Indigenous
New Media Arts:
Narrative Threads and Future Imaginaries
THEA PITMAN
This
article seeks both to communicate a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of Indigenous
new media artworks and projects, and to "frame" them within the context of the
particular transnational networks of friendship and support into which they are
born and in which they circulate. It is my contention that Indigenous new media
arts[1]
have particularly flourished across the parts of the "Anglo-world" (Belich)
that are the result of the early waves of British settler colonialism, most
notably in countries such as Canada, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the
United States (including Hawai'i).[2]
There are a number of reasons why
Indigenous new media art initiatives have really been able to thrive across
this particular geopolitical framework. Firstly, there is the nature of settler
colonialism itself and the type of transnational dynamics it leaves us with. In
distinguishing between colonialist and settler colonialist frameworks, critics
have noted that while the former privileges a centre-periphery dynamic, settler
colonialism is "inherently transnational" and requires a "'networked' frame of
analysis" to capture the movements and exchanges between colonies (Lester, qtd
in Veracini 10). Nonetheless, although the phenomenon of setter colonialism has
the capacity to bypass the original metropole, it still depends on that
metropole for the provision shared cultural values and a lingua franca through which cultural sharing may take place. Thus,
from the outset, there is a network of settler communities with lots in common
and a shared language in which to explore similarities and differences.
Furthermore, while the original
circuitry of settler colonial "worlds" is based on the movement and exchanges
between settlers rather than the Indigenous peoples the settlers sought to
displace, assimilate or eliminate, the same overarching networks and linguas francas have also been
strategically appropriated by Indigenous peoples to provide the framework for
the growth of a pan-Indigenous movement that has blossomed over the last forty
years. While this global Indigenous movement stretches far beyond the
"Anglo-world," Ronald Niezen argues for a predominance of Indigenous voices
from the "Northern Hemisphere," particularly Canada and the United States, in
the first Indigenous-specific meetings organised at the United Nations that
provided the basis for the development of this movement (69-72).[3]
Secondly, there is the critical relationship
between the global Indigenous movement and new media technologies. The development
of the Indigenous movement has been considerably facilitated by the rapid spread
of networked digital communication technologies since the late 1980s. As Niezen
notes, "the clearest evidence of indigenous networking can be found on the
Internet," and, drawing a comparison with Benedict Anderson's influential
arguments about the importance of the relationship between printing
technologies and the rise of nationalisms, he argues that "the development of
information technology has similar implications for the rise of international
consciousness among those marginal to nation-states" (226, n.12).[4]
Furthermore, it is worth noting that these technologies were developed first in
the United States, almost all computer programming languages are based on
English, and the lingua franca of the early internet was, by default, English.
Thus those Indigenous communities resisting within the "British" (post)colonial
settler world,[5] and who were
minded to appropriate the structures and technologies of that world to advance
their own decolonial agendas, were ideally placed to take advantage of new
technologies such as the internet and to undertake the networking necessary to
support the development of a nascent global Indigenous movement.
Furthermore,
Maximilian Forte argues that while "it is important to
underscore the extent to which the symbols and discourses of indigenous groups
in one part of the world can and do impact the symbols and discourses of
indigenous groups in another part of the world, especially on the Internet,"
the circulation of "globalized indigeneity" is not multilateral, and "North
American Indian labels, motifs, and representations" have significant sway in "influenc[ing]
contemporary articulations" of indigeneity elsewhere in the world.[6]
Other research in the field focusing on the first decade of the internet's
existence would suggest that even if Forte were not overstating the influence
of North American Indigenous iconography at the point in time that he was
writing, other sources of Indigenous influence were quick to spring up in
places such as Australia.[7] Nonetheless
the predominance of Indigenous voices and visions from
across the "British," "Anglophone" (post)colonial settler world in the context
of networked digital media is still apparent.
And finally, although new media technologies are
essential to the development of the contemporary global Indigenous movement,
new media arts per se have not
flourished everywhere that there are self-identifying Indigenous communities
that use the internet to network with other Indigenous communities, either in
English, or increasingly in other linguas
francas of colonisation that have substantially increased their presence
online such as Spanish or Portuguese.[8] It is the
case that, while socio-political conditions in (post)colonial settler
nation-states such as Canada or Australia are far from ideal from an Indigenous
perspective, these are nonetheless "'successful' colonies" (78) in Niezen's
terms: they are large, politically stable, liberal democracies with strong
economies that are well able to support and sustain a healthy Indigenous arts
"scene" in a way that has not been possible in other contexts either within the
"Anglo-world" or in other (post)colonial settler contexts such as Latin America.
It is this contrast between different
contexts and how they may facilitate, or not, the creation and circulation of
Indigenous new media arts that underpins my curiosity to explore the artworks
and projects that are the focus of this article. My main research interests are
in Latin American cultural studies, and I am currently involved with a project
entitled AEI: Arte Eletrônica Indígena
[Indigenous Electronic Art] (www.aei.art.br), run by the NGO Thydêwá (www.thydewa.org). The project promotes the
co-creation of what they refer to as "electronic art"[9] between
(typically) non-Indigenous artists and interested Indigenous community members
in nine different communities in the North East of Brazil. In order to analyse
and evaluate the artistic processes and products of the project, I felt the
need to familiarise myself with the kind of new media/digital/electronic
artworks and projects that I was aware were already being produced by other
Indigenous artists in North America. As I began this research, the need to
recognise the fact that new media arts created by Indigenous artists in the
United States and Canada exist in an "(art) world" that is distinctively
structured by the legacy of British settler colonialism, and has strong links
to other "comparable" countries such as Australia and Aotearoa became apparent.
The vibrancy of Indigenous new media
arts across this particular geopolitical framework is evidenced by a wealth of
different artists' networks, residencies, group exhibitions and anthological
publications. While some of these are confined to just one locale or, for
better or worse, nation-state, others seek to span the full geopolitical range.
Whereas more place-based and financially demanding activities such as
residencies, workshops and exhibitions tend to be circumscribed by local,
regional or national frameworks, arguably it is Indigenous-led
artistic/academic networks of friendship and support that are most likely to
span the full range of settings. The special issue of the journal Public, entitled Indigenous Art: New Media and the Digital (eds Igloliorte et al.,
2016), provides maximum proof of the scope and rationale of these networks. In
the introduction, Canada-based Indigneous editors Heather Igloliorte, Julie
Nagam and Carla Taunton are clear about the transnational (post)colonial settler
colonial framework that the works and projects selected span, although less so
about its British origins and Anglophone underpinnings: Despite the repeated
use of the term "global" in reference to the "Indigenous media art" showcased,
they also repeatedly emphasise that "This publication gathers scholars,
curators, and artists from the Indigenous territories in Canada, the United
States of America, Australia and Aotearoa" (9), all "colonized countries" (13)
that "share similar histories of settler colonialism" (6).
With what is such a dynamic, creative
"thread" of activity spanning across continents and oceans, it is an invidious
task to select materials for specific comment. I have thus structured what
follows around various vectors that will give a sense of the diversity of the
field: I start with some of the earliest projects, followed by those that most
clearly project Indigenous cultural imaginaries into the future ("First
Encounters and Indigenous Futures"). I then go on to explore the very different
modalities of Indigenous new media arts as well as some of the common threads
that bind them together ("Multidimensionality: Voices and Visions"), before
closing with a consideration of the different audiences that this kind of art
engages ("Sharing Indigenous New Media Arts").
In terms of the relationship of my
approach to Indigenous-led academic publications such as the special issue of Public mentioned above, as well as the
Canada-specific anthology Transference,
Tradition, Technology: Native New Media Exploring Visual and Digital Culture
(eds Claxton et al., 2005), and the North America-specific Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art
(eds Loft and Swanson, 2014), these works for me constitute primary materials
in themselves. As Indigenous-led publications they provide compelling evidence
not just of the artworks and projects themselves, but also of the transnational
networks of friendship and support that underpin their creation and
circulation, and of Indigenous understandings of the purpose and intended
audiences of Indigenous new media arts.
First Encounters and Indigenous Futures
The
beginnings of Indigenous new media arts are contemporaneous with the
development of new media itself. Indeed, Indigenous engagement with computing
and with code as communication technologies go back at least as far as the
early twentieth century—Native American languages were used as code to
send messages in both First and Second World Wars (Eglash 181). In the case of
the development of the internet, the United States-based Ojibway artist
Hymhenteqhous Mizhekay Odayin, more commonly known as Turtle Heart, started
creating art on computers from the early 1980s (Eglash 182), and his American Indian Computer Art Project
website started life on a Bulletin Board System before being hosted by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a World Wide Web site in 1991 (Turtle
Heart), i.e. before the Internet took off as a widely-accessible public
platform in 1994. The American Indian
Computer Art Project is essentially Turtle Heart's personal artist's
website, and it showcases his artistic trajectory, including drawings,
paintings, sculpture and computer-generated visual art, the latter a strong
thread throughout his career. According to the AICAP website, it was one of the first thousand websites ever to be
created and has been archived in the Permanent Collections of the United States
Museum of Computer History at the Smithsonian Institute. The site switched to
personal ownership in 1998 (http://www.aicap.org) and is still live on the
internet twenty years later—this quarter-century trajectory is quite a
phenomenal achievement for any web-based project.
Fig 1. Hymhenteqhous
Mizhekay Odayin/Turtle Heart, first
capture of the American
Indian Computer Art Project
website on Internet Archive Wayback Machine (12 Dec 1998). Reproduced with kind permission of the artist, for
academic and educational use only. No commercial use of any AICAP materials is allowed, implied or
granted.
While
Turtle Heart's AICAP is an individual
artist's website, and came about as a result of his close links with US
academics in the field of computer science (personal email), other Indigenous
artists in Turtle Island/North America, particularly those much further north
in Canada, first came to new media via the networking and dissemination possibilities
offered by the internet for spatially dispersed Indigenous artists, together
with the support of art institutions such as the Banff Centre for Arts and
Creativity in Alberta. Starting in the mid-1990s there were a whole host of
initiatives to network Indigenous artists as well as encourage take-up of new
media technologies through face-to-face events and exhibitions, online gallery
spaces and chatrooms. See, for example, Drumbytes.Org (http://drumbytes.org,
1994–), Cyber Powwow (http://www.cyberpowwow.net, 1996–), and isi-pikîskwewin
ayapihkêsîsak / Speaking the Language of Spiders (http://spiderlanguage.net,
1996–).
These early initiatives have also
continued to develop over the last twenty-five years and have led to Indigenous
media arts research networks such as Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC;
http://abtec.org, 2004–) and more recently the Initiative for Indigenous
Futures (IIF; http://abtec.org/iif; 2015–), both led by Cherokee/Hawaiian/Samoan academic
and artist Jason Edward Lewis and Mohawk/Irish artist Skawennati. As Lewis
notes, while AbTeC was focused on "claiming territory in the newly formed
virtual places of cyberspace," IIF directs its attention at "claiming territory
in the future imaginary, or better yet, creating our own" (Lewis 37). Both
initiatives thus ensure Indigenous presence in virtual and/or imaginative
spaces to contest the dominant view that these spaces are terra nullius where "white" people can make themselves at home
having removed any concern for competing and/or prior claims for such space, or
where their dominance will inevitably prevail after many battles (the typical
narrative arc of Western science fiction).[10]
Lewis's and Skawennati's own artistic
outputs are important in their own right. See, for example, Skawennati's
complex and painstaking TimeTraveller™
(http://www.timetravellertm.com, 2009–) video-art project created using
machinima technology that records real-time interactions in gaming
environments, in this case the actions of avatars created by the artist to
support roleplay scenarios in Second Life, and which retells significant
episodes of history from a First Nations perspective (Ore; LaPensée and Lewis).
Fig
2. Skawennati. "Dakotas Raise Weapons",
machinimagraph from TimeTraveller™
(2010). Reproduced with kind permission of the artist.
Image may not be reproduced without permission.
However, what is perhaps even more
important is the fact that the directors have arguably inspired a whole
generation of Indigenous artists to work with computer gaming technologies
through the Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling in Digital Media (http://skins.abtec.org)
that AbTeC has been running since 2008. (See, for example, the work of Beth
LaPensée.) These workshops have focused on developing the potential of
Indigenous youth from a wide variety of different ethnic groups, predominantly
in Canada but also in places such as Hawai'i, to simultaneously engage with new
technologies and with their own cultures through the design of computer games
that represent them and their worldviews, including their visions of what kind
of futures they want to have. This is not only important in terms of ensuring
the passing on of Indigenous knowledge and cosmovisions (worldviews), from
generation to generation, but also in terms of contributing to the envisioning
of possible futures for the whole of humanity. That is to say, one hopes that
Indigenous science-fiction imaginaries can offer much needed correctives to the
above-mentioned mainstream science-fiction narratives that tend to rerun
colonialist first-person-shooter scenarios, thus delivering only the
unimaginative futures conjured up by those who hanker after the glories of
conquests past.
Similar initiatives are also evident
elsewhere in the British settler colonial world, such as in the Pilbara region
of Australia, where Ngarluma youth have collaborated on a project
sponsored by Big hART—a not-for-profit community arts initiative—
to create an interactive animated science-fiction comic storybook for iPads
called The Neomads (http://yijalayala.bighart.org/neomad,
2010–), and which is based on "Dreamtime stories about the land, seas and
rivers, sacred sites and spirits" (Bessant and Watts 1). Bessant and Watts
voice some concerns about the ability of the project to not simply further
essentialise and commodify Indigenous identities in a new medium and to offer
real agency for the Ngarluma youth
involved (11-12). Nonetheless, they conclude that "The Neomads contests the idea of who is a 'real' Aboriginal by
demonstrating that the young participants are savvy technicians skilled in new
media" and "creative bricolage," and that they are able to use new media to
strengthen their sense of community belonging, as well as relate to a
fast-changing, multicultural world (Bessant and Watts 11-12). Thus, through
these gaming imaginaries, and the creative, intercultural skills and
positionalities developed in their composition, Indigenous youth and artists
can be seen to be making a significant contribution to future-proofing their
cultures.
Multidimensionality: Voices and Visions
The
different manifestations of Indigenous new media arts are as diverse as one can
imagine, ranging from Inuit (Pond Inlet, Nunavut) artist Ruben Anton Komangapik's
Nattiqmut Qajusiqujut (the seal that
keeps us going) (2014), a 15cm-wide mixed-media piece combining harp seal
skin, various different metals and nylon thread and incorporating a QR code
dyed into the seal skin which leads to a YouTube video of the artist telling a
family story of cultural survival; to British/Māori (Ngapuhi, Ngāti
Hine and Ngai Tu) artist Lisa Reihana's c.20m-wide and 4m-tall,[11]
64-minute-duration video installation In
Pursuit of Venus [Infected] (2015-17). The latter work took Reihana ten
years to create and it is based on a revisionist re-enactment of first
encounter between Indigenous people and Captain Cook and his crew in Tahiti for
the 1769 Transit of Venus—a prelude to the colonisation of the entire
region—as seen in "a scenic wallpaper from 1805 called Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (or Savages of the Pacific), created by
French manufacturer Joseph Dufour based on the design of painter Jean-Gabriel Charvet"
(Jefferson). In the "digital wallpaper" installation, the figures depicted
"come to life," embodied by Australian Indigenous actors in the main, and act
out vignettes that trouble any Manichean readings of the narrative of first
encounter, encouraging viewers to adopt their own point of view (a play on the
work's acronym, "POV"). Yet, despite vast differences in materials or scale,
there are, nonetheless, obvious common threads running across a great many of
these works relating to questions of Indigenous voice and agency, cultural
heritage and "story-telling" via new media, as well as wider questions of
cosmovision and ethics of representation.
Fig
3. Ruben Anton Komangapik, Nattiqmut Qajusiqujut
(the seal that keeps us going) (2014). Harp seal skin, indelible
ink, steel, bronze, sterling silver, nylon cord, and waxed nylon, 114.5 x 180 x
6cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Reproduced with kind permission of the
artist and the National Gallery of Canada. Image may
not be reproduced without permission. Scan QR code with any QR code reader to
access the video.
Fig
4. Lisa Reihana, In Pursuit
of Venus [Infected] (2015–17). Single channel video, 16k Ultra-HD video, colour,
sound, 64 mins, c.20m-wide/4m-tall screen. Supported by Creative New Zealand, New Zealand at Venice,
Artprojects, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Park Road Post. Installation view, Lisa
Reihana | Cinemania, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2018.
Photo: Document
Photography. Reproduced with kind permission of the
artist and CAC. Video footage showing how the
installation was made and how it works available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmMRF5nw9UI
As Jason Edward Lewis argues, the
multidimensionality of digital art forms (the facility to provide different
layers or divergent narrative threads via links, for example) is an excellent
way of providing "a much fuller picture of what this history is or what this
contemporary situation is" and ensuring that a wider range of voices can be
heard (Lewis, in interview with Smyth). Excellent examples of layering,
multi-voiced-ness and alternative means of story-telling are to be found in the
multimedia work of Diné (Navajo) artist William Ray Wilson. In a series of
beadwork "weavings," including Auto
Immune Response: Weaving the Sacred Mountains (2011-12) and eyeDazzler: Trans-customary Portal to
Another Dimension (2011), Wilson embeds scannable QR-codes into the
weavings. In Auto Immune Response these
QR-codes link to short videos that focus on "a post-apocalyptic Navajo man's
journey through an uninhabited landscape," and raise questions about ecological
change, the loss of key Indigenous sacred landscapes, and the possibility of
survival and "reconnection to the Earth" (Wilson, interviewed by Moomaw and
Lukovic). In eyeDazzler, a much
bigger public-art piece made of 76,000 4mm-diameter glass beads, the textile is
much more complex in itself, referencing a particular two-sided Navajo textile
design as made by the artist's grandmother. Where the
cultural knowledge required for the elaboration of such traditional textiles is
being lost, Wilson uses two identical QR-codes to offer an alternative
"trans-customary portal" (in his terms) to access that knowledge—the
codes lead to a two-channel video of his mother and aunt discussing, in Diné,[12]
how
their mother had made the original rug, while the viewer sees images of how the
new rug is being made and who is involved in the project.[13] As Wilson
notes, rather than simply foisting something new and high-tech onto an artform
perceived as "traditional" and "static," "our project was always about working
from within and developing a trans-customary form based on something that our
mothers and their mothers before them have always been innovating" (Wilson,
interviewed by Moomaw and Lukovic). The eyeDazzler
project was also a community collaboration, given the enormity of the task of
making the piece, and designed as a piece of public art to complete the
feedback loop between creative communal praxis and its intended local
(Diné-speaking) audience.
Figs
5 & 6. William Ray Wilson, eyeDazzler:
Trans-customary Portal to Another Dimension (2011);
whole work and detail. Reproduced with kind permission
of the artist.
A more recent project that evidences
the facilities of "layering" in digital art, is Wilson's Critical Indigenous Photography Exchange (CIPX) which includes a
series of eight "talking tintypes" (https://willwilson.photoshelter.com/gallery/Talking-Tintypes/G0000n_hiXQrBXNw,
2015).[14]
These are conventional-looking ethnographic black-and-white tintype photographs
of Indigenous subjects in the style of Edward S. Curtis. But these are not just
conventional ethnographic portraits, presenting objectified, decontextualised
images of unnamed Indigenous subjects for consumption by the Western gaze. The
"exchange" of the title suggests that these images are the result of a
collaborative "exchange" between sitter and photographer which grants the
sitter greater agency in the way in which they are represented and offers new
ways for viewers to understand contemporary Indigenous identities. It effects
this exchange by means of adding new layers to the ostensibly traditional
image. Indeed, when they are scanned with an Augmented Reality app (Layar), the
images are overlayed with video material from the sitting such that sitters can
both return the viewer's gaze and speak for themselves.[15]
The results, as readers may judge for themselves by downloading the free Layar
app and scanning the images below, are really very arresting and effective.
Figs 7 & 8. William Ray Wilson, "Insurgent Hopi
Maiden" (2015), and "Chairman
Shotton of the Otoe-Miossouria Tribe" (2016), from the "Talking Tintypes"
series in Wilson's Critical
Indigenous Photography Exchange (CIPX) project. Reproduced
with kind permission of the artist.
Another way of thinking about the issue
of layering in these images is also to consider the fact that Wilson has chosen
to include some ostensibly Latina/o subjects alongside
the Native American sitters,[16] thus
hinting at the complexity of the relationships and/or overlapping identities
between Native American communities in the South West, the large, and
fast-growing, numbers of mestiza/o
(mixed-race) Chicanas/os and Latinas/os in the region, and the
not-insignificant numbers of Indigenous community members from further south in
the Americas who have settled in the area. While the majority mestiza/o population likes to emphasise
its Indigenous ancestry as a way asserting an a priori right to reside in the
US Southwest and emphasising its own sense of colonisation by Anglo-America,[17]
this indigenist dynamic also tends to erase the presence of self-identifying
Indigenous peoples among the Chicana/o and Latina/o populations as a whole.
Indigenous people of Latin American origin in the US Southwest have to
negotiate their multiple oppressions as both Indigenous and Chicana/o or
Latina/o, as well as the complexity of their "settler" relationship vis-à-vis Native
American communities in the region. As critics have noted, these are "layered,
complex, multifocal, and multi-vocal Indigenous" (Blackwell, Boj Lopez and
Urrieta Jr, 132) identities that are very much part of the contemporary,
transnational, transcultural, and cosmopolitan forms of indigeneity (Forte)
that Wilson sought to photograph.
A significant amount of Indigenous new
media arts created to date has come in the form of large-scale digital video
and multimedia installations. Lisa Reihana's Tai Whetuki—House of Death Redux (2015), for example, focuses
on Māori and Pacific rituals around death and mourning. The two-channel
video installation takes up two whole sides of a room that is otherwise in
complete darkness. Nonetheless, the videos are designed to partly project, and
partly reflect onto the polished floor, thus over-spilling their "natural"
limits, and a hazer is also used to create a mist that is picked up by the
light of the projector. This last element was intended by Reihana to evoke a
sense of "spirit" (interview with Tamati-Quennell 67).
Another example—one that offers a
meta-narrative about "old" media and voice to boot—is The Phone Booth Project (http://www.lilyhibberd.com/The_Phone_Booth_Project_new.html,
2012-13), by non-Indigenous Australian artist Lily Hibberd and Martu filmmaker
Curtis Taylor. The installation stems from a community-based project around the
social role still played by phonebooths in the remote communities of
Australia's Western Desert (Biddle, Hibberd and Taylor 110). When installed in
the Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park for the Networking the Unseen exhibition of Australian aboriginal digital
art curated by Gretta Louw in summer 2016, the installation consisted of three
whole-wall videos featuring Martu community members discussing, in different
languages (but with subtitles in English), what the phonebooths meant to them,
how they have appropriated this technology, as well as other footage of the
booths in the communities. In the same space there was also a real phonebooth,
red sand on the floor and lighting to mimic the pounding heat of the desert sun
(Rai).
In both these cases, what is important
is the immersive, visceral impact of the installations: this aspect is really
enhanced by the non-digital elements that force viewers to engage with the
works through all of their senses. This decentring of the digital, relegating
it to be just another means for communication that Indigenous artists may
appropriate at will, is a helpful corrective in a field that has often given in
to too much celebratory, utopianist hype about the potential of digital media
to revolutionise human society, including "freeing us from the meat" of our
carnal bodies and painstakingly-negotiated social identities.[18]
Furthermore, the "whole-body" experience offered by such video installations
helps to move them beyond the conventions of "Western" documentary practices,
and works, instead, to engage the viewer with Indigenous cultural repertoires.[19]
Fig
9. Lisa Reihana, Tai Whetuki—House of Death Redux (2015). Ultra-HD, widescreen cinema aspect
ratio, 2-channel video, sound, 14 mins. Photograph of the installation at The Walters Prize 2016 exhibition,
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2016. Installation
view, Lisa Reihana | Cinemania, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2018.
Photo: Jay Patel. Reproduced with kind permission of
artist and CAC. Sample of video available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6tVOhG2Ruo
Figs 10
& 11. Lily Hibberd and Curtis Taylor, The
Phone Booth Project (2012-13). Photographs of
installation as featured on the project website. Website also includes sample
videos. Reproduced with kind permission of the artists.
Sharing Indigenous New Media Arts
Indigenous
new media artists and community art projects have flourished across the
contemporary British (post)colonial settler world over the last twenty years
(or so), particularly in Canada, the United States, Australia and Aotearoa.
Integral to this flourishing, such artists and projects have often used the
networks of friendship and support provided by other Indigenous artists and supporters
elsewhere in that "world," as evidenced by the Indigenous-led works of
scholarship on the subject, in order to strengthen their sense of identity as "Indigenous
peoples," as well as raise the profile of this kind of art. But the question
remains, raise the profile with whom? Who is the intended audience of this kind
of art?
As the
editors of the special issue of Public
dedicated to Indigenous Art: New Media
and the Digital (2016) note, their anthology was designed precisely "to
showcase the invaluable momentum created by existing global networks of
Indigenous artists, curators, and scholars, and to share the knowledges and
practices advanced through such networks" (Igloliorte et al., 6). Elsewhere in
their introduction, however, the editors make the case for the primacy of
global Indigenous artistic and cultural exchange achieved through these works
and projects, of an engagement with Indigenous (counter)publics, invoking the
potential that these practices have to promote decolonial forms of critical
mass referred to as "gathering" (they
appropriate Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith's term), "Indigenous networking," and "Indigenous-to-Indigenous
dialogue around the world" (Igloliorte et al., 6).
Nonetheless, in the earlier Indigenous-led,
Canada-specific anthology, Transference,
Tradition, Technology: Native New Media: Exploring Visual and Digital Culture
(2005), one of the editors, Dana Claxton, specifically notes that as Indigenous
new media arts become more recognised and enter formal gallery spaces, they are
predominantly appreciated by a "non-Aboriginal audience" (16). Despite voicing
concerns about the possible co-optation of Indigenous new media art by the
dominant, largely non-Indigenous academy and art world, Claxton is positive
about the decolonial potential of the increasing presence of Indigenous new
media art works in such fora, hoping that the exchange with the non-Indigenous
viewer can be "one of pedagogy, understanding, truth, hope" (16), building "trust
and interrelationships with non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal communities" (17).
She goes on to argue that "By decolonizing the exhibition space and art
discourses, an Aboriginal worldview will flourish, taking hold within the
artworld" (17).
It is in this sense, then, that we
should celebrate the fact that the most successful of Indigenous new media
artists featured in this article now figure in the exhibitions and permanent
collections of major institutions both within the geopolitical limits of the contemporary
British (post)colonial settler world, as well as beyond. For example, an
installation of Lisa Reihana's In Pursuit
of Venus [Infected], called The
Emissaries, was selected for exhibition
in the New Zealand pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and praised as the
best work of the whole exhibition by eminent art critic Waldemar Januszczak.
At present (November 2018), the same work is being exhibited at the Royal
Academy in London as part of the impressive "Oceania" exhibition of indigenous
art from the region, from first encounter to the present day. The presence in
these venues of Reihana's large-scale critical revisioning of first encounter
is a significant part of what a decolonisation of those spaces entails,
particularly given their tendency to function within the nation-state framework
of international "world fair"-like exhibitions or anthropologically-curated art
"spectacles" reminiscent of the imperial-legacy collections of "world" art in
places such as the British Museum.
Other of the artworks featured in this
article have recently been purchased by major galleries in the relevant
(post)colonial settler nation-states that clearly seek to expand their
collections to be more inclusive of the ethnic diversity of the nation in question.
See, for example, Ruben Komangapik's Nattiqmut Qajusiqujut which has been purchased by the National Gallery of Canada,
or some of Will Wilson's photographs that are now held by the Portland Art
Museum. While this is also to be celebrated, one of the dangers with purchase
by art galleries is, however, that they place a stranglehold on the further
circulation of (images of) such works such that they are reserved only for
those with the cultural and economic capital required to visit such institutions
or to purchase expensive art books.
A lot rides, therefore, on the careful
curation of international exhibitions and state-owned collections so that
Indigenous new media arts are not shoe-horned into "frame"-works that limit and
neutralise their ability to communicate, nor made inaccessible to those
communities whose stories they tell. Furthermore, circulation in such fora
should, of course, not be taken as the only measure of success. Travelling
exhibitions that take works to Indigenous communities themselves and
co-creative community new media arts projects have an important role to play in
ensuring that Indigenous communities continue to be both participants in the
creation of such works as well as the primary audiences thereof.