Artifact Piece, Revisited by Erica Lord (Athabaskan/Inupiaq)

(see more photos here)

(full article here)

“In April, Erica Lord performed Artifact Piece, Revisited at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, in New York City. In reprising James Luna’s work The Artifact Piece, first presented in 1987 at San Diego’s Museum of Man, Lord asks us to reassess relationships among Native American peoples, museums, and anthropology now, after twenty year’s work at repatriation, collaboration, and Native self-representation. In addition to returning to issues of stereotype and expropriation raised by Luna, Lord broached several concerns not apparent in Luna’s work, including the position of Native women in the popular mind and the role of consumption and commodification in identity-production.

In his performance-as-installation, Luna, a member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, lay stretched out on a bed of sand in a horizontal glass case, dressed in a loincloth and surrounded by personal effects and official documents, including his divorce decree and high school diploma. The work performed Native presence: against the prevalent idea that American Indian people vanished under European domination or were reduced to those traces found in static exhibit halls, Luna lodged himself in the museum as a living, animate, disruption of established power relations. As Jean Fisher put it in a 1992 Art Journal article, Luna’s work did not simply threaten to return a controlling gaze: rather, she wrote, the presence “of the undead Indian of colonialism … and the possibility that he may indeed be watching and listening disarms the voyeuristic gaze and denies it its structuring power” (Fisher 1992:48-9). The Artifact Piece thus came to exemplify a postcolonial critique of museums and anthropology that troubled long-standing assumptions about the relationship between “us” and “them.”

Lord’s Artifact Piece, Revisited was mounted at NMAI with Luna’s cooperation, in conjunction with an exhibit of his Emendatio, a piece commissioned by the Smithsonian for the 2005 Venice Biennale. In Lord’s hands, the physical disposition of the work did not differ much: it consisted most fundamentally of the artist’s body on display, surrounded by artifacts from her life made museum objects through anthropological commentary. This included a text panel giving the ethnographic particulars about her species (Homo sapiens), culture (Athabaskan/Dena), and region (Alaska). But where Luna’s work relied upon the threat that the museum-goer’s gaze might be returned, Lord’s depended more substantially on inviting that gaze and the viewer’s desire. Labels mounted in the case with her called attention to her pedicure (identifying her painted toenails as a component of a ritual for attracting a mate), her endomorphic body type and wide hips (suitable for childbearing), and her pierced ears and nose, specifying that while these were not traditional, they did allow her to wear ornaments acquired through traditional practices of gifting and trading. In this way, Lord called attention to ways that constructions wrought by the gaze are not only raced but gendered, such that Native American women find themselves in different relation to museums and anthropology, as well as popular culture, than that experienced by Native men.

www.ericalord.com

(via ndnsurgency)