of death, red the ever-troubling passion that sullies

purity and threatens death. But violation implies an inviolate moment, before the

white quilt in Blood on the Snow was stained, before the canoe in The Great Water

(plate 8.10) capsized and was swamped by black waters – two of the five instal-

lations that comprised The Named and the Unnamed. The minimalist disposition of

the pared-down components of Belmore’s installations is misleading. Minimal art

attempted to expunge the references of forms and materials. Here the allusions to

red and white and black, to yielding softness and rebarbative grit, to a solitary

eagle feather, are allowed to flourish and expand. The idea that things, and

colours, have ‘lost’ their symbolic value is countered. And then these components

are not just disposed in space; they are disposed in what they, the colours, the

materials and forms, mark out as moral space. Good and evil are shown to be at

work, in opposition.

The idea of Canada is constructed, amongst a few other things, by the history

and cultural allusions of the canoe. But it was constructed in a quite literal sense

by the exploration, trade and settlement enabled to a considerable extent by this

Native invention. The subsequent invasion swamped and capsized the canoe. The

capsized canoe is likely to invoke Tom Thomson (iconic Canadian artist), the black

canoe to invoke Bill Reid (iconic Canadian Native artist). Much of the vast litera-

ture on coping with the wilderness pays homage to the Native genius that makes

‘wilderness’ precisely the wrong word. It also characteristically detects, and trades

on, unsettling echoes of the ‘imaginary Indian’. Margaret Atwood’s story Wild-

erness Tips30 of 1992 takes, from a guide to surviving in the wild, the question as to

whether tips is a noun or a verb. It turns out to be a verb.



The Great Water is a monumental precedent for Fountain. It is a tragic, arrested

drama of catastrophe and abandonment. The tropes of its telling – canoe, canvas,

blackness – are sharp and compacted images which compose themselves into a

monument, with drapery, the canoe becoming a funerary urn of sorts. The

historical and cultural allusions of the capsized black canoe are arrested and

extended by the black integument of the canvas. The narrative movement is from

black water pouring over the canoe to the framing edge of this gush of canvas,

which is the limiting, tidying hem of grommets – Canadian classics of wilderness

coping. There is also the classic limiting strategy of the bounded reservation

system. The Great Water is funereal in its stillness, in its blackness and its drapery.

Belmore’s compulsion to use the feel of material, its phenomenology, as well

as its cultural references, is here again compounded by the use of colour. Only the

highest-quality canvas will drape like this and hold an even darker blackness in its

folds. It represents water at night, the thick darkness that surprised Belmore

again one summer out on the water on a moonless night and gave her an idea

about her own death, what the unknown feels like. And, she points out,

Johnny Depp – in Dead Man ( Jim Jarmusch, U.S.A., 1995) – floating away as he dies,

in a canoe, makes it look like a seductive way to go. As for culture, canvas – the

tent, the groundsheet – is the classic protection against nature. It has also been,

for quite some time in Western art history, the perfect medium on which to

represent nature, contending with it at a remove. This tableau, with its elegant

economy of means and tightly, tidily controlled excess, prompts reflection on the

inseparability of nature and culture. Latour has written of modernity’s failure to

8.10 Rebecca Belmore, The Great Water, 2002. Installation: canoe, fabric, metal grommets, powdered

carborundum sprayed on the interior of the canoe, 457 x 914 x 61 cm. Photo: Howard Ursuliak.



do what it set out to do: bracket off nature.31 This piece can be taken as a

disquisition on the ethical reasons for re-incorporating nature into the conduct of

human affairs.

Latour has argued that the nature/culture binary is a product of the fiction on

which modernity is based: the fiction, that is, that humans can set themselves

apart from, and control, nature. In recognizing today’s hybrid connectivity

between politics, technology, science and nature, the links between our culture

and others, past and present, can also be more clearly seen. Latour arrives at his

conclusion in terms that are not very different from those of Chief Robert Joseph

in his recent discussion of the ‘interconnections’ between sea and sky worlds,

mortal and spirit worlds,32 or of Taiaiake Alfred on the necessity to perpetuate

pre-contact Indigenous ‘regimes of conscience and justice that [have] promoted

the harmonious co-existence of humans and nature for hundreds of genera-

tions’.33 It is invidious to put the onus of such cosmological ideology onto one set

of installations, the work of one artist. But the risk might be worth taking anyway,

as The Named and the Unnamed does not play as a post-colonial accounting,

complete with racialized praise and blame and uncritical advocacy. It circumvents

this terrain and attempts something even more difficult. It also avoids the Trojan

Horse effect – smuggling of moral censure into the enemy’s institution, in this

case public art galleries in Canada, so that the enemy appears to be hosting its

own undoing. However, that effect is usually a temporary disruption, and it is

soon business as usual afterwards. This work pictures a world where good and evil

operate simultaneously and must battle it out, a Manichaean world. Strategic

essentialism has been much discussed and frequently deployed in recent work by

members of Indigenous and other ethnic groups in Canada.

Native issues – the common catch-all phrase – have moved increasingly to the

forefront of national awareness, particularly since 1982, when the Canadian

Constitution Act recognized ‘pre-existing Aboriginal rights’, pre-existing, that is,

the foundation of the Canadian state in 1867. One important consequence for the

growing numbers of First Nations artists was a loosening of the Foucauldian grip

of two federal institutions: the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the National

Gallery of Canada. The former, according to its charter, displayed cultural

production, old and new, of Native people; the latter displayed art by everyone

else.34 (The inclusion of Inuit art in the collection of the National Gallery was an

anomaly worthy of its own study.) Native art in western Canada, particularly

British Columbia, remained closer to its traditional modes, but in the rest of the

country young artists were going to art schools. New Work by a New Generation,

curated by Anishinabe abstract painter Robert Houle in Regina in 1982, marked

a significant moment for the understanding of Native art as also ‘art’.35 The

purchase of the Anishinabe painter Carl Beam’s North American Iceberg (1985) by

the National Gallery in 1986 began to break down the old taxonomy. The process

was completed when, in 1992, the exhibitions Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the

National Gallery of Canada and Indigena were showing concurrently in Ottawa.36



The Task Force on Museums and First Peoples emerged in 1992 from an unpre-

cedented two years of discussions between First Peoples and cultural agencies

across Canada and initiated widespread policies of ‘collaboration’. Influential

critical texts by a new generation of Native curators and writers – Beyond History by

curators Tom Hill and Karen Duffek, ‘The home of the Indian culture and other

stories in the museum’ by Deborah Doxtator, ‘The construction of the imaginary

Indian’ by Marcia Crosby, ‘What more do they want?’ by Loretta Todd, and

‘Borderzones: The ‘‘Injun-uity’’ of aesthetic tricks’ by Gerald McMaster – began to

adjust the balance of power.37 Contemporary works that contributed to an

increasingly politicized climate of reception included Robert Houle’s Everything

You Wanted to Know about Indians from A to Z (1985), Bob Boyer’s Blanket Statement

(1988), Yuxweluptun’s Scorched Earth: Clear-cut Logging on Native Sovereign Land,

Shaman Coming to Fix (1991), Ed Poitras’s Morningstar Manifesto (1990), Dana Clax-

ton’s video I Want to Know Why (1994) and Theresa Marshall’s Band Stands (1996).

Attention was brought to the increasingly vocal urban Native people in the

exhibition Reservation X: The Power of Place in Aboriginal Contemporary Art, of 1998.38

For all its official multiculturalism, Canada is still a sufficiently cohesive society

for institutional policy shifts to have marked effects. Shifts are reflected in

programming on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and in policies of the

Canada Council for the Arts that encourage Aboriginal funding applicants and

cultural production. The Banff Centre for the Arts, one of the country’s major arts

institutions, has had a programme dedicated to Aboriginal art for the past ten

years.39 In 1999 the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network was established.40

The history of settlement and urbanism, and disparities in treaty-making

processes across the country, explain why in British Columbia, where most of the

land remains un-ceded, many communities work to retain their own definition of

their own traditions. The Coast Salish artist Yuxweluptun’s vibrant, angry, neo-

surrealist narrative paintings, such as The Universe Is So Big, the White Man Keeps Me

on a Reservation (1987, Gatineau: Cannadian Museum of Civilization) and Red Man

Watching White Man Trying to Fix Hole in Sky (1990, Private collection), have

remained exceptions until recently. The work of Brian Jungen, of Dunne-Za

descent, is securely rooted in hybridity and is enjoying enormous popularity.41

Tensions between art and politics, sometimes extreme, cannot be generalized

across Canada, particularly as further taxonomic blurring is making it difficult,

once again, to distinguish clearly between ‘art’ and ‘culture’. The latter is now

widely and recursively understood in the broadest possible terms, including those

of the once-decried anthropologists.42 Art is difficult to disentangle from cultural

activities, in turn hard to distinguish from community formation and social

activism cohering around highly successful First Nations initiatives such as IMAGe

Nation, a new media group, and Talking Stick, an annual festival of performance

art. Belmore’s work about the death of Dudley George was prescient, and the

matter has not been allowed to fade. Currently a public enquiry, established by

the Ontario Government in 2003, is investigating George’s death in the stand-off



at Ipperwash. Michael Harris, who was the premier of the province at the time of

the incident in 1995, as well as members of the Ontario Provincial Police, are

testifying at the enquiry.

Art shades into activism. It also shades into proprietary issues – culture as

property, fully accessible only to an ethnically restricted group. ‘Outsiders’ may

find this shocking. Yet when the protection of circumscribed, partial knowledge is

an ethical, not an epistemological, matter, what can be said? And how should the

art historian respond to such protectionism? By approving empowerment and

resistance? By producing valorising description? By objecting? By going away?

Jungen’s masks, fashioned by deconstructing and then re-constructing Nike Air

Jordans, are collectively titled Prototypes for a New Understanding. They might seem

to offer an emollient answer. For this writer, Belmore and Luna are taking a more

complicated route, closer to the bitter arguments and historical resentments that

underlie continuing and ubiquitous misunderstanding. Their work shows up the

limits to freedom of access marked by assertions of ownership, and orchestrates a

potentially bruising encounter with a closed door.

The art of Belmore and Luna shifts from that arena to a shared ethical realm.

Instead of the habitual moral relativism, Belmore proposes something closer to

a philosophical moral realism: the claim that there are moral facts and properties

8.11 Rebecca Belmore, Installation view of Fountain, 2005. Water screen, 274 � 488 cm, in the Canadian

Pavillion in the Giardini, Venice. Photo: Howard Ursuliak.



independent of people’s culturally specific beliefs and attitudes. The Named and

the Unnamed leaves little scope for moral negotiationism. Rather, moral 20/20

vision is enabled through the distillation of some uncompromising tropes, with

the whole thing – performance, video, installation – structured on a subtle,

if simplified, Anishinabe cosmology. This work dares to be about good and evil.

It is about the corruption of power and bad faith, anywhere at any time. By

being anchored in the sensory and the specific – Anishinabe specific – these huge

cloudy topics do not quite get out of hand and squeak in under the banality

barrier. In an undidactic way the colours, directions, elements, make themselves

felt. The work is not so much social text as sensory tableau – palpably critical and,

palpably, ethical.

Fountain was intended as a tribute to Venice, its wateriness and its fountains.

Typically, Belmore finds her surface/support material on location, but Fountain

echoes earlier preoccupations with that element in peril, Great Water amongst

them. Earlier works have dealt with the politics of water in Canada, where the

normalized apartheid of the reservation system has maintained another public

secret: the total absence of clean water on more than a few reservations, as well as

in other communities that are not reservations.

The sequestered awkwardness of the Canadian pavilion in Venice’s Giardini

was mitigated by the formal simplicity of Fountain. The darkened space, which is

8.12 Stan Douglas, Le Detroit, 2000. Film installation with two synchronized 35mm projectors

and one semi-transparent screen. 6 minutes each rotation. Installation: Winnipeg Art Gallery,

Winnipeg, Canada, 2001. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York.



accessed directly from the outside, was spanned by a screen, of falling water, onto

which a slightly less than two-minute video loop was back-projected (plate 8.11).

This meant no interference from audience shadows on the image. The simplicity

was, as usual, deceptive. The precision rivulets of water acted as vertical raster

lines emitting a low-level flicker, a persistent hiss and palpable humidity. By

destabilizing the projection surface Belmore was continuing the interrogation of

light projection and means of support as worked on by two of Belmore’s

Vancouver near contemporaries, Stan Douglas (plate 8.12) and Rodney Graham

(plate 8.13), whose own narrative devices tend to be imbricated into filmic modes

and the techno-logic of projection. Belmore’s idea was for the energy of this

animated, watery screen to reconstitute the projection as a live performance so

that an approximation of her habitual use of her self, her body, in real time and

space could be established. So the brisk reprise of elemental struggle and cath-

arsis is to be seen as sculptural, performative and distinguished from the passive

endurance-viewing involved in much large-scale video work.

There is no such thing as a neutral location, but only some would know that

Fountain’s original action was on Musqueam traditional territory, on Iona Beach,

near the estuary of British Columbia’s Fraser River. The beach lies under the flight

path that leads from Vancouver’s international airport due west across the Pacific.

From the beach a municipal sewage spit reaches out into the ocean. It turns out to

be a location where the not-easily-explained can happen: the artist uses the word

‘magic’.43 The opening shot establishes a grey lowering sky over a grey ocean and

a grey beach scattered with drift wood. A pile of the logs, which Belmore thinks of

as ‘escapees from B.C.’s [British Columbia’s] lumber industry’,44 spontaneously

erupt in flames. Attention transfers to a woman struggling, almost submerged, in

the water. She is trying to fill a bucket with the stuff but is meeting some kind of

resistance. Then the resistance stops. Pulling herself out of the water, she lurches

8.13 Rodney Graham, Vexation Island, 1997. Video/sound installation, 35 mm film transferred to

DVD, 9-minute continuous loop. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago.



with the sloshing bucket across the beach to the camera, heaves it up and at

the watcher with a groan of relief – the only sound to interrupt the sound of

falling water – as the water turns to blood. Through the now-bloodied water

screen the artist’s distorted face appears (plates 8.14–8.19 and col. plate 7).

8.14–8.15 Rebecca Belmore, Fountain, 2005. Production stills. Photo: Jose Ramon Gonzalez.



8.16–8.18 Rebecca Belmore, Fountain, 2005. Production stills. Photo: Jose Ramon Gonzalez.



Cut back to the grey beach in less than

two minutes.

In Keeping Slug Woman Alive (1993)

Greg Sarris asks: ‘Is there a way that

people can read across cultures so

that intercultural communication is

opened rather than closed, so that

people see more than just what things

seem to be?’45 Beyond seeming, in

Fountain’s cyclical connection between

fire, water and blood, the miraculous

and the magical are fused. Such a

possibility concentrates the spiritual

syncretism of twentieth-century

Anishinabe, many of whom converted

to Christianity. Belmore has often

made work about growing up glimp-

sing something, on the periphery of

something, at the edge of her grand-

mother’s life, always aware that

because she did not speak her grand-

mother’s language, she was excluded

from the Anishinabe cosmology in

which her kokum was fully involved. Enforced attendance for Native children at

residential schools, where speaking their languages was forbidden – one of the

provisions of Canada’s Indian Act of 1876 – amounted to a gag order. It discon-

nected the granddaughter. The frantic desperation of having been excluded was

enacted in a work at the Havana Biennale of 1991, where, gagged and bound hand

and foot, she struggled alone up a flight of stairs in the colonial castle Castillo de

la Fuerza. Her title Creation or Death: We Will Win echoed Havana’s omnipresent

slogan ‘Revolution or Death: We Will Win.’ Such works emerge from the state of

being Native rather than a state of having a culture, having cultural knowledge.

This means that the Native as focus for the acquisitiveness of others is replaced by

the Native able to block that acquisitiveness. It deflects attention from what she

might or might not have, from her cultural possessions, to who she is and what

she can do. But, in Belmore’s recent work, rather than sending the other away

empty-handed, she presents an allegory of this very situation.

The confluence of signs of Indianness with signs of Venice has its own history.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show toured Europe, as well as Canada and America (plate

8.20). Members of the troupe were photographed in Venice around 1891.46 In

important ways, with Fountain, Belmore (like Douglas and Graham) is continually

re-playing the history of constructing and representing contemporary culture back

at its denizens – any of them. They have their own histories, of course, but the one

8.19 Rebecca Belmore, Fountain, 2005.

Production still. Photo: Jose Ramon Gonzalez.



not shared is her own history of Indian as allegory, which she is using for a purpose.

The emphasis is on protecting something, resisting assimilation, maintaining

difference, not on euphemistic sharing. What the difference consists of possibly

nobody knows, but it can be felt. The bucket of blood is a shriek against historical

theft. It is also dousing the careful monitoring of paradigm shifts, well-meaning

outside advocacy, and the soft-soap of collaboration.

During the 1980s contemporary North American Native art was emerging

as a political act, an understanding sealed in influential writing by some of the

artists – Carl Beam, Jimmie Durham, Gerald McMaster, Edgar Heap of Birds,

for example.47 The focus was on exposing and denouncing the bad morality

embedded in colonialism to which ethnic identity was thought to give unique

access. Consequently, over the past two or three decades, the Native artist has

been expected to be simultaneously the embodiment of tradition, spiritual seer

and all-purpose spokesperson for the not-yet-post-colonial moral high-ground. It

has been a virtual renewal of the Rousseauian notion, but it has proved an

untenable guide for reading Native art, and the hermeneutics have moved on. Yet

it is exactly the precariousness of their position, caused by the tangle of aesthe-

ticized politics, morality and desire, that certain artists of Native ancestry like

8.20 Members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show visiting Venice, c. 1891. Photograph from America’s

National Entertainment, 1895. Photo: courtesy Glenbow Library, Calgary, Alberta.



Belmore, Luna, and Brian Jungen contrive to make compelling.

Their success confirms that some of the most acute and persuasive formulations

of the ontological entanglements in which they are all caught up are being made by

contemporary artists for whom their Native ancestry is at once fundamental and

surpassed. Although it is in demand for such purposes, their work is not merely

decorating the discourse, or the dust jackets; it is addressing the anxiety about what

species of object Native art is, and playing a large part in determining what it does. It

has an entangling agency, entangling rather than accusatory. It has moved beyond

the rights and wrongs of colonialism by showing how those rights and wrongs are

part of a broader moral universe. To put this another way, the strategies of strategic

essentialism have broadened. Good and evil are not calculated or understood

within ethnic boundaries. The ‘n’ can be taken out of ethnic to reveal ethics.

Native art has then been stereotyped by its obsession with stereotypes, guilt

and essentialism, strategic or not. In parts of northern Europe in particular,

Natives are stars for being pre-industrial survivors – the allegorical Indian indeed

– but it is not necessarily clear that the mondo dell’arte moment can withstand

much real-time ethical accounting. Belmore risks pitching an ethical note higher

than the moment is willing to hear. Perhaps it is not just this moment either,

since the situation recalls what Walter Benjamin thought of Charles Baudelaire’s

mis-timed allegorizing.

Venice has for centuries been a site of transcultural encounter, and Native artists

join the procession of exotic, specimen visitors from other lands.48 In a talk during

opening week, Luna spoke of walking around Venice at night, being able to see into

people’s houses, to see them at table, in their kitchens, watching television, the

familiar normality of it all: easier to connect than he had expected. Another Luiseno,

Pablo Tac, born in 1822 (d. 1841), had left the west coast of North America for Europe.

He did not go, as did the Nuxalk from Bella Coola, to perform their masked dances

in German cities in the 1880s, but to become a missionary in Rome. Tac has left the

only Native eye-witness account of the California missions, and it is a clear-eyed

account of what might have been thought of as a heart-wrenching trauma of

accommodation. Writing on Tac in the catalogue of Emendatio, Lisbeth Haas states:

Pablo Tac died from a virus on December 13, 1841. He never completed his vows or returned to

his homeland in California, but his (150 page) manuscript continues to inspire people. The

writing of this brave, complex young man offers some parallels to James Luna’s work. Tac

expresses lament and yet has humour. He defies definitions of Luiseno people, culture and

thought that originate from the outside. He records the foreign concepts and ideas that he and

other Luisenos brought into an indigenous framework, and offers unique ways to comprehend

Luiseno society and experience.49

In Rome Tac was immersed in the Latin rites in preparation for his return to

California as an emissary of the Catholic church. California–Italy–California, the

routes have been established.



In Venice, as elsewhere, Luna is unequivocal: ‘My work is about essence.’ He is

also a master of the discursive trope. The titles of his works, many of which have

become canonical, spell it out: the dead Indian, the Indian as artefact (Artifact

Piece, 1987, plate 8.21), the real Indian (Take Your Picture with a Real Indian, 1993), the

reservation Indian (Creation and Destruction of an Indian Reservation, 2000), the

drunken Indian (The History of the Luiseno People: La Jolla Reservation, Christmas 1990,

1993), the Indian as story-teller (Indian Tales, 1992), the Indian subject-as-object

(New Basket Designs, 1993, Petroglyphs in Motion, 2000), the Indian shaman (The

Shameman, 1993, and The Shameman: My Way, 1994), the Indian as an identity issue

(Tribal Identity, 1995, 1996), the wild Indian (The Last Wild California Indian, 1999), the

Indian of the academy (American Indian Studies, 2000), the spiritual Indian (On the

Spiritual, 1991; The Chapel of the Sacred Colours, 2000).

It has not always been clear that the performativity of everyday life is

analytically separate for the Native from public performance, nor public perfor-

mance separable from performance art, despite Judith Butler’s analytical

distinctions.50 In Artifact Piece Luna lay prone in a vitrine while his labelled scars

and other personal details were scrutinized the better to understand this pugilis-

tic Luiseno divorcee who liked country rock music. As Dream Rider in In My

Dreams, Luna appeared in preposterous Indian biker gear, going nowhere on an

exercise bike, earthbound but flapping his crutches, a reverse Icarus trying to take

off, unable to escape his real-life predicament on earth (see plate 8.7). And, at the

8.21 James Luna, Artifact Piece, 1987. Sushi Gallery, performed at the San Diego Museum of Man,

San Diego, California. Photo: John Erickson, courtesy of the artist.



Whitney Museum in New York, he appeared, stolid in his breech clout, posing

next to a stuffed shirt, pandering to the taste for ironic implication of the

opening-night crowd. Of Emendatio Luna announced, ‘I’m not going to be a spec-

tacle. I’m going to make one’ – a corrected or amended spectacle, he might have

added.51 The implication is that Emendatio is a spectacle about having been one.

When he first saw the enclosed courtyard of the former Palazzo, now the

Fondazione Querini Stampalia – manicured lawn accessed by shallow steps,

backdrop of ivy-draped walls, masonry fragments and odd bits of marble piled up

in the wings – he saw it as a stage, a Venetian stage. And the audience who stood

transfixed, or wandered around, during the four-hour-long performances (plates

8.22–8.26 and col. plate 8) over four days during the Biennale press week treated it

as a stage. It was an obviously transnational audience: scribes, posh bohemians,

the rich, the learned, cliques, cadres and the curious. That there was some tension

between his performance here and his habitual procedures, done with his own

people in mind first, is evident in Luna’s sharp: ‘I’m not going to turn my work

around for smart Europeans.’52 At the same time he knew he had to have a

translatable mode, hence allegory.

To set the stage Luna appears dressed as an ‘ordinary Indian’ – jeans and

T-shirt reading ‘You don’t know me.’ He arranges a circle of stones. The perimeter

of the circle is quartered by arrows stuck upright into the lawn and by tins of

8.22 and 8.23 James Luna, Performance for Emendatio, 2005. Photo: Katherine Fogden.



Spam. The stone-and-Spam circle is doubled by little sachets of sugar and insulin

syringes. There are acorns, the staple of Native California, and a woven blanket.

The soundtrack sets it, too. Jorge Arevalos’s composition synthesizes Procol

Harum’s version of Bach’s Air on a G string for church organ with sanctuary bells,

their tinkle a spine-chilling counterpoint to the Luiseno rattle. Generally, the

counterpoint is achieved by over-dubbing sources variously tribal (Luna’s term),

Beethoven, blues, rock and Catholic church.

Everything is placed deliberately, ceremoniously, so that the ordinary

becomes the extraordinary, establishing signifiers of protection (the arrows), of

Indianness (Spam a favourite comfort food) and morbidity (the scourge of

diabetes) for Indigenous people. All is done in accord with the protocols of the

transmission of knowledge, through invocation and reiteration, with variations.

It is, he says, ‘just a way of remembering’. He is not acting so much as allegorizing.

A sequence of personae, from reverent to scurrilous, exemplifying the allegor-

ical dexterity of the Native, emerges from a little green room to dance in the circle,

four times, for four hours on each of four days. There are plenty of instances in

‘Western’ art history where the slave, the moor, the jester, the dwarf, the Indian, is

a subservient observer of the main event. But here, no humble adjunct to an

imperial tableau, Luna is the star of his own show, the centre of his own circle. His

work has always been distinguished by its reflexivity about Native stardom. Each

figure has its own moves. Each has a rattle, sometimes two. Luna in breech clout,

necklaces and rattle, the minimal garb of the pre-Mission Luiseno; Luna in

elaborate composite regalia, feathers, fringed and beaded buckskin, moccasins;

8.24 James Luna, Performance for Emendatro, 2005. Photo: Katherine Fogden.



8.25 and 8.26 James Luna,

Performance for Emendatio,

2005. Photo: Katherine Fogden.



Luna in leathers (this one got the most unrestrained response); ‘Lounge Luna’

(‘my alter ego’) in maroon sharkskin tuxedo, swaggering and lungeing into

menacing poses. With a black silhouette of The End of the Trail53 – poignant

lie – emblazoned on the back, it is evidently an Indian lounge suit worn by an

Indian with a rattle. He is including himself by doing what Indians might do if

they had not always been excluded as lounge entertainers. The dark glasses

give nothing away. They are not so different from the eye masks worn

during carnival. He could equally be playing to Venetian art history: maroon,

scarlet, lavender, gold, colours often put together by Titian and deployed here

with all the dramatic action found in Tintoretto. On the third day it occurred

to him to add a gondolier, the manufactured allegorical Italian, to the sequence

of vignettes. These types upset the type-casting of the Indian and move on from

ironic games with stereotyping that have characterized so much Native art

for so long: the Sioux artist Oscar Howe painted The College Indian (Norman, Okla-

homa: The Norman Brousse Jacobson Collection) – a couple dressed up for

graduation looking Native in every way except their costume – in 1949. These are,

rather, moral allegories, mimed tragic-comically, with due ceremony, made

accessible for a polyglot audience. Dancing in an Indigenous circle, Luna is

standing in – as allegorical figures can – for a twisted or felted history (if this is a

juncture at which to take advantage of the suggestion of Deleuze and Guattari that

their work be taken up piecemeal to draw on their contrast between woven and

felted)54 to help to picture an incomprehensible agglomeration of chaos, loss and

values traduced.

The ‘stage’ could be approached through the ‘chapel’ (plates 8.27 and 8.28). The

ground floor of the former palazzo was reconfigured in the 1960s by Carlo Scarpa, a

prominent Venetian architect of the period. Luna turned it into a plausible –

because improvised – chapel for and about Pablo Tac. There was an altar and

backcloth, an altar rail and pews. On the altar were candles and an abalone

shell, crucifix and eagle feather, and a Luiseno basket. A chalice and paten were in a

vitrine to the side. These are the things that Tac, Luna imagines, would have

had about him in Rome. The enclosed space of the chapel was pried open and

articulated with unruly images and objects of what went before, of other ways

of doing things, other sources of authority. The altar cloth was a Navajo weaving, as

widely traded amongst Native groups in the southwest and across the plains. It

was inscribed with Tac’s text in his own hand.55 Tac wrote a history of the Luiseno

under Spanish colonial rule and the only known Native account of the conversion of

the Quechnajuis, making it clear ‘that the Catholicism practiced among his people

interpreted doctrine according to Quechnajuichom culture and ways of seeing’.56

The objects and images in the chapel that prefigured, or echoed, what was danced

in the performance, did not reinforce what the chapel stood for, as is the way

with the usual furniture and effects of religious spaces, but rather disrupted it. Tac’s

chapel in Rome was as much a Native space as is Iona beach in British Columbia.

Set into the altar frontal the video Apparitions: Past and Present paired photographs:



8.27 James Luna, The Chapel for Pablo Tac from Installation, Emendatio, 2005. Fondazione Querini

Stampalia, Venice. Photo: Katherine Fogden.

8.28 James Luna, The Chapel for Pablo Tac from installation, Emendatio, 2005. Fondazione Querini

Stampalia, Venice. Photo: Katherine Fogden.



Luna’s great-grandmother with one of her children in 1906 and Luna’s niece

with one of hers in 2005; a group of northern Diegeno elders waving feather

plumes during rites held in 1907 on the anniversary of Chief Cinon Mataweer’s

death, and Jose Albanas, a Luiseno spiritual leader, taken in 1932. Luna, alone or

with his Luiseno contemporaries, was there, too, striking the same poses, holding

the same turtle or gourd rattles. Connected to the old guys with the same empathy

and emulation that characterized the chapel which was itself associative. Again

there was an Arevalos soundtrack, scored for Luiseno ‘Indian’ voices and sounds

aimed at deconstructing the ‘ethnographic allegories’ of the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries.

Latour has questioned the popular explanatory value of ‘social’, suggesting

that the social may be better thought of as a dynamic network, a bundle of

associations. This offers a way of un-coupling the Native and the ethnographic. In

speculating about the dynamic of such deployment, something like ‘association’

8.29 Cathy Nelson Rodriguez, Portrait of Pablo Tac, 2005. Oil on canvas, 61 � 63.5 cm. Photo:

Katherine Fogden.



might be what articulates the dancing

and the simulated chapel, a lived

association with historical epistemolo-

gies. Luna associates himself with

cultural knowledge, including its frag-

mentation or forgotten-ness. It is not

known what Tac looked like, so Luna

imagines that he looked like himself.

The portrait of Luna as Tac or of Tac as

Luna (plate 8.29), by Cathy Rodriguez,

who lives on the La Jolla reservation as

Luna does, folds into itself how much

Luna knows or cannot know about

Luiseno life. He identifies with Tac, and

Tac made clear what he did not know,

although at least he knew that he did

not know: ‘Meglio stare zitti che dire

menzonge’ (‘Better to be quiet than say

lies’), he wrote in a passage from his

manuscript that is featured on the

endpapers of the catalogue:

Avrei potuto insegnare molte piu cose, ma chi

puo insegnare agli altri cio che non si sa? Quello

che sapevo, l’ho insegnato. Quello che non sapevo

L’ho omesso. Meglio stare zitti che dire menzonge.

(I could have taught more, but who

could teach others what they don’t

know? What I knew, I taught. What I

didn’t know, I’ve left. Better to be quiet

than saying lies.)57

The chapel is a kind of religio-

historical exegesis of a particular

transcultural encounter, in part clear

enough, in part opaque. Its opacity

derives from Tac’s difficulty with what

he did not know, or, because of his age

and conversion, what he could not

have known, about the culture he was

inevitably representing when in

Rome. It is intensified by the way in

which Luna seconds and reiterates

8.30 Exterior, Fondazione Querini Stampalia,

Venice. Photo: from Joseph Kosuth, La materia

dell’ ornamento, 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

8.31 Pietro Longhi, The Geography Lesson, c. 1750–

52. Oil on canvas, 61 � 49 cm. Fondazione

Querini Stampalia, Venice.



that difficulty. What then can an audience ‘know’? The answer perhaps lies in the

visceral response prompted by his own dancing. If this seems to be primitivizing

all over again, emphasizing the mind/body duality which much of the post-colo-

nial debate, and particularly the part played in it by Native artists, has worked to

overturn, then that is exactly the predicament intensified, dramatized, or alle-

gorized here. It is easy enough to comprehend that an Indian is dancing, less easy

to be sure what he is dancing for, or about. Confronted with the opacity, the

insistent rhythm, the sweat, the technologically mediated voices, drums and

bells, the bruised grass, the invitation is to feel viscerally implicated. When

Belmore throws water/blood into viewers’ faces, and then herself faces their faces

through the distortions, there is not much to do but flinch (see col. plate 7). This

account, then, is situated within a renewed and widespread interest in the

sensory and how that connects to ‘those things we never knew’.

Installation, dance performance, soundtrack all affirm, if they do not actually

celebrate, syncretism, nomadism. But at the same time, a non-negotiable, fixed

identity, the phenomenology of the syncretic present, underlies and authorizes

them. Another way of putting this would be to say that Emandatio provokes a

suspicion that it is all an elaborate decoy, an extended, entertaining diversion, in

order to maintain and protect something. Or, using one way – the art-world

performance way – of encoding knowledge to overlay or replace another way of

encoding knowledge.

But only an Indian could be doing this, now. Standing for collapsed cosmol-

ogies, broken-down social orders, and a present that reverses the sylvan idyll of

pre-Mission California, the figures and objects do not add up. Some grand

historical picture of a culture does not unfurl behind Luna – although it might

have, had things gone differently. It is not a matter of using ethnography recur-

sively but of using the bundle of reinscribed cliches that have emerged from the

collective fantasy recursively, while the narrative flow, having been interrupted,

8.32 James Luna, Emendatio, the artist seen dancing from the third floor of the Fondazione Querini

Stampalia, Venice, 2005. Photo: Katherine Fogden.



has been paused on tableaux, on hieratic, allegorical episodes, a sort of morality

play. The makers of Emendatio and Fountain present themselves as moral agents,

acting with a seriously authoritative conviction that is not just post-ironic but

post-poignant. The moral message sets their work apart. Along with its bitter

revelation of lurking harm, it offers a corrective. This is how it is, now; this is

what we are doing about it. So they are allegories of curing, even of redemption.

Emendatio then cannot be a story but an episodic work, a series of vignettes,

both phenomenological and referential, a provoking mix of affect and allegory.

When Luna had left, the guards kept the curious at a distance from the Spam, sugar

and syringe circle. But they could do nothing about the scent of bruised grass –

bruised by the Indian’s heel. The Querini Stampalia (plate 8.30) now houses a great

library and archive of Veneziana. Amongst its treasures is a collection of paintings

by Pietro Longhi giving a detailed account of eighteenth-century Venetian daily life.

Longhi’s work was exceptional in the annals of Venetian art – no allegory there.

One of his paintings happens, with some irony, to be a geography lesson (plate 8.31).

Looking down from the windows on the Palazzo’s third floor where they hang, the

trodden circle of Venetian grass below was clearly apparent (plate 8.32).

A P PE N D I X

Rebecca Belmore’s solo exhibitions include:

1988: Artifact 671B, Thunder Bay, Ontario;

1992: Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to their Mother, national Cana-

dian tour;

1993: Wana-na-wang-ong, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver;

1995: Tourist Act #1, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico;

2000: The Indian Factory, Tribe/AKA Gallery, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; on this

ground, RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island;

2002: Vigil, Talking Stick (Aboriginal Arts Festival), Vancouver, BC; The Named

and the Unnamed, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver,

BC, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto;

2005: Fountain, Canada Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale.

Belmore’s group exhibitions include:

1990: Biennale d’art actuel de Quebec, Quebec City;

1991: Interrogating Identity, Grey Art Gallery, New York; Havana Biennial,

Havana, Cuba;

1992: Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa,

Ontario;

1994: 6th Native American Invitational, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona;

1995: Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico;

1998: Sydney Biennial, Sydney, Australia;

2001: House Guests, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto;

2003: The Political is Personal, Queen’s Park, Toronto;

2006: Sydney Biennial.



Notes

1 Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native

Narrative, Minneapolis, 2005.

2 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cul-

tural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, 2001, 21–5.

3 See Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The

Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture, Vancouver,

1992; Marcia Crosby, ‘The Construction of the

Imaginary Indian’, in Vancouver Anthology: The

Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas,

Vancouver, 1991.

4 See Allan J. Ryan, The Trickster Shift: Humour and

Irony in Contemporary Native Art, Vancouver, 1999.

5 See Appendix.

6 See Paul Chaat Smith and Truman Lowe, James

Luna: Emendatio, Washington, 2006; Jan Bailey

and Scott Watson, Fountain, Vancouver, 2006.

7 Jolene Rickard, ‘Performing Power’, in Rebecca

Belmore: Fountain, Kamloops Art Gallery, The

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University

of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2005.

8 Chaat Smith, ‘Luna Remembers’, in James Luna:

Emendatio, 28.

9 See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic

Drama, trans. John Osborne, London, 1985; Paul

de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in

Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust, New Haven

and London, 1979; James Clifford, ‘On Ethno-

graphic Allegory’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics

and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, 1986.

10 See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries,

Durham, 2004.

11 Paul Chaat Smith, ‘Luna Remembers’, in Chaat

Smith and Lowe, James Luna: Emendatio, 27.

12 Terry Smith, ‘Visual Regimes of Colonization:

Aboriginal Seeing and European Vision in

Australia’, in The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn,

ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, London and New York,

2002, 283.

13 See, for example, Michael Ames, Cannibal Tours

and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums,

Vancouver, 1992; Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and

Politics of Museum Display, eds Ivan Karp and

Steven D. Levine, Washington, 1991; Ruth B.

Phillips, ‘Art History and the Native Made Object:

New Discourses, Old Differences?’, in Native

American Art in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jackson

Rushing, New York, 1999; Annie E. Coombes,

Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and

Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian

England, New Haven and London, 1994; Site

Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, ed. Alex Coles,

London, 2000.

14 Artifact Piece was first performed at the San Diego

Museum of Man.

15 See Francis, The Imaginary Indian.

16 The exhibition was organized by the Glenbow

Museum, Calgary, Alberta. For the exhibition

catalogue, see The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of

Canada’s First Peoples, Toronto, 1987.

17 See Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art,

New York, 1967; Daniel Miller, ‘Primitivism in Art

and the Necessity of Primitivism to Art’, in The

Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art, London,

1991; Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places,

Chicago, 1989. The published arguments that

centred around Primitivism in Twentieth-Century

Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the

Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984 are

conveniently brought together in The Anthro-

pology of Art: A Reader, eds Howard Morphy and

Morgan Perkins, Oxford, 2006.

18 Except for the years 1973–1979, when he was

active in the American Indian Movement (AIM),

Jimmie Durham has lived outside the United

States, because, in Chaat Smith’s words,

‘amnesia is the state religion’, see Chaat Smith,

‘Luna Remembers’, in Chaat Smith and Lowe,

James Luna: Emendatio, 28. Durham’s writings are

gathered in Jimmie Durham: A Certain Lack of

Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics, ed.

Jean Fisher, London, 1993. There is also the

monograph, Jimmie Durham, eds Laura Mulvey et

al., London, 1995.

19 Such as Deborah Doxtator, Robert Houle,

Mithlo, Paul Chaat Smith, Jolene Rickard and

Gerald McMaster.

20 Paul Chaat Smith, ‘Luna remembers’, in Chaat

Smith and Lowe, James Luna: Emendatio, 28.

21 See Charlotte Townsend-Gault, ‘Hot dogs, Adobe, a

ball-gown and words: The modes and materials of

identity’, in Native American Art in the Twentieth

Century, 113–33, Jessica Bradley, ‘Art and the Object

of Performance’, in Rebecca Belmore: Fountain, 42–8.

22 In My Dreams was performed in 1996 at the Getty

Center, Los Angeles; ATLATL Conference, Tulsa,

Oklahoma; The Swiss Institute, New York; and

Siena Heights College, Adrian, Michigan; and in

1997 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

23 The Metis artist Edward Poitras, in 1995, was the

first Native artist in the Canadian pavilion.

24 For Bas Jan Ader, see Wade Saunders, ‘In Dreams

Begin Responsibilities’, Art in America, 92: 2,

February 2004, 54–63, 65.

25 For further discussion of this interpretation, see

Charlotte Townsend-Gault, ‘Have We Ever Been

Good?’, in Charlotte Townsend-Gault and James

Luna, Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the Unnamed,

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University

of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2003, 9–50;

Jolene Rickard, ‘Performing Power’, in Rebecca

Belmore: Fountain, 68–76.



26 The Named and the Unnamed took place at the

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in

October 2002. It was also shown at the Art

Gallery of Ontario, Confederation Centre, and

the Kamloops Art Gallery. For the exhibition

catalogue, see Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the

Unnamed, Vancouver, 2003.

27 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the

Labour of the Negative, Stanford, 1999, 5.

28 Taussig, Defacement, 7.

29 June 1983 is the date on which the first of sixty-

one women disappeared in mysterious circum-

stances from the part of Vancouver known as the

Downtown East Side. Suspicions led the police to

the farm of Robert William Pickton in 2000.

Pickton was arrested in 2002 and, by May 2005,

had been charged with twenty-seven of the

murders. The trial began in January 2006 before

the British Columbia Supreme Court, when

Pickton’s plea was not guilty to the twenty-seven

charges. The Court is following the ‘voir dire’

procedure, which concerns the admissibility of

evidence and entails a total publication ban. A

jury is expected to be empanelled in the autumn

of 2006 at the earliest. There are no estimates

on the length of the trial, but it will probably

last for months. The Vancouver Police (city-

controlled) have come under intense criticism

for the way they handled the investigation of the

disappearances (the Royal Canadian Mounted

Police, who are federally controlled, became

involved in 2001). In particular, the city force has

been accused of racism, given the fact that most

of the women were aboriginal, and of being un-

caring, because the women were sex-trade

workers and, in many cases, drug addicts.

30 Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips, London, 1992.

31 See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans.

Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA, 1993, 79–81.

32 Bruno Latour, ‘Behind the Masks’, in Down from

the Shimmering Sky: Masks of the Northwest Coast, eds

Peter Macnair, Robert Joseph and Bruce Gren-

ville, Vancouver, 1998, 18–35.

33 Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power and Righteousness: An

Indigenous Manifesto, Oxford, 1999, 6.

34 See Diana Nemiroff, ‘Modernism, Nationalism,

and Beyond: A Critical History of Exhibitions

of First Nations Art’, in Diana Nemiroff,

Robert Houle and Charlotte Townsend-Gault,

Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National

Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1992.

35 See Robert Houle, ‘The Emergence of a New

Aesthetic Tradition’, New Work by a New Generation,

exhib. cat., Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, 1982.

36 See Nemiroff, Houle and Townsend-Gault, Land,

Spirit, Power, and Indigena: Contemporary Native

Perspectives in Canadian Art, eds Gerald McMaster

and Lee-Ann Martin, Ottawa, 1992.

37 Task Force on Museums and First Peoples,

Turning the Page: Forging New Partnerships between

Museums and First Peoples, Ottawa, 1992; Tom Hill

and Karen Duffek, Beyond History, Vancouver,

1989; Deborah Doxtator, ‘The Home of the Indian

Culture and Other Stories in the Museum’, Muse,

6: 3, Autumn 1988, 26–9; Marcia Crosby, ‘The

Construction of the Imaginary Indian’, in

Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art,

Vancouver, 1991, 267–91; Loretta Todd, ‘What

More Do They want?’, in Indigena, eds McMaster

and Martin, 71–9; Gerald McMaster, ‘Border-

zones: The ‘‘Injun-uity’’ of Aesthetic Tricks’,

Cultural Studies, 9: 1, January 1995, 74–90.

38 This exhibition, curated by Gerald McMaster, was

presented at the Canadian Museum of Civilisa-

tion; for the exhibition catalogue, see Reservation

X: The Power of Place in Aboriginal Contemporary Art,

ed. Gerald McMaster, Hull, Quebec, 1998.

39 The Banff Centre states on its website: ‘We will

seek to further build and strengthen our part-

nerships with communities and other arts and

culture organizations, and continue to develop

innovative arts and culture programs founded

upon the traditions and teachings of the Indi-

genous peoples of this land.’ See www.banffcen-

tre.ca/aboriginal_arts.

40 See www.aptn.ca.

41 The exhibition Brian Jungen opened at the New

Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in

2005 and travelled to the Vancouver Art Gallery

in 2006. The exhibition is scheduled to be shown

at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal in

2006. An exhibition of Jungen’s work will also be

presented at Tate Modern, London, in 2006.

42 See Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn, London,

1998.

43 Personal communication between the artist and

the author, 2005.

44 Personal communication between the artist and

the author, 2005.

45 Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive, A Holistic

Approach to American Indian Texts, Berkeley,

1993, 3.

46 America’s National Entertainment: An Illustrated

Treatise of Historical Facts and Sketches, 1895, from

which the photograph was taken, is in the

Library of the Glenbow Museum, Calgary.

Deborah Doxtator writes: ‘The audience [of

the Wild West Shows] was afforded one thing

more that was lacking in written accounts and

engraved or painted depictions of Indians. The

live performance permitted a degree of audi-

ence participation. The performance not only

involved the audience in sensual ways in that

they could experience sights, sounds, smells and

the three dimensional reality of living perfor-

mers, but as a result they could also become

involved emotionally.’ Doxtator, ‘Wild, Weird



and Wonderful’, in Fluffs and Feathers: An Exhibit

on the Symbols of Indianness, Brantford, Ontario:

Woodland Cultural Centre, 1988, 20.

47 See Indigena, eds McMaster and Martin; Jimmie

Durham, ed. Fisher, London, 1992.

48 See Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The

Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture,

1100–1500, New Haven and London, 2000, and The

Architectural History of Venice, New Haven and

London, 2002.

49 Lisbeth Haas, ‘Pablo Tac: Memory, Identity,

History’, in Chaat Smith and Lowe, James Luna:

Emendatio, 53.

50 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the

Performative, London, 1997.

51 Luna in coversation with the curators on a DVD

that accompanies the exhibition catalogue enti-

tled ‘A Performance Rehearsal at the Smithso-

nian’s National Museum of the American

Indian’; see Chaat Smith and Lowe, James Luna:

Emendatio.

52 In the DVD ‘A Performance Rehearsal at the

Smithsonian’s National Museum of the Amer-

ican Indian’.

53 After the sculpture of the same name (1915) by the

American artist James Earle Fraser (1867–1953).

54 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minnea-

polis, 1987, 475–7.

55 Tac’s manuscript ‘intersperses writing on the

mission period – arranged by subheadings on

conversion, dance, the ball game, and daily life –

with extensive and sophisticated notes on

Luiseno grammar and a partial Luiseno-Spanish

dictionary’. See Haas, ‘Pablo Tac: Memory, Iden-

tity, History’, 49.

56 This is the name by which Pablo Tac’s people

knew themselves before the foundation of the

Mission San Luis Rey on their land, which

became part of Mexico in 1821.

57 Chaat Smith and Lowe, James Luna: Emendatio,

endpapers.



rebecca belmore and james luna on location at venice

Documents