Laughing in the Dark: Weird
Survivance in the Works of
Bunky Echo-Hawk and Daniel McCoy Jr.[1]
KRISTINA BAUDEMANN
"We are locked in darkness with wicked words...
Listen, ha ha ha
haaaa."
Gerald Vizenor, Bearheart:
The Heirship Chronicles [1978; 1990], vii-viii
In The Trickster Shift (1999)
Canadian scholar Allan J. Ryan created a comprehensive framework to
conceptualize humour and irony in North American Indigenous art. In dialog with
Indigenous artists and writers, art historians, actors, scholars, and elders,
Ryan identified the many layers of "a distinct comic and communal attitude... that can be legitimately labelled 'Native humour'" (xii):
"Emerging from these conversations was the conviction on my part that there was
indeed a sensibility, a spirit, at work and at play in the practice of many of
the artists, grounded in a fundamentally comic world view and embodied in the
traditional Native North American trickster" (xii). Drawing on Anishinaabe
artist Carl Beam's comment on a "trickster shift" (3) in Indigenous art—a
transformation of the tricky character from oral stories into contemporary
artistic practice—Ryan shows that trickster humour ranges from subtle to
biting and bitterly ironic. In their works, artists such as Beam, Gerald
McMaster (Cree), James Luna (Luiseño), Edward Poitras (Métis), Shelley Niro
(Kanien'kehá:ka), and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (Coast Salish/Okanagan descent)
humorously subvert stereotypical representations of Natives, which engages
viewers in the long overdue conversations about misconceptions of Native realities.
Even though the term is not mentioned in The
Trickster Shift, the humorous elements Ryan discusses effect survivance, Gerald Vizenor's
(Anishinaabe) now well-known neologism for active Native survival through
creative resistance, humour, and irony.
Two decades
after the publication of The Trickster
Shift, subversive humour continues to be a significant component of the
works of many Native artists who draw on new and
different material—from new media to different pop cultural
elements—thus widening the representational range of trickster humour in
the visual arts. This paper is concerned with the humorous effect of outrageous
and grotesque elements in the works of Bunky Echo-Hawk (Yakama/Pawnee) and Daniel McCoy Jr. (Potawatomi/Muscogee Creek). Echo-Hawk's Gas Masks as Medicine series or McCoy's Insulin Holocaust (2011) seem to offer pessimistic visions of the
end of our worlds in toxic waste. However, rather than proclaiming total
catastrophe and the futility of resistance, these paintings effect weird survivance—a term that I
will explain in this article—through dark humour. Ryan's 1999 work
already hints at a link between survivance and disturbing, non-cathartic
representations of violence, war, depression, illness, and death: in The Trickster Shift, Ryan reads the
"black humour" (98) of Native artists such as McMaster or Poitras as strategic
resistance to their representational disenfranchisement, arguing that elements
which are both disturbing and funny serve "not so much to undercut
seriousness... but to intensify it graphically" (98). Turning to weird survivance means acknowledging this link and thus explicitly
including the more macabre pieces of Native art in the Vizenorian paradigm of
survivance: McCoy's and Echo-Hawk's art effects survivance through dark humour
without mitigating the horrors of reality.
Gerald Vizenor introduced the
term survivance as part of a
terminology that has come to be known as "Vizenorese"
(Blaeser 71). As the term for creative resistance
through trickster humour, survivance is both the core and the effect of Vizenorese. However, Vizenor's use of the term is more complex
than that. With reference to postmodern theory in general and Jacques Derrida's
poststructuralist semiotics in particular, Vizenor suggests that survivance is
the transformational experience effected by trickster
discourse, a narrative strategy that draws on postmodern collage, Native
storytelling, and humour and irony to reveal the colonial stereotype of the indian as a
simulation, an empty, colonial sign without referent
('essence'/'meaning'/'truth') in reality. Like Derrida's différance, survivance
oscillates between the fixed meanings of its constituents ('survival' and
'resistance'). It plays on both while ultimately signifying neither entirely.
Vizenor explains that survivance
means "an active sense of presence" (Vizenor,
"Aesthetics," 1) of Native voices in the absence of traceable, that is,
textual, evidence which removes both storyteller/writer and readers/audiences
into a textual universe in which meaning can never be absolute and the
representation of Native people is always already defunct, or incomplete. The
reader, then, perceives the world as constantly shifting. Survivance ultimately defies clear definition: "The shadows of
tribal memories are the active silence, trace, and différance
in the literature of survivance" (Manifest
71). Vizenor's terminology echoes a postmodern suspicion with the idea of
authenticity, while refusing to discard the possibility of culturally-specific
representation.
An element
of violence is innate in the mechanics of survivance. After all, as Derrida has
frequently suggested, shifting the gaze to the level of textual/visual
signifiers always involves the idea of dangerous movement and violent erasure.
As Derrida states in Writing and
Difference, "Death strolls between letters" (Writing 87). Once meaning is perceived as constantly shifting,
rather than fixed, readers and viewers are thrown into a world of insecurity.
Nevertheless, violence on the level of representation seems incompatible with
the spirit of survivance: gruesome, vulgar, and inexplicable elements are
usually neglected in discussions of the term even though the stories Vizenor
has referred to as "the literature of survivance" (Manifest 63)—featuring, for
instance, Vizenor's own works—contain disturbing elements, such as
graphic scenes of violence. Vizenor's debut novel Darkness in Saint Louis: Bearheart (1978) serves as a case in
point: the titular 'darkness' can be associated with the different characters'
violent experiences which are intermixed with scenes of "wild humor" (Owens 247).[2]
Drawing on
Vizenor's notion that "[s]ome upsetting is necessary"
(Coltelli 172),
Louis Owens (Cherokee/Choctaw descent) consequently identifies "surprise,
shock, outrage" (248) as major elements of Vizenor's trickster spirit (248):
"Whether in traditional mythology or Vizenor's fiction, the trickster
challenges us in profoundly disturbing ways to reimagine moment by moment the
world we inhabit" (248). Nevertheless, academic discussions rarely focus on
this core aspect of survivance. Scholarly contributions frequently reproduce
the commonly accepted notion that survivance consists in the subversion of
tragedy and victimhood through a humorous and positive story about Native
presence. Vizenor himself, in "The Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory
and Practice," the core essay of the 2008 collection Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, seems to have moved away
from the notion of survivance as something that is itself hollow and can never
give essence—a play on shadows and simulations that dissolves static and
clichéd representations of Native people in wild laughter. Instead, Vizenor
stresses the spirit of resistance, a belief in democratic values, and positive
animal metaphors. Survivance, then,
is an ever-shifting concept that has become a household term in Indigenous
studies and returning to its margins might be worthwhile—to the dark
alleys of Native humour and bizarre scenes of resistance in Native painting for
which the term survivance as it is
commonly understood in current academic discourse might seem, at a first
glance, entirely inappropriate.
Survivance
works, among other aspects, through what Ryan termed the "varying strengths"
(Ryan 168) of "toxic humour" (168)—"a form of humour based on toxicity"
(Farmer qtd. in Ryan 168), meaning that "[y]ou have
to laugh because there is nothing else to do but laugh at [the situation] in
order to face the reality of it, in order to get past it" (Farmer qtd. in Ryan
168). As various scholars have pointed out, laughter at the grotesque and the
bizarre is an integral part of humour's subversive and liberating effect. Blake
Hobby, for instance, stresses that darkness in general is a key element of
comedy: "All humor involves negations, absurdities,
and dark truths about our lives, including our inability to defeat death and the
conflicted way we cope with this darkest of all dark realities" (57). This
darkness finds expression in the "dry, sardonic wit" (Ryan 267) of Native
artwork addressing war and genocide. Métis artist Jim Logan, for instance,
calls the joke in his piece Unreasonable
History (1992) on Natives in World War II "sadistic" (qtd. in Ryan 254), a
"relief of anger, I guess, frustration" (254). Logan discusses the fantastic
scene in his painting that depicts the violent conquest of Rome by a Native
American army: "Ah, it wasn't even a joke... to kill somebody is sick... but [it's] the thought behind it. If you lighten anything up in
these times of trauma and despair, then you laugh about stuff like that because
it's reflecting on the reality of the situation" (qtd. in Ryan 254). The
laughter, then, does not result from the sight of a gruesome image or idea, but
from the artist's "bizarre, off-the-wall sense of humour" (qtd. in Ryan 267)
that is "a little strange to live with," to adapt Maxine Bedyn's
words to our purpose here (qtd. in Ryan 267). While Native humour has been
described as "a positive, compassionate act of survival" (Vizenor qtd. in Ryan
4), the comic worldview of an Indigenous-centred universe nevertheless subsumes
horrible realities that must be confronted, understood, and even processed in
the communal spirit of creative resistance and dark laughter.
The OED does not know the term dark humour, but defines "black humour"
as "[c]omedy, satire, etc., that presents tragic, distressing, or morbid
situations in humorous terms; humour that is ironic, cynical, or dry; gallows
humour." Merriam-Webster defines "black
humor" as "humor marked by
the use of usually morbid, ironic, grotesquely comic episodes." According to
these dictionary definitions the comic might be said to subsume the tragic; black or dark humour emerges as a product of
the artistic arrangement of gruesome elements. It is the 'thought behind it'
that makes representations of illness, death, or violence appear humorous:
while the gruesome elements alone would not provoke laughter, it is the
artistic arrangement that does.
In order to
acknowledge that survivance can involve dark humour and bleak imagery one might
consider worthwhile the introduction of a new term that directs the scholarly
gaze to the artistic handling of the grotesque and bizarre elements. During the
2016 International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) roundtable
discussion on survivance, Stina Attebery
suggested the term weird survivance
as descriptor for Yakama/Pawnee artist Bunky
Echo-Hawk's Gas Masks as Medicine
series. Echo-Hawk's scenes might at first strike viewers as bizarre: they
feature people and animals wearing gas masks in neon-colored
landscapes. Positive animal metaphors are a core feature of Vizenorian
survivance, which is why some might consider it a definitional leap to locate
Echo-Hawk's representations within this tradition. His animals appear
unsettling: the blue and neon-green horses in such paintings as Tribal Law (2003) or In the Pursuit of Justice (2010) can be
understood as metaphors for a poisoned environment. The qualifier 'positive' is
therefore not what first comes to mind when faced with their empty eyesockets and irradiated hair. Some of Daniel McCoy Jr.'s
(Potawatomi/Muscogee Creek) paintings might similarly
be called disturbing, from the very titles such as Insulin Holocaust to the artistic compositions constituted by a
wild melee of images, from skulls and whiskey bottles to internal organs.
Echo-Hawk's
and McCoy's works challenge fixed expectations about Native people and Native
art through a mode that might be termed weird
survivance. This mode includes, for instance, the artists' use of the
grotesque, meaning, their integration of "figures that may distort the natural
into absurdity, ugliness, or caricature," and which appear unpleasant or
frightening ("grotesque"). Echo-Hawk's and McCoy's compositions furthermore
integrate elements of the absurd ("abandoning logical form" [Baldick 1] to express a human perception of the universe as
chaotic and life as futile), and the uncanny (a depiction of quasi-human or
quasi-animal figures that causes unease, repulsion, or fear). With the help of
these techniques, the artists create bleak images, giving a face to such dark
realities as environmental catastrophe, the toxicity of Western societies,
human diseases, and the lingering persistence of human crimes like corruption,
murder, and rape. Some of their artworks might outrage viewers and make them
sick to their stomachs.
Considering
Echo-Hawk's and McCoy's artworks in the context of weird survivance means
acknowledging the importance of shock—the 'upsetting' Vizenor suggested
in Winged Words—as well as the
fact that a confrontation with dark realities might not immediately be deemed
positive and liberating by all viewers. Weird
survivance asks viewers to accept the strangeness, complexity, and
surrealism of the portrayed scenes: in the works of Echo-Hawk and McCoy Jr.,
for instance, their symbolism cannot be entirely deciphered but might
ultimately be understood as an expression of an inherent weirdness in the
viewers' own world.[3] The
artists thereby raise awareness for political issues—such as Native and
human rights—and impending threats to individuals and society, from
diabetes to climate change.
Weird survivance describes a
mechanics of the grotesque, surreal, outrageous, and darkly humorous in
Indigenous visual art that renounces what Vizenor terms tragic wisdom, a firm belief in the allegedly innate victimhood and
backwardness of Native cultures. The discomfort these images cause in their
viewers can provoke dark laughter. Weird
survivance, then, is to be taken with a grain of salt: the technical term
blends a feeling of strangeness and unease with the Vizenorian paradigm of
survivance; it speaks to the recognition that, as an artistic technique
affirming Native presence and cultural resurgence, survivance can become a
little weird. In other words, it can become impolite, unexpected, or even
disgusting—as in Jeff Barnaby's (Mi'gMaq) short film The Colony (2007), where a man severs his leg with a chainsaw; in
Stephen Graham Jones's (Blackfeet descent) novel The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong (2000), where the Native
protagonist participates in the hilarious/horrifying rape scenes of an
underground porn film that re-enacts the history of colonization; or in Wendy
Red Star's (Crow) photograph The Last Thanks (2006), where a group of
plastic skeletons with colourful paper headdresses participate in a bizarre
Thanksgiving meal alongside the artist, a darkly comic scene that addresses
mainstream culture's perverted fascination with Native death. The art of weird
survivance makes viewers question what they perceive as weird and why, thus drawing
their attention to the inherent weirdness—the unnaturalness—of a
colonial world. It highlights affective responses to a reality that is always
slightly off, from joyful mirth to the darkness of an oppressed mood and the
hollow emptiness of depression. In the following analyses, I will single out
dark humour as a distinctive trait of weird survivance and thereby highlight
the mechanics of outrage, puzzlement, disgust, resistance, and renewal in the
works of Bunky Echo-Hawk and Daniel McCoy Jr.
The humour in Bunky Echo-Hawk's acrylic-on-canvas paintings ranges from
cutting to subtle and dark, the latter especially in stark contrast to the
bright colors, the blue, purple, neon pink, yellow,
and green, that have been described as "blocks of blinding color"
(Froyd). Down and Out (2011) shows a
Native man decorated with eagle feathers and sporting a mohawk
who is resting his head in his palm and holding a sign that says "HOMELESS
VETERAN NEED RIDE TO INDIAN TERRITORY." If
Yoda Was an Indian He'd Be Chief (2004) features the character Yoda from
the Star Wars franchise universe
wearing a headdress, gaze lost in the starry sky. Echo-Hawk's most famous piece
entitled Triple Threat (2011) shows
an athlete with a firm grip on his basketball, eyes narrowed in determination
and ready to dribble, pass, or shoot.[4] These
pieces comment on aspects of contemporary Native North American lives. As
Echo-Hawk says in his artist's statement, "It is my goal to truly exemplify the
current state of Native America through art" (bunkyechohawk.com). The bright colors of the compositions break with realism: Triple Threat and If Yoda Was an Indian,
for instance, appear as dreamscapes. The vibrant reds and blues of such works
as Down and Out or War-whooping with Cope's (2013) are
reminiscent of 1950s and 1960s advertising—colors
also familiar from Pop Art—and in stark contrast to the subject-matter
alluded to in the images, such as poverty, homelessness, and mindless
consumerism. Echo-Hawk's compositions criticize the commodification of
Indigeneity while celebrating aspects of Indigenous popular culture, from
Cope's Dried Sweet Corn to Star Wars,
basketball, and name-brand sneakers. As Olena
McLaughlin puts it, "By merging American pop culture with Native experiences,"
such artists as "Echo-Hawk and [Steven Paul] Judd encourage their audiences to
reconsider Native American history and position Indigenous peoples as active
participants in the present... In the process of subversion,
images of popular culture the artists use become props for Native discourse" (31).
Bunky Echo-Hawk is an Oklahoma-based
artist whose work has been called Native Pop and Hip Hop. He attended the
Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and works as an
artist, writer, photographer, and art instructor. His works have been showcased
in exhibitions across the United States as well as overseas. Echo-Hawk has also
done murals, skateboards, clothing, and digital collages. He cofounded NVision, a nonprofit organization
for Native artists "who focus on Native American youth empowerment through
multimedia arts" (bunkyechohawk.com). In interviews, Echo-Hawk frequently
stresses the importance of activism to dispel oppressive myths about Native
people for the sake of creating better futures. Echo-Hawk is a member of the
Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and a traditional singer and
dancer for the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma (bunkyechohawk.com). Curator Alaka Wali stresses that
Echo-Hawk draws on his traditional heritage but "speaks in a contemporary
idiom": "Look at the skateboards. Look at the Nike shoes... Indians are not about the past. They're about the present and the
future."
Echo-Hawk
has stated that he first and foremost addresses Native audiences, stressing
that he creates art "for the advancement of our people" ("Bunky
Echo Hawk"): "I live for our youth. I live for our future... I live to be a voice. I live to see, in my lifetime, change for
the better. I live for proactive action. This is how I'm living. How are you
living?" ("Bunky," beatnation.org). Echo-Hawk's
notion of 'proactive action', which can be defined as "taking the initiative
and anticipating events or problems, rather than just reacting to them after
they have occurred" ("proactive," OED Online), is reminiscent of survivance, a
key aspect in Echo-Hawk's activist art. In fact, with Echo-Hawk's work, the
Vizenorian "traces of tribal survivance" (Manifest
63)—the presence of real Native people beyond their representation in the
artwork—is literalized: during artistic performances, Echo-Hawk takes his
audience's questions while painting and thus engages them in the process. Art
is thus defined as a community-based event rather than a pastime of elites. The
artwork itself is unburdened from having to mimetically represent Native
cultures as proof of their enduring existence.
Echo-Hawk has
stressed the "positive message" ("Bunky Echo Hawk")
in his paintings which might strike viewers as odd considering his
representations of poisoned environments and neon green skin that glows
toxically. However, a subtle and dark humour pervades Echo-Hawk's compositions
that overrides tragedy without downplaying environmental catastrophe, neocolonial oppression, and tribal corruption. His Gas Masks as Medicine series effects
weird survivance through the dark humour of portraying Native warriors as
survivors in a poisoned environment. The figures look eerie: their facial
features are hidden behind gas masks that appear as blends of protective
technology and futuristic devices that have become a part of the wearers'
bodies. In In the Pursuit of Justice
(2010) that shows a rider on a horse, the horse's face looks like it has melted
into the gas mask, its muzzle grotesquely warped into the filter cartridge
canister, and its eyes eerily widened into black holes. The painting appears in
monochromatic green. The gas mask might be interpreted as a signifier for the
toxicity in the horse's and rider's environment that makes visible through
artistic means the pollution extant beyond the canvas in the viewer's own
world.
The bright
green and neon yellow in Echo-Hawk's paintings of gas masks are not symbolic of
a vibrant nature, but of radioactivity via analogy with pop culture
representations of radioluminescence, such as Homer Simpson's glowing,
poison-green fuel rod from the opening segment of the TV show The Simpsons. In Pursuit, then, the toxicity is everywhere, seeping through clothes
and skin and consuming every other shade of color.
The existence of horse and rider within this hostile environment creates a
complex image of resistance and complicity. Represented in a position of power,
high up on his horse and complete with suit and tie, the rider seems fluent in
the language of the corporations responsible for the corrupted environment,
while simultaneously equipped with the knowledge—and the technology—to
resist and survive.
In the
language of Echo-Hawk's paintings, signifiers of Indigeneity such as
headdresses, eagle feathers, mohawks, Native patterns, and ceremonial objects
denote a Native warrior status—Echo-Hawk's 'modern warriors' in our
poisoned, postapocalyptic world.[5] As Wali explains, "Bunky Echo-Hawk sees himself as a modern
warrior, following in the tradition of Pawnee warriors. Although he's not a
fighter... with a military weapon, he sees
himself as fighting for the dignity and well-being of his people" (WBEZ). As
the rhetoric of modern warfare suggests, under Echo-Hawk's brush, the canvas
itself becomes a weapon—surely a symbolism that should be approached with
caution—to provoke and outrage. Echo-Hawk's paintings envision a path of
determined, if not violent, resistance against colonial oppression;
nevertheless, they capture the complexity of Indigenous and non-Indigenous
relationships that cannot be reduced to binary positions such as
colonizer/colonized or victim/perpetrator.
The
prevalent irony in Pursuit is that of
an unexpected form of Indigenous survival, not only rejecting the still
widespread stereotype of Native backwardness, but
representing the gas masks as Indigenous
technology. The signifiers of radioactivity and toxicity may cause 'harsh laughter':
yes, the painting tells a story of active survival, but to what end when the
world is no longer livable? Echo-Hawk's image of
horse and rider in a poisoned landscape is reminiscent of Lawrence Paul
Yuxweluptun's representations of chemical fallout as Dal’esque
melting tribal symbols in Native Winter
Snow (1987) (273) and Bob Boyer's (Métis/Cree) ironic depiction of acid
rain as pretty droplets of color in Let the Acid Queen Rain: The White Goop
Devours All (1985) (274). "Toxic humour doesn't get much stronger or more literal than this," Ryan states about Yuxweluptun's and Boyer's work in The Trickster Shift. The same might be said about Echo-Hawk's
uncanny warrior and eerie horse in Pursuit,
or his representation of a toddler wearing a gas mask in Inheriting the Legacy (2004). With these images, Echo-Hawk draws
attention to environmental catastrophe, locating the reasons in neocolonial capitalist politics, while hinting at the
possibility of change through resistance. The modern warrior in Prosecution Rests (n.d.) carries a
briefcase: the painting shows a lawyer who has suited up for court, the gas
mask on his face symbolizing both toxicity and the wearer's resistance to it.
The eerie blue horse outfitted with a poison-green gas mask in Tribal Law (2003) appears immobile in a
toxic landscape. It seems to be watching the spectator, which rounds off the
unsettling scene. One might imagine Echo-Hawk's blue horse to be both an ironic
take on the movement and energy of Pop Chalee's (Taos
Pueblo) The Blue Horse (1945) or Franz Marc's Large Blue Horses (1911),
as well as a continuation of their natural beauty in a toxic future. While
Echo-Hawk's representations reveal the effect of human pollution on the natural
world, his paintings nevertheless imagine the endurance of animals.
As the
series title suggests, the gas masks signify healing—good medicine. The
term might be understood as referring to the effect of the paintings on their
viewers. The unsettling depictions of enduring survival effect weird survivance:
the viewers laugh darkly about the fact that in our chemically poisoned world,
humanity as a whole has become the endangered species physically unfit for
survival that the Western world believed Indigenous people to be. The bizarre
figures in Echo-Hawk's paintings, then, both estrange and empower. The neon-colored Natives outfitted with radiation protection gloves
and gas masks are metaphors of environmental pollution. However, their
transformation on canvas into strange warriors in an irradiated landscape also
gives hope for an enduring existence into the future through creative
resurgence. As Echo-Hawk explains, "I get inspired and motivated to do my art
from injustice in Indian Country. There are a great number of atrocities that
our people faced... throughout the past five hundred
years and my fuel for my art comes from how those atrocities affect us today as
Americans,... as Native Americans" ("Bunky Echo Hawk"). Echo-Hawk's paintings juxtapose the
reality of these atrocities with the possibility to overcome. As Echo-Hawk
notes about his struggle to represent Fetal Alcohol
Spectrum Disorder in illustrations for the American Indian Science and
Engineering Society, "it was really hard to stomach, for me to even try to draw
it—so what I ended up doing was trying to draw something that was more
empowering" (WBEZ). These words might be applied to his Gas Masks as Medicine series as well. Gas masks and neon colors as weird survivance constitute a form of empowerment
through dark laughter that spites death and disappearance while refusing to
mitigate the horrors of our everyday world. Echo-Hawk thus works to upset
viewers and hopefully startle them into action, on the one hand acknowledging
the toxic futures in stock for subsequent generations, on the other hand
refusing to give up without a fight.
4 Low-Rez Rock 'n' Roll: Humour and
Weirdness in Daniel McCoy Jr.'s Native Lowbrow
Weird survivance takes the form
of vivid color and a relentless flood of
images—rendered in acrylic on canvas and pen-and-ink on paper—in
the works of Potawatomi and Muscogee Creek artist
Daniel McCoy Jr. In his paintings and drawings, the darker realities of
contemporary Indigenous life in the U.S. combine to create fantastic and
strange worlds. McCoy's compositions deal with such themes as alcohol and drug
abuse, illness, loneliness, the damages done by consumerism, and the
psychological distress of living in a colonial society. In The Letter, a 2011 collaboration with Topaz Jones (Shoshone/Lummi/Kalapuya/ Molalla), scenes of "angst and heartbreak"
(Meredith) unfold around a large, human heart that looks as if it had just been
extracted from a body: the aorta is still attached to the organ and dripping
with blood. Andrew Jackson Meets Voltron
(2009) shows General Andrew Jackson facing the superhero from the 1984 animated
series Voltron, Defender of the Universe,
a revisionist take on Indian Removal and the U.S. American genocide of Native
people. As McCoy notes in his artist's statement, "I paint so I can leave an
imprint of my existence. I enjoy the process immensely. I re-create past
triumphs, current disasters, as well as inspiring stories in my works. My
interest in exposing truth on my past, spirituality, and dreamtime
recollections has taken form in the work lately" (McCoy).
Daniel McCoy
Jr. is a Santa Fe-based artist whose work has been featured in various art
shows across the U.S. and won major awards, including best painting at the
Santa Fe Winter Indian Market (SWAIA) in 2011 for The Indian Taco Made by God. McCoy graduated from the Institute of
American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a member of the Potawatomi
Nation. For his art, he draws on a variety of styles, from Native American Flatstyle art—discernible in his highly detailed, colorful scenes that fuse traditional patterns with
contemporary themes and artistic styles—to album covers and underground
comic books. The influence of the latter is visible on the levels of content
(provocative themes like sex, drugs, etc.), representation (comic style, use of
speech/thought bubbles etc.), as well as technique (the delicate ink patterns
that provide shape and depth to McCoy's drawings, reminiscent of the ink work
of Keno Don Rosa or Ed Roth). McCoy is a fan of H.P. Lovecraft's stories and
grew up with science fiction, but he credits his father, Daniel McCoy Sr., with
being the biggest source of inspiration, saying that "he was [an] automotive
pin striper and a very good artist in his own right. I owe my talent to him, he
introduced the airbrush, H.R. Giger, and Frank Frazetta
to me as a child. My other favorite artists include
Robert Williams, Joan Hill, Rick Griffin, Woody Crumbo,
Johnny Tiger Jr., Jerome Tiger, Robert Crumb, Jack Kirby, and recently Arik
Roper and Jus Oborn. I was heavily
influenced by Heavy Metal and Rock Music from the 70ʼs and early 80ʼs, in particular the darker themed
music. I hope to work for an artist one day still, possibly find some great
band that needs great art for their albums" (personal communication, 29 Jan.
2016).[6]
McCoy's
works are rich in detail and color, the arrangement
of image on top of image reminiscent of Lowbrow, an underground art movement
also known as Pop Surrealism that emerged out of 1950s and '60s counter
cultures such as the punk, rock 'n' roll, and hot
rod scenes. Lowbrow artists like Robert Williams set out to upset preconceived
notions about art with their vulgar and grotesque paintings. Like Williams,
McCoy both engages and unsettles the viewer through a sheer flood of visual
stimuli. McCoy's style has been called Low-Rez, a term popularized with the exhibition Low-Rez: Native
American Lowbrow (2012, Santa Fe, NM), and which featured McCoy's works
alongside Native artists such as Ryan Singer (Diné),
April Holder (Sac and Fox/Wichita/Tonkawa) and Chris Pappan
(Kaw/Osage/Cheyenne River Sioux).[7]
"Beneath the
thin crust of conformity that characterized mid-century America lay a bubbling
cauldron of weirdness," Larry Reid remarks about the emergence of Lowbrow.
Emphasizing the weirdness—a confusing number of grotesque shapes and their
unexpected arrangement—is similarly worthwhile when looking at McCoy's
paintings. In The Amazing Couch
(2005), a man is lounging on his couch, a bottle of beer in one hand, TV remote
in the other. The thought bubble over his head is crammed with gaudy images,
such as a bottle of Jägermeister, a melee of buildings, a boy in bed sick and,
top centre, a hand pouring beer out of a Coors can right into a funnel that is
sticking out of a disembodied liver. The man seems to be enjoying this hodgepodge
of personal memories and images seen on TV on his amazing couch—except
that he's clearly dead. His grinning skull and skeletonized hand imply zombification
through mass media images. The bizarre difference between the man's dried-out
shell and the vivid images that, even post mortem, keep rushing in on him, provoke
'harsh laughter,' a self-conscious chuckle at having one's own, dark reality
represented on canvas.
Like many of
McCoy's works, Couch could be
imagined as a panel from a comic strip, and therefore as an individual scene in
an ongoing story. Furthermore, there is always a sense of vulgar satisfaction at
breaking the rules and upsetting viewers with macabre scenes. As McCoy says, "I
like to get back at enemies, ex-wives, figures in the wrong, and general acts
of poor ethics. Without saying a word, I can get my revenge" (personal
communication, 29 Jan. 2016). However, he also stresses the importance of balance
and healing which he equates with "[m]oving from a
square structure with doors to circular structures. Many problems arose when
the modern western dwelling was introduced to the Native Americans, alcoholism,
secrets, rape, and abuse came with what happened behind closed doors" (personal
communication, 29 Jan. 2016). Different from hedonistic pleasure or iconoclasm
for the sake of chaos, McCoy's works effect decolonization through weird
survivance. Anger and outrage at colonial cruelty and ongoing grievances are
outbalanced by the urgent wish for change. Painting (in) a Native-centred world
transforms Lowbrow. The wild rush of images not only unsettles viewers but also
educates them about their realities and hopefully startles them into action.
McCoy's particular
set of influences, then, is discernible in a dark form of humour, a visual
language of dry wit and biting irony in which he is fluent, and which is
informed by historical, political, and social issues. For instance, the
grotesque red figures of two naked people, a man and a woman, in Insulin Holocaust (2011) might incite
laughter that becomes stuck in the viewer's throat once the painting's dark
theme is recognized. The figures' mouths are screwed open around the ends of a
giant hot dog that connects their expressionless faces. The woman seems to be pregnant.
The couple is surrounded by images of junk food and cheerful cartoon faces,
uniformly colored in shades of blue and grey. A cake
is folded into the space between their bellies, a large burger covering up the
lower parts of their bodies. A giant syringe can be seen floating into the
picture from the top left; a skull in the top centre crowns the composition,
red sparks glowing in its dark sockets. McCoy's painting perfectly visualizes
the relentless agony of diabetes suggested by the title. The word holocaust moreover hints that the
introduction of junk food might be understood as a systematic crime against
humanity—an apt signifier although its borrowing and estrangement from
historical and religious contexts might upset viewers and cause them to recoil.
McCoy sees
the overwhelming presence of injured bodies in Native societies—from rape
and alcoholism to health conditions like obesity and diabetes—as yet
another facet of colonization: "With flour and processed foods came diabetes
and weight troubles... History repeats itself indeed" (personal
communication, 29 Jan. 2016). By translating this horror into art, McCoy's
representations confront viewers with the strangeness of their own reality,
with their own complicity even, and thereby undermine viewers' attempts to
distance themselves from the subject-matter. The Indian Taco Made By God (2011) features outstretched arms
reaching for a piece of frybread, another ironic comment on consumerism in
Native America. As America Meredith points out, "underneath the dazzling colors and masterful graphic strokes lies [sic.] questions.
Why does Indian Country fetishize a food so unhealthy, born of poverty and
privation? Nostalgia for comfort food is a running theme in McCoy's work—Frito
pies, Spam, commodities—but we are what we eat."
Similar to Couch and Holocaust, weird survivance in Taco is created through the depiction of
dark realities in McCoy's very own visual language. The Indigenous-centred
narratives he imagines on canvas clearly speak of the horrors of history and the
often incomprehensible cruelty and stupidity of human conduct
in general. However, the sheer pleasure of exploring the details of the
paintings invariably engage the viewer, from the masterful brushwork, bright colors, and the odd internal organ, to what Meredith calls
"McCoy's flair for visual puns"—she mentions "the clouds [that] resemble
bubbles in hot lard" in Taco—that
make for "a clever joke."
With McCoy's paintings, viewers have to make an effort to reassemble fragments of a narrative on their own terms. Unlike McCoy's characters that often appear as passive victims in a chaotic world, viewers are moved into a position of power. McCoy's impertinent narratives surprise and shock; the problems Native people in North America face on a daily basis are loud and inescapable. However, McCoy's art also provokes laughter that empowers because it is incompatible with the wish to wallow in self-pity. Instead, it makes viewers aware of their own trickster streak, not only their capacity for wickedness, but also for resilience. That dark chuckle, then, constitutes the first step toward acknowledging, facing, and tackling larger problems. It moreover signals an acceptance to be teased, criticized, and called to action—a positive feeling and rush of energy necessary to face the darker realities of our world.
In his Anthology of Black Humor ('l'Anthologie de l'humour noir,'
1966) French Surrealist writer André Breton sounds exceedingly Vizenorian when
he introduces the concept of black humour as "[c]hance
encounter, involuntary recall, direct quotation?" (xxiii): "To take part in the
black tournament of humor, one must in fact have
weathered many eliminations. Black humor... is the mortal enemy of sentimentality" (xix). As Mark Polizzotti points out, Breton assembled his infamous
anthology in the wake of the Second World War and included, alongside artists
and writers such as Rimbaud, Swift, Picasso, and Dal’, five German-speaking authors,
suggesting that while the horrors of war make carefree jest impossible, there
is a dire need for communal 'harsh laughter' at the ironies of history and the
cruelty of human nature, a transformative chuckle that empowers because it is a
sign of resistance (Polizzotti viii–ix). Breton urged quick publication of the
book in 1940 (Polizzotti viii–ix), noting that "[i]t seems to
me this book would have a considerable tonic
value" (qtd. in Polizzotti ix; italics original).
Dark humour
is a defining element of the mechanics of weird survivance in the works of Bunky Echo-Hawk and Daniel McCoy Jr., and it similarly engages
the viewers of the artwork in communal 'harsh laughter' at perverted food
culture and environmental catastrophe. Grotesque or uncanny figures command our
gaze for the weirdness in our everyday lives, for what is off, unhealthy, or
simply ironic. The empowering element and sense of resistance reside exactly in
the fact that while producing humorous images the artists nevertheless succeed
in conveying the horrors of colonial history, environmental pollution, illness,
and depression. Drawing on a multitude of influences, Echo-Hawk and McCoy surprise
and even outrage their viewers, a necessary "upsetting" (Vizenor in Coltelli 172) that precedes all change. Resisting
sentimentality and victimhood, the Gas
Masks as Medicine series and works such as Insulin Holocaust depict Natives at the centre of their own worlds
and stories, in a position of power despite injury, and of responsibility for
the world for the sake of future generations.
[1]
I am
indebted to Stina Attebery for providing feedback while I was developing this article, and for giving me
permission to use her phrase weird
survivance. I take full responsibility for my definition and suggested use
of the term. The title of this essay borrows from, and suggests the influence
of, Mark Polizotti's introduction to André Breton's Anthology of Black Humor (1966; 1996)
entitled "Laughter in the Dark."
[2]
This
work was re-issued in 1990 under a new title—Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles—that would be more
memorable to readers since it emphasized "one strong word" (Vizenor in
Vizenor/Lee 95).
[3]
The weird in weird survivance might therefore be understood in analogy to the
notion of weirdness in New Weird
Fiction. This umbrella term groups together fantastic
literary works that engage in mapping out worlds as unsettling and mysterious
(i.e. weird) as the readers' own realities. In his much-quoted definition,
U.S.-American author Jeff VanderMeer defines the New Weird as having "a visceral,
in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive
horror for its tone, style, and effects" (xvi); furthermore, "New Weird
fictions are acutely aware of the modern world, even if in disguise, but not
always overtly political. As part of this awareness of the modern world, New
Weird relies for its visionary power on a 'surrender to the weird' that isn't,
for example, hermetically sealed in a haunted house on the moors or in a cave
in Antarctica" (xvi). The term has been used to describe the fantastic and
bizarre elements in the fiction of such authors as China Miéville,
M. John Harrison, and Michael Moorcock.
[4]
Triple
Threat is part of the series Skin
Ball dedicated to Native athletes and was reproduced on t-shirts and
sneakers for the Nike N7 series.
[5]
For a
more detailed discussion of Echo-Hawk's use of Pawnee regalia and
pan-Indigenous symbols, see Olena McLaughlin's
insightful article "Native Pop: Bunky Echo-Hawk and
Steven Paul Judd Subvert Star Wars"
(2017) in Transmotion 3.2.
[6]
For more details on McCoy's life and art, please refer to Alicia Inez Guzmán's 2018 interview with the artist in the/magazine,
at themagsantafe.com/daniel-mccoy/?fbclid=IwAR2wCcl1SVJ184HSkFzQog9Lf0Wn2bqfl-WW1iunnfKKUXysNGD8zOQNnCU. Some of McCoy's works can be found on artslant.com.
[7] April Holder's representation of blood-smeared, mangled Native zombies in Relics of an Undead Culture and Chris Pappan's Native American Porn Stars series also make wonderful examples of weird survivance in Native visual art. See also: chrispappan.com; April Holder can be found on artslant.com.
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