Beyond the End: Indigenous Artists' Creation & Communication
On New Red Order's "One if by Land, Two if by Sea," March 2022 at Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
NEW RED ORDER PRESENTS: 'One if by Land, Two if by Sea'1
Lately, as the days grow longer in brightened hours, they grow shorter in my perception – it no longer seems an option to spend hours alone in the inky mornings, but one must be seeing, writing.
That makes a convenient moment for the CPH:DOX film festival, and the collective New Red Order’s exhibition “One if by land, two if by sea” at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. New Red Order comprises “a public secret society of rotating and expanding membership, including core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, who confront colonial structures with incisive humour, to promote Indigenous futures.” – a decentralised structure reminiscent of other resistance-oriented groups (Pussy Riot comes to mind). And art and the post-colonial has seemed an especially salient topic, certainly in my own purview since summer 2020, when some of my fellow residents at Su Casa Catholic Worker helped tumble the Columbus statue in Chicago – though the principle of “confront[ing] colonial structures” has struck, and often still strikes me as a bit vague. On that operating principle, this particular exhibition aims to
bend and break temporal and geographical conditions, all the while maintaining a nuanced specificity to place. The space between this shared specificity creates a territory that could spawn new approaches to ‘decolonial’ work and possibly foster other more meaningful and intuitive formulations.
This resonates with (though does not directly reference) Indigenous Environmental Knowledge, or IEK, which loosely refers to a sense for the patterns of the natural environment – and capacity to articulate them and respond to them – from a philosophical position which prioritises relationality.2 In keeping with this principle, let us regard our own surroundings, stepping into the exhibition.
We are in central Copenhagen, at Nyhavn, a bright sheet of sunlight draping the peaked houses and cobblestone streets lining the harbor, where sailboats lay in wait. The exhibition’s works primarily refer to North American colonialism, branding those who maintain United States or Canadian citizenship ‘complicit’ in colonialism – though the exhibition itself takes place outside of North America. (A troubled thing in Denmark: it is too easy for some viewers to see political regressives as ‘over there.’) But several elements of the exhibition refer to Greenland: notably, a room featuring videos of Greenlandic artists generating sounds on a violin amid a mountainous landscape; a video, sequenced backwards, of a woman emerging from/being buried by smooth, grey stones; a clothesline bearing Lutheran priestly garb, the frilled collar strung out like a serpent, suspended over a tie, a nightstand with an alarm clock, a ceramic dish displaying the words, “Give us this day our daily Seal.” The exhibition underscores that the pains of indigenous peoples’ impoverishment, forced religious conversion and cultural assimilation, and loss of language diversity are phenomena that know no geographic constraint.
There are also topics that transcend a given locality: for example, that of the treatment of monuments. In the first gallery, one wall is dominated by a generated video of monuments fashioned from flesh; these slowly-moving, detailed shots are interspersed with tightly-sequenced, stop motion-esque photographs of actual monuments in the United States. Along the walls are silver-tone prints reaching out on black wires from the walls in clusters mid-air; as well as numinous projections of silhouettes dancing, writhing amid backlighting of red and violet, altogether generating a sense of excess which operates beyond the field of language. (And indeed, language does fall short: the moments where the video attempts to make a verbal statement on decolonialism are the most trite, dampening the striking sense of acuity created by the dynamic space of light and dark, and the captivating soundscape.)
In spite of the refined visual effect – especially with the juxtaposition of various forms of lightwork – the content’s tone veers toward iconoclasm, with a somewhat reactive flavour. The destructive impulse of condemning monuments fails to gesture, even lightly, toward any palpable ‘truth,’ revealing the danger of smashing idols: in deficit of memory, and in great uncertainty, another (ideological) idol is erected in its place. So, to address the Kant’s perennial question, what can we hope for?3 let us start with reframing the matter at hand. We must not falsely posit that the indigenous-colonist divide is one of ongoing conflict. Iam factus est. The post-colonial world is a post-apocalyptic one.
Last year, the New York Times published an article discussing the imaginative capacity exercised in the science fiction of indigenous authors, whose projects are not so much speculative as they are reconstructive in nature. These writers operate in the shadow of the effacement of the vast majority of the Americas’ native populations, coupled with the total transformation of a landscape (and in a relatively short span of time, the introduction of monocultures and onset of ecological collapse). This bouleversement upsets the way in which a culture operates – most notably, when person-environment relationality lies at the centre of one’s conception of humanity. It results in a hyper-accelerated cultural transformation – one with both push and pull factors guiding people’s mobilization and actions.4 This serves as the grounds for understanding ‘apocalypse.’
Definition:
Apocalypse, noun: Old English, via Old French and ecclesiastical Latin from Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein ‘uncover, reveal’, from apo- ‘un-’ + kaluptein ‘to cover’.
The connotation has changed dramatically over time, as indicated by conservative rabbi and scholar Daniel Boyarin’s remark on apocalyptic literature:5
“…apocalypses ‘present themselves as revelations to a great hero of the past mediated by an angel. The revelations typically take the form of symbolic visions of history, journeys through the heavens, or some combination of the two.’”
Our current understanding of apocalypse is not so close to revelation as it is to eschatology: an ending and a fulfilment. Yet the idea of deliverance via a transcendent mediator remains, and this is necessary: human systems, human languages are superseded, and are rendered obsolete. Tentatively, I will state the following, acknowledging the ahistoricity of my statement, and its application strictly within contemporary, vernacular culture:
We know apocalypse as a severance in understanding. The semantic systems that refer to the ‘before’ and ‘after’ are discrete, and this communication breakdown cannot be overcome by human means. Even if a language system persists, the objects to which it refers have changed so dramatically that it becomes an unwieldy tool, and an uncomfortable mould.
In other words, apocalypse entails the breakdown of the possibility of communication across a sizeable extent of time. We might draw another example from anthropological studies regarding IEK:
Experience is key to all modes of knowledge building. Anthropologist Tim Ingold… makes the point this way:
“The source of cultural knowledge lies not in the heads of predecessors but in the world that they point out to you—if, that is, one learns by discovery while following in the path of an ancestor—then words, too must gather their meanings from the contexts in which they are uttered.”
From this standpoint, we must appreciate that all knowledge systems have a means of knowledge production that is tied not just to schooling or dissemination from elders but also to the contexts of experience. An example of this was presented to one of us (Thornton) recently by a Tlingit man, who wrote via email wondering about documentation of the “big storm” that comes after the herring spawn in Sitka Sound, Alaska, each spring. The big winds of the storm are said to help break up the herring spawn, which is laid on substrate (including Western hemlock boughs placed by Natives) in the intertidal zone, where the eggs eventually hatch out. The man remembered hearing about this wind from an elder but could not recall the Tlingit word or concept. Nevertheless, the experience of the wind after this (2019) herring season triggered the knowledge memory. According to documentation of Tlingit elder Al Martin (Thornton 2015: 219), this wind is called “‘Wind of the washing of the spawn: L’uk’ eeti.oosk,’” and it arises because “the herring had to be washed clean from the beach so the[y] ... can survive.” This is a remarkable bit of IEK that many younger Tlingits are still aware of from experience, even if they are not familiar with the Tlingit term for this special wind.
These phenomena like “the wind of the washing of the spawn” are vulnerable to complete loss when their verbal scaffolding deteriorates. Our ability to circumlocute these felt absences – an act of physiological sense to verbal translation, additionally – is limited. And in the half-life of this memory, we begin to feel the subjective violence or trauma evoked by E. Lévinas in Totalité et infini:
[V]iolence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognise themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.
Colonial trauma par excellence, as the previously-held way of life becomes untenable, and its practitioners are thrown into utter chaos. I think here of biological extinction – like frogs’ inability to cope with the chytrid fungus, which has been responsible for mass amphibian extinction since its first outbreaks in the 1990s.6 Prior to this mass extinction event, the average rate of one species’ extinction every 700 or so years was little challenge for adaptation to meet. “Indigenous” or “traditional” cultures7 rapidly become relics whose importance is impossible to articulate except under the soggy term, cultural heritage – something else which is far from clear.8
What we witness, then, is not a war between pockets of preserved transmission (communal, mother-to-child, etc. — though I acknowledge that many rich traditions endure today) resisting a colonial aggressor, for the conservation of a ‘pristine’ way of life would demand complete isolation. No – ‘indigeneity’ itself is fundamentally changed via being placed in relation with a colonial power: one that in this sense, is one whose relationship with environment is subjugated to the demands of a remote centre. In response, indigeneity, which previously could not be cleanly defined (just as it was not until the 18th century that ‘Judaism’ was articulated as a category by its practitioners, people considering themselves members of the land of Israel), becomes reified and in these cases of artistic expression, weaponised against a traumatising power – and a conflict from which there is no return. It is not possible to “decolonize [our] minds” when the way of life – with stable communities and enduring practices that reflectively affirmed certain beliefs – when that stability has been irretrievably altered. Attempts at recuperation via identitarian self-assertion are hypocritical in that they refer to the self (as Subject and totality), and not as relation – the heart of IEK. These enunciations are perfectly understandable, and even sympathetic9 – but merely crying Revolution! is a gesture most often void of transformative potential.
The tragedy of colonialism and/or forced displacement is not the loss of life, nor the loss of a “way of life,” but rather, the subjectively-felt lack that haunts those who are aware of this déracinement somewhere in the past. And along with that, creative foment within decentralised, semi-separated spheres stalls, and ‘folk arts,’ especially those of intangible nature, are forced to participate in the langage of contemporary art, with its fast-paced temporality (both in the rapidly-developing usages of mediums, and in the temporary exhibition-oriented museum approach). This, for me, evokes a kind of pessimism: so-called ‘indigenous’ art rarely proposes an alternative system, an alternative future except in the vaguest of terms. (Outsider art is a bit different – and I am very fond of this!) And in the case of One if by Land, Two if by Sea, facile symbols and text are too strongly incorporated in many works, propel the artworks into a semantic system, leaving the more pacific sea of light-handed visual (re)marks.10
In the New Red Order exhibition, some pieces appeared to manifest more self-awareness of the futility of the quasi-utopian recuperative project, entertaining it with a savoury irony. In one installation room, viewers sit on folding law chairs, encircled by inflatable zoo animals and balloons, the plastic audience thrusting the viewer into a physical context not of their own choosing. Amid the ‘ridiculous,’ the viewer is not afforded a privileged, distanced perspective; they must sit among the detritus manufactured in late-stage capitalism, with a temporal uncanniness prompted by the fact that such inflatables only last for one party, or one summer – yet their materials will far outlive the person whom they briefly accompany.
The speakers featured in the video are variegated – some activists erect at a podium at an event captured by TV cameras, a supporting delegation behind them; others caught on home video, or on their iPhone’s front camera; yet uniformly confronting the audience with a piquant tone, betraying a sense of violation and abjection, a sense which exceeds verbal articulation, and which is exhibited primarily in vulgar gestures and fragmented stock phrases – the last common currency of people whose shared cultural fabric has frayed. (I speak not only of people who have faced linguistic extinction or forced assimilation, but the North American public in a late capitalist society writ large; what, now, of the novel, or Hollywood movies, which many people can comfortably ignore?11)
Even as the screen flashes, “Center Native Voices,” the voices presented are not capable of educating the audience: they express dismay, which then expects of the audience not only empathy, but critical distancing and focused attention in immense measure. As a result of longstanding oppression – and (mal)adaptation, to “center Native voices” means to accept the imperfections, and indeed, the lack of intelligibility of traumatised speech. In this video, the speakers are severed from their genetic or artistic forbearers, as much as they are distanced from us, the audience.
The prioritisation of ‘lived experience’ tends to reduce the variegation of life’s phenomena into a flat narrative, a convenient ZIP file, to the degree of tyranny. That does not mean it does not have its place – but it must be considered an artifact open to response, rather than an authoritative proclamation. It does not foreclose the questions Who is capable of bearing witness? Who may tell a story, and through what epistemological tools, and through what channels of communication?
My grandparents came from Guangzhou to the United States when I was ten or so; we shared a house for several years. I did not speak any of their languages, and they did not speak English. This required the adaptive gestures of cooking together, going on walks, exchanging flowers; but often, it led to a sense of mutual irritation or violation – so much of my childhood was snapped up by my grandparents’ surreptitious filming that I was camera-shy for years after leaving my family’s home! But equally, I had a certain sympathy for the impulse to capture everything: my grandparents were professors at Sun Yat-Sen University, and were sent to the countryside for hard labour during the Cultural Revolution. There was an unaddressed trauma, a fear of separation and loss of control, but one that they chose not to talk about – and could not have discussed with me had they wanted.
It is impossible to ignore embodied silence: one cannot forget a language barrier when you take meals with people with whom you cannot speak, year in and year out. This deficit was not theirs alone: I knew my own finitude. But unlike, say, midcentury English schoolboy who could ask anyone about their experiences of World War II, I was a child of immigrants, and later, a kind of immigrant myself, without anyone around me capable of narrating the Cultural Revolution. What testimony remains, then? Books, of course, to which people have more-or-less equal access. Given that you engage your imagination the instant you begin to comprehend a moment in history – inserting yourself in the frame, asking ‘what would I have done? what side would I take?’ – I have never felt I had a monopoly on certain histories by virtue of my genetics. And there is another thing: though failing to identify with a genetic inheritance, one does have the consolation, and even liberation of creating one’s home within a chosen environment. Not necessarily within a community of likeness, but as in Audre Lorde’s formulation:
“…our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference… It was years before we learned to use the strength that daily surviving can bring, years before we learned fear does not have to incapacitate, and that we could appreciate each other on terms not necessarily our own.”
Or, as in a conversation with a beloved friend, some years ago, who told me, “You just have to decide to plant yourself in a given place. ‘Home’ comes in time.”
It seems to me that this is the operating principle of IEK: knowledge – of environment, and of self – comes from interdependence with place, recognised. And if anything, New Red Order extends this way of life to all who encounter their work: not with evenhanded fluency in every piece, but in the clarion invitation to join their organisation, regardless of one’s natal culture. Indigeneity is not static: it is constituted by constant dedication of the self, the repeated decision of surrender to the exterior world.
First in a series of meditations on memory & relations with place. SAMO, what can I say? Responses, as always, are very welcome. And thanks to all friends, whose company and conversations give rise to my impressions as I move through this world. You make me happy.
NB: The lack of object labels and the absence of a publicly-available online catalogue means that my descriptions remain somewhat unanchored: mea culpa!
See the definition in the introduction of Thorton’s Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Environmental Knowledge: “A simple definition of Indigenous Environmental Knowledge (IEK) is knowledge generated by Indigenous Peoples about their surroundings, including relations with other beings, human and other-than- human, which is adapted and transmitted from generation to generation.”
Just to set the limits of my recollection of Kant, I definitely don’t hope for heavenly reward or a future world. ;-)
See Lukas Allemann, “Soviet-Time Indigenous Displacement on the Kola Peninsula,” published in Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic.
See Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.
Here, I do not think of Amerindian cultures as much as I do of Brittany, where the Breton language – and according culture – is written off as folky and thus, irrelevant to a cosmopolitan, centrally-administered, and liberal-minded culture; many view it as a swollen appendix.
I recently watched the film Treasures of Crimea, where Ukraine and Crimean museums both lay legal claims to Scythian objects loaned out to Amsterdam on an exhibition before the occupation of Crimea. The film makes clear that Ukraine’s claim as a nation, with the support of the 1970 UNESCO convention preventing appropriation of a nation’s objects, takes precedence over the more ‘real’ claim to cultural heritage that Crimea, or Russia for that matter, would have on the same artifacts.
Let us note, too, that the instruments of colonial oppression – take the rationalising gaze of the camera – are adopted. Shall we deny victimised peoples the poor fruits that “modern” society does offer up?
See the exhibition Unity in Diversity, at Tempelhof Feld in Berlin, Summer 2021.
See Ross Douthat’s opinion piece, “We Aren’t Just Watching the Decline of the Oscars. We’re Watching the End of the Movies,” published in The New York Times.