Art Archives - Not Even Past

Native Literatures and Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Brief Historiography

October 14th is what most people know as Columbus Day. However, for many Indigenous peoples, the celebration of Christopher Columbus is a reminder of the generations of trauma and settler conquest of Native nations and lands. For that reason, several states, including Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and South Dakota (and cities like Austin), have chosen to rename the holiday Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Native activists have been at the forefront of this movement. Here is a twitter thread discussing the global campaigns to reframe the day:

I'm going to be tweeting about #IndigenousPeoplesDay a lot this weekend. I think about it a lot since I've been working on multiple #IPD campaigns during the past 4 years. pic.twitter.com/73jk2IHt3J
— ndnviewpoint (@mahtowin1) October 12, 2019

It is difficult to study or teach American history without including Native peoples. That said, many historians limit mention of Indigenous peoples to the period before 1776 or even 1840, but the narrative that the cultures died or were replaced by the United States relegates Native peoples to the past, furthers the colonial project of erasure, and simply does not do enough scholarly diligence. There is a difference between talking about Native peoples and teaching Native histories. “Decolonizing your syllabus” by including one Indigenous, Black, or POC scholar is not sufficient either.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I’d like to suggest some easy additions to your syllabus, playlists, and bookshelf. This is a brief review of some seemingly untraditional academic works by Native authors, scholars, artists, and creators. My reflection on Native literature here includes scholarship in a number of forms that could easily be incorporated into a syllabus or added to your Comprehensive Exam List. This list is a starting point and I’d encourage readers to go further by listening to Native leaders, scholars, and artists.

ART

Images via Blanton Museum of Art and FrankWaln.com

The Blanton Museum of Art recently featured the work of Cherokee and Choctaw artist, Jeffrey Gibson in an exhibit called “Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day.” Gibson’s art was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation when he was awarded a 2019 MacArthur Genius grant. The exhibit was celebratory, sincere, and visually stunning. Gibson’s talent was on full display in a wide range of pieces. They included sculptures, textiles, paintings, film, even several boxing bags. Descriptions of each piece were written by Gibson himself. (They are generally written by exhibit curators so to have Gibson’s narration was an honor!)

View of Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day at the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, July 14, 2019–September 29, 2019 (via Blanton Museum of Art)

A room of the exhibition hall was dedicated to the ghost shirt, a garment used by ghost dancers during the ceremony but reinterpreted here by Gibson. Each ghost shirt carries its own symbolism and messaging. Gibson’s use of a wide range of materials, textiles, prints, and textures allows his work to explore ideas of race, sexuality, gender, and religion. Gibson’s perspective bridges cultural practices and modern art forms and visualizes coalitions in the global struggle for Indigenous rights. Gibson wrote, “A garment acts as the mediator between the wearer–myself in this case– and the rest of the world. It can protect me, draw attention to me, celebrate me, allow me to be another version of myself.” The exhibit closed on September 29th, but you can find out more about Gibson’s work on his website.

Frank Waln’s “What Makes The Red Man Red” and “AbOriginal” are must listens. The music video for the former shows imagery and lyrics from Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). Scholars and social commentators have observed the obvious racism in the almost 70-year-old animated film, however, Waln’s work includes both audio clips and an answer to the question “what makes the red man red”?:

You made me red when you killed my people
Made me red when you bled my tribe
Made me red when you killed my people
(Like savages/ Like savages)

In “AbOriginal,” Waln goes home. The lyrics talk of life in his reservation— the pains, protests, and resilience that comes from his tribe.

I got this AB Original soul/ I got this AB Original flow
I got this pain that I can’t shake/ ties to my people I can’t break
Got this history in my blood/ got my tribe that shows me love
So when I rise/ you rise/ come on let’s rise like

Similarly, the music video pays tribute to Waln’s tribe and hometown in Rosebud, South Dakota. (ALSO–today he is releasing “My People Come From the Land,” a track that he worked on in collaboration with a Lakota language teacher and is his debut of playing the Native flute.)

PODS

Cherokee scholar Adrienne Keene (@NativeApprops) and Swinomish and Tulalip photographer Matika Wilbur (@matikawilbur) host the All My Relations Podcast. Their podcast bridges Keene’s expertise in the history of appropriations of Native culture and Wilbur’s interest in the modern for a truly delightful podcast. Their guests include academics, tribal elders, creatives, aunties, and artists. Their latest episode, “Beyond Blood Quantum” features Charlotte Logan, Gabe Galanda, Tommy Miller, and David Wilkins, and discusses the tribal implications, legal basis, and colonial origins of blood quantum.

Rick Harp (Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation) hosts Media Indigena, with regular roundtable guests Candis Callison, Brock Pitawanakwat, Kim TallBear, and Kenneth T. Williams. The scholars, journalists, and policymakers discuss the latest developments in North American news and the direct impact on Indigenous peoples in the 21st century. The conversations are pointed and nuanced. Each guest brings their expertise and insight into the complex issues facing Indian Country. Their latest episode, which was recorded live in Edmonton, Alberta, is called “Is the Green Movement Still Too White?” and looks at the global green movement, the media attention that propelled Greta Thunberg into the spotlight, and some of the pushback from Native Twitter.

This Land, a Crooked Media podcast hosted by Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee Nation) is especially timely. Nagle unpacks how a 20-year-old murder case in Oklahoma made it to the Supreme Court in 2019, the history of land divisions in Indian Territory, the Trail of Tears, and the long-term ramifications for tribal sovereignty and Native land rights.

BOOKS & BOOKLISTS

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (2019) is edited by Elissa Washutta and Theresa Warburton. This is one of the best books I’ve read as a graduate student and holds a permanent place on my shelf. The collection was composed with care and intention. As the editors described it, Shapes of Native Nonfiction is meant to hold structure throughout like a basket. The collection is structured in four terms based on the basket metaphor: technique, coiling, plaiting, and twining. Each represents a different style of non-fiction writing The editors and contributors are speaking directly to the idea that the academic essay is the only valid form of nonfiction. Form here is critical to the decolonial process. The editors write, “our focus on form-conscious Native nonfiction insists on knowledge as a resource whose coercive extraction is used to narrate settler colonialism in order to normalize its structure.”(11). It is a phenomenal collection specific to individuals, peoples, and places.

Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter calls into question basic assumptions about what makes up Indigenous literature and, as the title states, why they matter. Justice’s work urges readers to expand their view of what should be considered “Indigenous Literature.” This work is accessible to the generalist and the specialist, yet acknowledges their added significance: “our literatures are just one more vital way that we have countered those forces of erasure and given shape to our own ways of being in the world…they affirm Indigenous presence– and our present.” (xix)

The Elizabeth Warren Syllabus, which seems to become timelier every year, combines the specialties of several scholars already mentioned and citizens of the Cherokee Nation: Adrienne Keene (@nativeapprops), Rebecca Nagle (@rebeccanagle), and Joseph M. Pierce (@pepepierce). The syllabus was meant to not only address Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s claims to Cherokee ancestry but to contextualize the history of such claims by non-natives to Native ancestry. The Syllabus is structured by theme and topic and generally touches on the ideas of DNA and genetic testing, Indigenous citizenship, Cherokee history, erasure, cultural appropriation, blood, and tribal sovereignty. The syllabus was published in the Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies.

Finally, one way to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day is to support the UT Native American and Indigenous Studies program and institutions that support Native students. Show up to events. Rally around causes. The NAIS Program provides an undergraduate certificate and graduate portfolio for UT students and also hosts a number of speaker series and workshops. This semester’s lineup includes Angelo Baca (Hopi/Diné), Tiya Miles, Héctor Nahuelpan (Mapuche), and Roxana Miranda Rupailaf (Mapuche). Consider attending one or several of these events.

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day!

Photography, Film Criticism, and Left Politics

By Jessica Werneke

Each year, a group of artists, art historians, and visual theorists meet at a conference to discuss the intersections of the visual, art, aesthetics, activism, and politics. Among many other important contributions, the conference is designed to involve individuals from a variety of institutions and backgrounds to unite scholars whose critical approach to photography, cinema and film is from “the Left.” As a historian of photography, I attended this conference for the first time this year. While there were many valuable and insightful presentations, several stood out not only for their original contributions, but also for the contemporary relevance of their ongoing artistic and research projects.

Dr. Nela Milic’s (University of the Arts, London) Materialising Site, was a description of her ongoing research cum artistic project visualizing the political awakening of Serbia in 1996 through visualizations of Belgrade. Melic’s personal experience of the uprisings against Milosevic, with nearly 200,000 protesters on a daily basis, was the initial impetus for her project. Yet, in her early research she found that Western European discourses not only misrepresent the scale of events of 1996, but have a tendency to outright ignore historical events. Similarly, those who participated in the uprising expressed a sense of shame that their efforts were unsuccessful, and no individual had ever attempted to archive the many visual and artistic materials associated with the protests. Her response is an innovative endeavor that seeks to activate Belgrade’s memory through participatory mapping of the city – conducting interviews, collecting images, posters, coupons, and photographs that function as public art artifacts in a collaboration between artist(s) and citizens. This project has existed in several forms and iterations before Milic decided on its current format.

In her presentation, Brigitte Thorsen Vislev (PhD-fellow affiliated with SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark, the Danish Film Institute and the University of Copenhagen) explored ABCinema, a socialist amateur film collective founded in Denmark in 1968. The group wanted to construct an alternative to the established film industry and desired to create a new alphabet, language and vocabulary for art film. They worked primarily with handheld Super 8 cameras, and their philosophy of film did not require theatricality or even a script, and incorporated long takes (essentially until the film reel ran out), real time situations, and editing “in the camera”; that is editing while shooting rather than afterwards. The collective included about 30 artists, experimental filmmakers, and intellectuals, including Per Kirkeby, Bjørn Nørgaard, and Ole John, whose philosophy and style later influenced the more renowned Danish Dogma Movement of the 1990s. According to Vislev, “The Danish film movement of the 1960s was ideologically founded on left-wing, Danish social-democratic Marxist ideas, and that cameras were pens and weapons used to revolutionize social hierarchies and to question who had the rights and access to the means of production.” Though the group dissolved in 1971, ABCinema was instrumental in changing legislation on film financing. New state funds were set aside for art film, which allowed individuals to apply for funding based on their ideas, rather than a completed script. In 1972, a new law was ratified which set aside funding to exclusively support experimental films. See this link for an example of ABCinema’s work.

In “Picturing the Predator: Subverting the Military Sublime,” Paul Lowe (Photographer and Reader in Documentary Photography at University of the Arts, London) explained how modern warfare, particularly the use of drones for surveillance and targeting “enemies of the state,” poses a challenge of representation for photographers. The sanitized and depersonalized nature of drone warfare has led photographers to find alternative means of expressing and depicting the consequences of invisible weapons systems. Contrary to the depictions of drones on government military websites and corporate purveyors of military technology that sanitize this technology (despite civilian casualties and the significant loss of life), photographers like James Bridle have tried to reclaim some measure of depicting the realities of war. In his works Drone Shadows and “Dronestagram,” Bridle attempts to render the invisibility of drone warfare visible. Importantly, Lowe, who built his career on photographing conflict, demonstrates the difficulty and complexities of how to represent the contemporary military state and modern warfare.

James Bridle, Drone Shadow 004, Washington D.C., 2013 (via Dezeen)

Dr. Sigrid Lien’s (University of Bergen, Norway) presentation “The Politics of Silence in Marja Helander’s Photography – and Video Production” investigates Marja Helander’s body of work and its connection to her Sámi heritage. The Sámi are an indigenous people inhabiting Sápmi, which includes parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Murmansk region of the Russian Federation, whose language, culture and land have been, and in some ways, continue to be, threatened by adverse government policies in Scandinavia and Russia. As Lein demonstrates, Silence – Jaskes eatnamat, as well as Helander’s previous photographic series such as Modern Nomad and Darkness, need to be understood in terms of the Sámi people’s relationship to their ancestry, the present, and their spiritual connection to the Sápmi landscape. Silence depicts industrial landscapes and wastelands devoid of humans, but obviously bear traces of human activity, in order explore the aftermath of colonization in Sápmi. Lein also attempted to explain how various aspects of Helander’s work pay homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, though I was not wholly convinced by this argument. In a way, Silence falls into the category of “aftermath” photography, recording the trace of an event or series of events. As a whole, however, Helander’s body of work expresses the artist’s and the Sámi people’s conflicted sense of belonging.

Marja Helander, from the Series Silence – Jaskes eatnamat, 2016 (via Sami Center for Contemporary Art)

Marja Helander, from the Series Darkness, 2010 (via Marja Helander)

Jessie Bond (Freelance writer, editor, and research student at University of the Arts London) explored Susan Meiselas’ 1981 photobook Nicaragua, which was intended to create a “multi-layered and multi-voiced narrative” about the Nicaraguan Revolution and the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1978-1979. As one of the only American documentary photographers present during the initial Sandinista uprising, her photographs were published frequently in the press and the photobook Nicaragua was Meisela’s attempt at creating a more comprehensive narrative of the revolution. At the time of its publication Nicaragua was criticized for a variety of reasons, ranging from Meiselas’ lack of subjectivity to the separation of text and images in the book itself. Crucially, however, this separation of text and image allows the reader or viewer some fluidity in interpreting Meiselas’ narrative, but the order of the images themselves provides a sort of contextual chronology from unrest and protests to open insurrection. Similarly, Bond showed that Nicaragua was not Meiselas’ first project that avoided overarching strict or set narratives. Meiselas herself recognized her work was subjective and, according to Bond, the fluid narrative and structure of the book perhaps provides a closer visual representation of the experience of revolution than other, similar publications. Isabel Stein’s (The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) presentation “Molotov-Click: The Domestication of Weapons” also discussed Susan Meiselas’ work in Nicaragua, primarily her iconic image “Molotov Man.”

Susan Meiselas, Molotov Man, 1979 (via Wikipedia)

These presentations provide us with a variety of new ways to think about and study the history of photography. The range of topics and the interdisciplinarity of their approaches to visual culture also offer us tools for thinking about the photographs that we see every day and the roles they play in society and our everyday lives.

Each year, this conference is hosted by the Faculty of Beles Artes of the University of Lisbon. (this year 9-10 November,). I would like to thank Alise Tifentale (PhD Candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York), for suggesting I attend.

Jessica Werneke (UT History PhD, 2015) is a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy and Lecturer in History at Loughborough University (UK) and former Postdoctoral Researcher at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Her research explores the aftermath of Stalinist cultural policies in photography and visual culture, and the impact of the unique political and cultural context of the “Thaw” on photojournalism and amateur photography. You can read more of her essays on photography on her blog, Sovetskoe Foto Blog.

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Black Amateur Photography
The Public Archive: Frederic Allen Williams

The Public Archive: Frederic Allen Williams

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider. Based in New York City, he became known for his talks on Native American art delivered in his midtown studio using magic lantern slides, an early type of image projector. By digitizing a sizable collection of Williams’ prints, negatives, lantern slides, and other ephemera held at the Harry Ransom Center, Jesse Ritner‘s digital project not only makes these materials accessible to wider audiences, but also reflects on using photography as historians and teachers.

More on Ritner’s project and the Public Archive here.

Also by Jesse Ritner on Not Even Past:

Death, Danger, and Identity at 12,000 Feet
The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin
Paying for Peace: Reflections on “Lasting Peace” Monument
What Makes a Good History Blog?

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The Public Archive: Woven Into History by Alina Scott
Who Put Native American Sign Language in the US Mail? by Jennifer Graber
A Graphic Revolution: The New Archive (No. 19) by Joseph Parrott

Miss O’Keeffe

by Nathan Stone

I remember Georgia O’Keeffe. I couldn’t have been but three, first time I met her. She was already an older woman by then, or late middle age, at least. She was tall and perfectly centered, with a slender frame and grey hair pulled back in a tight bun. She wore long sleeves and dark jeans. She smoked only the best Cuban cigars. Women weren’t supposed to smoke cigars at all. But she got away with it. She and Frida Kahlo.

Miss O’Keeffe got her smokes from La Habana. They were already hard to get in ’61. The trade embargo was not yet in place, but things were already getting sticky with Fidel. The State Department didn’t like the combat fatigues, and the mob wanted their casinos back. I think they drove Fidel into Soviet arms. After that, Ché Guevara went to Angola, with a habanero in his teeth, just like Miss O’Keeffe. Cuban cigars became contraband. Reserved for drug traffickers and CIA agents. I suspect Miss O’Keeffe had some stashed away for a rainy day. But in the summertime, it rained every afternoon on the high plains of New Mexico. You learned to bide your time. You knew that’s just the way it was going to be.

Georgia O'Keeffe looks directly at the camera, resting her head on her hands. — Georgia O’Keeffe, 1932, Gelatin silver print (via the Met)

Back then, people might have said that Georgia O’Keeffe dressed like a man, if she weren’t so strikingly feminine. Sometimes, she switched the jeans for a long dark skirt, the sort Jean Harlow might have worn in a Western. Her perfume was something classic from the 1920s, sprayed on with granny’s atomizer, a little pungent, perhaps, but a good combination with the juniper and piñon all around us. We would meet her often at the Piggly Wiggly in Santa Fe.

She drove her pickup truck down from Ghost Ranch to Santa Fe about once a week for provisions. Ghost Ranch was her home in Abiquiu, north of Española. We rode in with Mom from Tesuque. In a 1960 turquoise Volkswagen. It wasn’t that we would just see her and comment that there goes a famous person. She would always speak, and she remembered our names, and we would remember her. I even remember a plane ride to Midland, sitting in the same row with Miss O’Keeffe. To go to Houston, back then, you flew from Santa Fe to Midland and there, you took the train. I don’t know where Miss O’Keeffe was going. Probably, New York. She had to check in with the art world once in a while.

Georgia O'Keeffe's home and studio — Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio, 1996 (via National Park Service)

One day, Daddy had to drive out to Abiquiu to fix Miss O’Keeffe’s hi-fi. Stereo was still a dream of the future. Daddy was good at fixing hi-fi systems. And the old hi-fis were very good machines, but they needed attention. You had to change the needle often, and when a vacuum tube burned out, you had to identify which one it was, buy the right replacement, and change it without electrocuting yourself.

Daddy was down on the floor, on his back, underneath Miss O’Keeffe’s hi-fi, and her German Shepherd walked into the room, growling, hackles raised. Miss O’Keeffe was right behind him. Don’t move, she said, softly. Instructions for the man on the floor, not for the dog.

She managed to call off her dog. Daddy got it. We had German Shepherds, too. Far better than locks on the door for looking after yourself, or your wife and kids. In what was left of the wild, wild west. Aware of prowlers and mountain lions.

I suspect Sanders and Associates had sold Miss O’Keeffe her hi-fi, and that was why Daddy would drive out there to fix it. He worked for them. It was about an hour away. Maybe it was just because he was a nice guy. She didn’t let many people into her sanctuary. Her dog knew that.

Georgia O’Keeffe, photographed by by Carl van Vechten (via Pixabay)

We often wondered, years later, what her music was. Big bands or Aaron Copeland; maybe Stravinsky. But Daddy’s gone now, and we never got around to asking him.

Igor Stravinsky came to Tesuque in ’61. He was an elderly man, by then. He came to direct his masterpiece at the Santa Fe Opera House. It was three blocks from where we lived, so Mom and Daddy went. They were young marrieds with three babies, no money and season tickets to the opera. Where will you ever see that again? Miss O’Keeffe was there, of course.

After that, Daddy bought a recording of the Rite of Spring to play for us at home on our hi-fi. We just called it, the jungle record. We played it over and over. We hid behind the couch for the loud and rowdy parts. Alongside that, the record changer dropped Toscanini’s Beethoven, Harry Belafonte’s Calypso and the complete The Kingston Trio. It was all music to us.

Daddy worked for Sanders and Associates, a King Ranch subsidiary, which meant Alfred King was trying his hand at import-export in Santa Fe. It folded because Mr. Sanders was cooking the books. Daddy turned him in to Mr. King, and then we moved to Dallas. We watched Kennedy get shot while we were there. Dealey Plaza was just a few blocks away. Shit goes down that way in Texas. JFK didn’t have a German Shepherd. He sure needed one.

Cerro Pedernal, viewed from Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, New Mexico (via Wikimedia Commons)

But this was supposed to be about Miss O’Keeffe. She was lovely. She had climbed the steep rock wall alone to get to the place where she was. Her masculine dress, her artistic style, and her cigars were a testament to her eternal readiness for the ongoing struggle. She possessed the peace that had cost her everything she had. She had walked through the fire.

Miss O’Keeffe gave up painting as a young woman, after attending the Chicago Art Institute’s school for starving artists. Said the smell of turpentine made her puke. For a while, she drew for an advertising firm in Chicago, then she taught public school in Amarillo. While she was in Amarillo, she started walking in the Palo Duro Canyon. It seduced her heart back to beauty.

She contracted the Spanish Flu in 1918, along with 200 million others worldwide, but she survived. She married Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer from New York, and he made many portraits of her. But she couldn’t bear his snobby family, or his philandering, so she escaped to New Mexico every summer. Hiking up high. It was there that she started painting again.

When Stieglitz died in 1946, she settled permanently at Ghost Ranch. She drove an old Model A until the wheels fell off. Then she got a Ford pickup, the one I remember from the supermarket in Santa Fe.

Ghost Ranch was out near Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was in the process of becoming a world-changing reality. Los Alamos is the strangest city on the planet. Complex, yet simple. If you drive into town to buy supplies, someone follows you. That is why Miss O’Keeffe preferred the supermarket in Santa Fe. She was recognized in Los Alamos and not welcome, there. She was recognized in Santa Fe and loved.

Georgia O'Keeffe—Hands and Horse Skull by Alfred Stieglitz — Georgia O’Keeffe—Hands and Horse Skull by Alfred Stieglitz, 1931 (via Met Museum)

Her life was an ongoing thermonuclear moment. Once, the soil rebelled and burned her workshop to the ground. Unable to finish a commissioned piece in New York, she had a nervous breakdown and spent two years in a psychiatric hospital. Behind bars with all the other artistic souls. Big Nurse, medication and electro-shock. She emerged, changed, but unscathed. She strode out of there with frightful courage, strong legs and unyielding decision.

That was 1932. The year that changed everything for her. From then on, she was determined, committed and, yes, maybe even, happy. More and more, she spent her time in the land that gave her life. She was more alone, but not lonely. She went back to New York to bury Stieglitz in 1946. After that, her only love was the the New Mexico desert. She painted it, smoked Cuban cigars, and watched the sun set, over and over again.

She died in 1984. She was 98 years old. She was not painting anymore. She would sit and watch the red desert cliffs on the high plane as the sun rose and set each day. Taking care of the beauty around her, just watching, perennially caught up in its angel fire.

Also by Nathan Stone on Not Even Past:

The Tiger
The Battle of Chile
Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez: An Unusual Disappearance

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Dagmar Lieblova, Survivor by Dennis Darling
Digital Teaching: Mapping Networks Across Avant-Garde Magazines by Meghan Forbes
Policing Art in Early Soviet Russia by Rebecca Johnston

Colonial Chalices: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 4)

Chalice (Cáliz) Mexico City, 1575-1578 (via LACMA)

This series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways written archives alone cannot.

Lillian Michel’s exhibit focuses on colonial chalices, one of the most sacred objects of the Eucharist. Unlike many other colonial objects that incorporated indigenous techniques and materials, silversmiths charged with the production of chalices were strictly regulated. There was little room for the incorporation of indigenous materials, let alone indigenous religious sensibilities. Chalices therefore can better document the arrival of new European styles in art and architecture than changes in indigenous traditions.

More from the Colonial Latin America Through Objects series:

Of Merchants and Nature by Diana Heredia López
Nanban Art by John Monsour
Andean Tapestry by Irene Smith

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Abisai Pérez Zamarripa reviews Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes
Brittany Erwin walks us through the National Museum of Anthropology in San Salvador
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra reviews Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment

Nanban Art: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 2)

(via Wikimedia Commons)

John Monsour’s exhibit on Nanban screenfolds exemplify the deep connections of the colonial Americas to early-modern Japan. Portuguese Jesuits and merchants arrived in southern Japan in the mid-sixteenth century with commodities from India, Europe, and the Americas and with hundreds of Luso-Africans. The foreigners were called “Nanban” (barbarians from the south). The Jesuits gained a foothold with Japanese lords that led to the massive conversions of commoners and nobles. Jesuits and Japanese artisan established workshops that produced many Nanban objects, including screenfolds documenting new European cosmographies. The maps also document the introduction of Chinese-Korean maps. Monsour’s exhibit shows the maps on Edo workshops led by Jesuit and the new cosmographies they engendered.

More from the Colonial Latin America Through Objects series:

Of Merchants and Nature by Diana Heredia López

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Brittany Erwin reviews The Archaeology and History of Colonial Mexico by Enrique Rodriguez Alegría
Acapulco-Manila: the Galleon, Asia, and Latin America, 1565-1815 by Kristie Flannery
Purchasing Whiteness: Race and Status in Colonial Latin America by Ann Twinam

Digital Teaching: Mapping Networks Across Avant-Garde Magazines

By Meghan Forbes

In “The European Avant-Garde in Print” (REE 325), students explored the unique and vibrant print culture in Central Europe between the two world wars and the social and political context that produced it. I sought to expose students to the networked qualities of magazines that were published in Czech, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, and German. We examined contributor lists, the aesthetic qualities of the “New Typography,” and the way that the magazines cross promoted each other through advertisement.

Students discovered the transnational and multilingual interconnectivity of these magazines through the use of various digital mapping and open source publishing resources, such as Kumu and Scalar. Using Kumu’s Social Network Analysis tool, for instance, I could help students visualize how one figure, such as Karel Teige, the leading member of the leftist Czech avant-garde group Devětsil, leveraged his connections with editors elsewhere to make magazines that facilitated relations with major figures of a pan-European avant-garde. To offer just one example, through the Brno-based magazine, Pásmo, the Czech avant-garde actively collaborated with the Russian born and Berlin-based artist El Lissitzky, the German Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, and French-German correspondent Yvan Goll.

(via author)

I used digital mapping in my lectures to make this fluid exchange more concrete and dynamic for students. Then, a major component of the class was built around students developing their own digital mapping and visualization group projects. In this way, students had the opportunity to engage critically and interactively with the materials covered in the course.

One group drew on our extensive discussion of Dada periodicals published both in Europe and the United States—which we had the opportunity to view in person at the Harry Ransom Center—to reveal how some prominent artists appeared in Dada publications on both sides of the Atlantic. They also used their map to comment on who did not figure in these publications—namely, women, with the exception of the New York-based 291 contributor Agnes Meyer, whom they featured.

(via author)

Another group of students chose to document connections across a series of publications not via their contributors or geographic locale, but rather in relation to shared principles of design, such as color, shape, and textual form. This group even built their map to visually reflect in its own design the various components that they chose to highlight.

(via author)

Another project focused on a single magazine—the Italian Poesia—to make manifest the various personal connections between the leading figure of Italian Futurism, F.T. Marinetti, and other artists and authors related to the movement.

(via author)

The digital mapping component of the course was largely made possible with the assistance of UT’s Slavic and Digital Scholarship librarian, Ian Goodale, who made multiple class visits in which students had the opportunity to workshop their digital projects, and who also held weekly office hours in the Slavic Department. Ian also created a Scalar platform that holds all the mapping projects in one place, with the Kumu maps embedded, and includes other analytical content generated by students, allowing for further connections to be drawn across the group projects.

I observe in my own classroom, and in the work of my peers both across UT and at other institutions, the need for universities and colleges to commit to allocating funding for their libraries so that they may train and hire staff who are able to support digital pedagogy. For example, this past semester, Ian Goodale also helped my colleague in the Slavic Department, Vlad Beronja, create another digital project, Yugoslav Punk, with students in his course on Punks & Divas in Southeastern Europe.

Another aim in teaching “The European Avant-Garde in Print,” was to expose students to non-European periodicals, to explore the variety of responses to inter-war social and political conditions, and also to find actors outside of a European male cohort largely not represented in the Central European set. By giving students the opportunity to create their own mapping projects, I hoped to reveal unexpected connections between these cultural products. There is more work to be done in achieving these goals in a future iteration of this course, and data visualization and digital mapping tools will facilitate students’ active learning towards this end.

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Digital Learning: Starting from Scratch, by Joan Neuberger
Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive, by Ian Goodale
The Prague Spring Archive Project, by Mary Neuburger and Ian Goodale

Tatlin’s Fish: Art and Revolution in Everyday Life

By Peter Worger

Tucked into the pages of Nikolai Punin’s diary is a sliver of silver paper made into the shape of a fish. Its scales have been drawn with what appears to be black marker or charcoal in an Impressionist style on one side and in a Cubist style on the other. The fish has two fins along its underside and a pointed tail, most of which have brightly-colored orange tips, and there is a razor-like saw of a fin on its backside. An orange piece of yarn is tied to its mouth as if the fish had been caught with it, making it easy to hang or pull out of a book. The whole object is about the length of a page and, since it was found in a book, one can assume it was made to be used as a bookmark.

Both sides of the fish are decorated in silver and orange (Punin papers, Harry Ransom Center).

The fish was a gift from the famous Soviet avant-garde artist, Vladimir Tatlin, to his friend, the art historian Nikolai Punin. The two men worked together at The Museum of Painterly Culture in Petrograd in the early 1920s just after the Russian Revolution when the diary was written. Punin worked in the Department of General Ideology and Tatlin was producing an experimental play by the poet Velimer Khlebnikov, another friend and collaborator in the circle of Russian revolutionary, avant-garde artists. For Punin, Tatlin represented a particular quality of Russian art that made it surpass the latest Cubist innovations in painting coming from France. In 1921, Punin had already written a polemic entitled, “Tatlin (Against Cubism).” In this short work, he argued that Tatlin made the same innovations in art as the French Cubists, but surpassed them because the tradition of icon painting in Russia gave the Russian avant-garde a particular appreciation of the paint surface. The lack of a Renaissance tradition of perspectivalism, according to Punin, also gave the Russian avant-garde a much freer relationship to space. Punin referred to The Fishmonger, as one of three paintings that represented Tatlin’s start in this direction. In that painting we can see multiple fish that have the silver and orange coloring as the paper fish found in Punin’s diary. Tatlin’s early experiences with church art, painting icons, and copying wall frescoes, was crucial in the development of his style as well as his ideas about the role of art in revolutionary society. The icon was both a work of art and an object for everyday use. This emphasis on the image as everyday object became important in expanding Tatlin’s creative pursuits to include the construction of utilitarian objects to transform the nature of everyday life in the USSR during the transition to socialism.

The Fishmonger, by Vladimir Tatlin, 1911 (via Wikiart).

In 1923, Tatlin became the Director of the Section for Material Culture at the Museum of Painterly Culture. During his tenure there, he authored several documents outlining his general program for the role of material culture in the USSR. In an article written under his direction called “The New Way of Life,” he described a series of new projects and prototypes, namely a new design for a coat, and one of five new designs for an oven that could cook and keep food warm for 28 to 30 hours and also keep the home heated economically. Tatlin incorporated the text of “The New Way of Life” into a controversial work of the same name, a photo-montage showing images of the designs that were meant to depict that revolutionary new way of life. He created it for display in the showroom of the Section for Material Culture and the designs were also shown at the Exhibition of Petrograd Artists of All Tendencies. Punin wrote a favorable review of Tatlin’s work in the exhibition, but other critics who believed that art should occupy a place “beyond the realm of the everyday” found the designs inappropriate. Tatlin’s work was revolutionary in that it challenged this traditional boundary between art and the everyday.

A New Way of Life, by Vladimir Tatlin (via Russian State Archive of Literature and Art).

The fish is an important indication of a close personal and professional relationship between the artist, Vladimir Tatlin, and his admiring critic, Nikolai Punin, and it represents the ways that Tatlin and Punin tried to outline a new revolutionary program for art. It also is an example of that very revolutionary impulse in that it is an object to be contemplated for its aesthetic beauty and also to be used for a utilitarian purpose as a bookmark. Tatlin’s work paved the way for a new interpretation of art as something that could be figurative as well as useful; art in revolutionary society could have a place in the daily lives of every individual and not only in the lofty realm of the art establishment. This little fish offers a window onto the theories of the period of the Russian Revolution, when people sought to rethink the entire Western European model of not only aesthetics but also society.

Tatlin’s fish can be found in The Punin Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Additional Sources:
Anonymous, “New Way of Life,” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (1988).
John E. Bowlt, review of O Tatline, by Nikolai Punin, I. N. Punina, V. I. Rakitin, Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996).
Christina Kiaer, “Looking at Tatlin’s Stove,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds (2008).
Jennifer Greene Krupala, review of O Tatline by N. Punin, I. N. Punina, V. I. Rakitin, The Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 3 (1996).
John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde (1983).
Nikolai Punin, “Tatlin (Against Cubism),” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (1988).

You may also like:

Rebecca Johnston studies a letter pleading for Nikolai Punin’s release from prison in Policing Art in Early Soviet Russia.
Andrew Straw looks at the evolution of Soviet communism in Debating Bolshevism.
Michel Lee discusses the relationship between Leninism and cultural repression in Louis Althusser on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus.

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