6.16.2006
Haida Exhibit Opens in Vancouver
I never know quite what to say when I look at Haida art, which I have had many opportunities to do having grown up on the West Coast. It's definitely powerful, but I want to avoid some sort of exoticizing or fetishizing gaze. I suppose that could be said of any artist's work, really, but the fact that native art appears more frequently in museums than art galleries has historically given it a kind of different, not necessarily positive, status, and this, I think, affects the way I see it.
According to this CBC review of the Haida exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG?) "the Haida themselves don't differentiate among land, the sea, politics, art and culture." This claim seems to put their art in quite a different sphere than someone like Andy Warhol's at first, but upon closer inspection actually may not. I think Warhol's work could definitely be read as poltical and cultural, and it deals with the urban landscape, and yet it also seems strangley depoliticized because its only viewable in highly specific, moneybags settings. Does the same go for native art? What does it mean that I know exactly one native artist, Bill Reid, by name? These are just thoughts. I have no clear answers.
I also definitely don't want to primitivize native artists' work and say some dumb thing like its essential difference is that it's always closer to nature, because that is a way to potentially limit its political efficacy, to keep it at a distance. Maybe limiting its efficacy is exactly what we want. Maybe it's closer to the urban landscape and the political sphere than we'd like to think, and so we Euro-descendants relegate it to museums where we can safely comment on its mythic, magic "power" and ignore its ongoing, highly current political significance. Is the switch to the art gallery just another containment strategy, a way of finally giving some deserved economic power to native artists, but not necessarily political power? I'm probably a dimwit for raising these questions, but I think it's better than my initial impulse to just shy away from them and talk about dead white guys.
