Reading "Imagery in Literature, Art and Philosophy" from
The White Man's Indian: Images of the
American Indian from Columbus to the Present by Robert
Berkhofer, Jr. provides topics for comparative analysis.
Consideration of the interconnectedness of Native Americans'
art and life is intrinsic to understanding their attitudes. Their
homes, for example, are works of art, sacred places, and microcosms
of the universe. "A Navajo hogan is constructed of logs and adobe,
always with eight sides and with its one door opening east to the
sunrise. The smoke-opening in the domed roof corresponds to the
mythological opening in the heavenly dome. The fireplace in the
center of the floor is symbolically the center of the world"
(Campbell). "According to the traditions of
the Achilpa tribe, the divine being Numbakula fashioned a sacred
pole from the trunk of a gum tree, and after anointing it with
blood, climbed it and disappeared into the sky. This pole
represents the cosmic axis, for it is around the sacred pole that
territory becomes habitable. During their wanderings the Achilpa
always carry the pole with them. This allows them, while being
continually on the move, to be always in their world and, at the
same time, in communication with the sky into which Numbakula
vanished" (Eliade). Other Native American
living structures such as the tipi and the pueblo also have
artistic and religious significance.
Background readings for discussion of aesthetics include Ralph
T. Coe's Lost and Found Traditions: Native American Art,
1965-1985 (Los Angeles
County Museum of Natural History). The emphasis
on symbolism inherent in Native American art is inspiring for
contemporary artists when they are exposed to the art in
comparative presentations. The use of negative and positive space
inherent in Southwestern design work, for example, expresses itself
in the three-dimensional sculpture of Apache artist Alan Houser.
Readings focus on the interconnectedness of the mythic,
ceremonial, social and personal levels of Native American life as
reflected in traditional art forms. Readings from the text
Religion, Art and Iconography: Man and Cosmos in Prehispanic
Mesoamerica (Bowers Museum of
Cultural Art) will develop this theme. Thus, we can analyze
theories of native aesthetics including such traditional Native
American art forms as pottery, weavings, sandpaintings, kachinas,
jewelry, painting, architecture, dance and music. We consider
the influences of Western art on Native American artists and
conversely the influences of Native American form, technique, and
thought on the development of American art.
One traditional art form that fits within the mythic and
ceremonial levels is Navajo sandpainting. "Navajo artists create
exquisitely beautiful sand paintings that they rub out as soon as
they finish them . . . . Art for such people is not so much the
finished product as the act of creation. Most Navajo men have
participated in the creation of sand paintings, though some are
much better at it than others. More important than the paintings
themselves, however, is the context in which they are created. They
are contributions to the harmony that is the Navajo idea of beauty.
The Navajo word hozho, usually translated as "beauty,"
actually means more than that. It refers to a total environment
(ho) that includes beauty, harmony, happiness, and
everything that is positive. Creating sand paintings, then, is part
of life, part of the constant striving for hozho.
Obliterating them makes sense because the Navajo value the dynamics
of their creation and recreation more than the contemplation of
finished products" (Maybury-Lewis 158-60).
American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, inspired by Navajo
sandpainting, rejected Cubism and developed action and field
painting. Pollock's dismissal of the traditions of his culture was
intimately linked to nature, magic, and symbols found in the
practices of the American Indians, especially in the sandpaintings
of the Navajo. Pollock's art, and therefore Navajo Indian art
as well, was a seminal force in the evolution of color field
painting, the dominant art and most significant style of the past
few decades.
Kachinas are also forms of art that express mythic and
ceremonial significance. "The link between the ordinary world and
the spirit world is made for the Hopi by their Kachinas. They are
messengers who listen to the prayers of the priests and the elders
and convey them to the gods. Kachinas have human forms and
distinctive personalities and are, on the whole, benevolent toward
humankind if they are treated with proper respect. In fact, Hopi
myth tells us that the Kachinas appeared on earth along with the
Hope themselves, but they were eventually killed off by enemy
intruders or, in another version, they felt slighted by Hopi
indifference and simply withdrew. They had taught the sacred
dances to a group of young men, however, and these became the first
Hopi priests. In the middle of the ceremonies -- usually during
spring or summer events -- the privileged participants are in fact
a troupe of clowns. These clown Kachinas -- or anti-Kachinas,
because, like the sacred fools who embody wisdom, they represent
everything the Kachinas are not -- swarm into the plaza from the
rooftops, climbing down the ladders head-first, falling, stumbling
in merciless imitation of human pretension. They act out life as
it should not be. They turn everything upside down, even such
grave matters as the treatment of the dead. The clowns behave
scandalously and so they make us think about morality. They inspire
the Hopi to protect their social and sacred values and at the same
time to laugh at their inevitable human weakness"
(Maybury-Lewis 210-213). This analysis of
the Kachina will connect with the earlier discussion of the
trickster in mythology.
Pottery is a form of Native American art that exemplifies the
personal level of tribal life. "The objects of Indians are
expressive and not decorative because they are alive, living in
our experience of them. When the Indian potter collects clay, she
asks the consent of the river-bed and sings its praises for having
made something as beautiful as clay. When she fires her pottery she
offers songs to the fire so it will not discolour or burst her
wares. And, finally, when she paints her pottery, she imprints it
with the images that give it life and power -- because for an
Indian, pottery is something significant, not just a utility but a
'being' for which there is as much of a natural order as there is
for persons or foxes or trees" (Highwater
77-78). Other forms of personal and social art such as jewelry
will also be approached from a four-fold aesthetic perspective:
mythic, ceremonial, social, and personal.
Music and dance of Native Americans are examples of all four
levels from mythic and ceremonial to social and personal. "In
every season they venerated that mystery in ceremonies made
splendid by their humility and intimate communion with what the
Hopi people call the 'Mighty Something.' And at the spiritual
center of their great affirmation was the dance, the moving means
of interweaving life, culture, land. As in the Ojibwa song/dance
of thanksgiving, the pulsating feet of their bodies caressed and
communed with the body of the earth . . . . [understanding of
Indian cultures] will require seeing the existence of other
metaphysics that call into question the universality and beneficence
of all our cherished binary oppositions: time/matter, spirit/flesh,
sacred/profane, animate/inanimate, imagination/understanding -- the
lot. We shall have to stop our negation, become children of nature,
and lift ourselves to the Sioux truth: 'We are all related'"
(Drinnon 112-13).
Readings and images from Mixed Blessings: New Art in a
Multicultural America by Lucy R. Lippard provides the basis for
discussions. Another important consideration is the concept of
"primitivism," discussed in Week One from an historical
perspective. As Lippard writes in Mixed Blessings,
"primitivism has been used historically to separate the supposedly
sophisticated civilized 'high' art of the West from the equally
sophisticated civilized art it has pillaged from other cultures.
The term locates the latter in the past -- usually the distant
past -- and in an early stage of 'development,' implying simplicity
on the positive side and crudity or barbarism on the negative.
James Clifford calls the notion of the primitive in Western culture
'an incoherent cluster of qualities that at different times have
been used to construct a source, origin, or alter ego confirming
some new discovery within the territory of the Western self,
assuming a primitive world in need of preservation, redemption and
representation.' And yet primitive means complex" (Lippard 24-25).
Some contemporary Native American artists use humor, irony, and
parody to critique mainstream American culture. These artists, such
as Jimmie Durham, parallel the polyphonic approaches of the
autobiographical writers in I Tell You
Now and Indi'n Humor who use
multiple voices to imitate, mock and question the dominant culture.
Sources not in the Annotated Bibliography:
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday,
1988
Eliade, Mircea. Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader.
Ed. Wendall Beane and William Doty. New York: Harper Colophon, 1975.
Maybury-Lewis, David. Millenium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern
World. New York: Viking Press, 1992.
Highwater, Jamake. The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian
America. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.
