OK, I admit it. I was talking smack about Indian Market last week. Not in this column, but in person, without remorse and to anyone who would listen, which, at this point, feels a bit harsh or at least narrow-visioned. My beef with Indian Market, the annual Plaza event organized by the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA), is that as a central clearinghouse for Native American arts and crafts, which emphasizes arbitrary notions of "tradition," it encourages artists to follow the easy money of a safe, homogenized "friendly Indian" art career rather than push the boundaries of expression, experimentation and identity. That much I believe is true, though it's not a dynamic confined to ethnic-based arts events; anyone who tells you there are no aesthetic, conceptual or behavioral recipes for getting ahead in the contemporary art world isn't paying attention. But Indian Market is a more concentrated form of creative
sanitization and it happens here, in Santa Fe, where our entire civic identity is already tied up in a precarious balance between creative expression and rigidly enforced appearance, so it's doubly alarming. But, in
the same way "Santa Fe Style" has been unable to prevent thriving subcultures of all kinds from burrowing in and out of the rotted vigas of its façade, Indian Market, I'm forced to concede, can't quite be written off as a monolith of conformity.
I learned this not strolling the Plaza for jewelry 'n' frybread (which, less than a charming and fattening Native food, is more the result of Navajo and Apache prisoners being rationed white flour and salt while interned at Fort Sumner) but sliding through chilled glasses of Chichicapa Mezcal at the Cowgirl. It was a Market scene, sardine-packed with both local and imported indigenes alongside a more usual crowd. Carefully furled blondes bounced next to samurai-high, jet black sprigs. Long, prairie noses dueled with tight, eastern buttons for prominence while calling the eight in the corner pocket, and Wes Studi's Magnificent Firecats of Discord-despite being neither fiery nor discordant-wrangled the crowd into a sort of multicultural bliss.
Meanwhile, folks from far and wide, summoned not by Market exactly, but dragged by friends and relatives or here to participate in the Native Cinema Showcase, were proving that even if the basic premise of Market is faked, the interaction that happens around it is about as vital as anything. With all the different indigenous action colliding around the Cowgirl, it felt like, well, like a real version of what Santa Fe pretends to be, only more worldly. After Chocolate Helicopter left a swelling under-aged crowd on the street in front of the Cowgirl clamoring for more, even though they weren't even allowed in the bar, it made sense to follow Rose Simpson and Jake Fragua's band over to the all-ages, late-night portion of Spindian Market, the DJ/Band festival that started at Alegria at 10 pm and ended at the Wise Fool Performance Space well past 4 am. Unfortunately, there was an interminable sound check and a desperate need for someone to solve the high guitar, quiet vocals and timid bass putting a damper on things. When the band really got rolling, though, with the soulful/psychedelic/noise rock set that woulda-coulda-shoulda stopped traffic back on Guadalupe Street, and Simpson addressed her indigenous crowd with urges of creative insurgency and smacked her mic against the floor so hard it split in two and proclaimed "
This
is our tradition," well, something was going on in that room. It was clear from the yips and whoops and fists in the air that the next generation is going to deal with Indian Market on its own terms. Watch your ass, SWAIA.
Of course a night like that has to start somewhere and, for me, it was over in the quiet Basiste Studio (430-B W. Manhattan St., 988-1814) on the Railyard. In the back room, one of Eli Levin's old paintings addressed Indian Market with a scene of tourists and locals clashing in the street in front of a downtown boutique called "Daddy's Money." In the front room, Trevor Lucero had prepared an inside outsider assault of portraits, prints and paintings, his scrawling expeditions on paper clutched with immediacy and simultaneously limber and blobby. Lucero's work has always been good, but we saw this vein last time the Albuquerque-based artist exhibited in Santa Fe. When will we see something else? It turns out Lucero's working up the courage to deliver the Center for Contemporary Arts a proposal to exhibit a series of 100-square-foot paintings he's been secretly, awkwardly, working on. "You know, you're doing something for 10 years and it just becomes normal, manageable," Lucero says. "And that's terrible. So, how do you break out of it? I try to do something completely unmanageable." Unmanageable may or may not be a tough sell for CCA's spot-on curatorial committee, but somebody ought to call somebody and see what happens when you throw this pony in the water, so to speak.
So there's Lucero and Indian Market, one an individual artist and another an institution, both barreling toward unwieldy, impending transformation. One's going willingly, one's got no choice, but both are confronting a socio-gravitational pull toward conformity against a balance of evolution and trying to figure out how art-as a career, as an action, as a force-can feel like it's pulling in both directions at once. Don't think about it too much, cautions Lucero, art is more for doing than talking. "Talking about art," he says, "is too heart wrenching, too expensive. It's like your uranium core is being depleted if you get too far into it."
