Walking east up San Francisco Street, toward the God's-eye gaze of the St. Francis Cathedral and the crowd of tourist cameras worshipping it with hymns composed in shutter snaps and video clips, I hatch an escape with a left turn into the courtyard entrance of the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum (108 Cathedral Place, 983-8900) and find a completely different planet.
Spider legs of steel arch up into the sky, supporting a ramada notched with symbols, a "roof" that welcomes rather than rejects, a circumference of rain. Towers of stacked stone rumble into view, stocky blocks of boulders standing like sentinels ready with both warnings and welcomes. The plants are unfamiliar-none of the crisp, low-cut grass that covers the nearby cathedral park or the downtown Plaza, none of the
tall, wide-leafed trees that sit in those places, either. The sun glints hard and the light ricochets through the courtyard in a spray of dapples. Cedar and sweet grass fill the breeze.
Through a window in one stone clamber, unknown words scribe across the far wall. I think I might be able to hear them. I think they might be breathing in my head. Closer, a different wall is unexpectedly legible. In a stylized, urban script, the wall throbs its question: What is Indigenous?
This is how I figure out that the planet hasn't changed up on me, just the paradigm. This is
Relations, Indigenous Dialogue
, an exhibition running through Sept. 30 that proposes, somewhat modestly, a serious effort to break the boundaries of conversations about Native identity, the meaning and practice of art, the substance of culture and the foundations of accepted museum function. For starters.
If it sounds like a big, unwieldy agenda with an unknown outcome, it is. If it sounds like lip service, it ain't. The book, which shares a name with the exhibition, is a 250-page honest-to-goodness dialogue back and forth between more than a dozen indigenous artists and thinkers from different backgrounds (and buttressed with essays by Lucy Lippard and Manulani Meyer). Reading it makes it obvious this conversation is real, evolving and about to have an impact on the course of artmaking among first peoples, native persons, tribal persons-whatever might be collected under the loose and open-to-question term "indigenous"-if not on the larger art community as a whole. Does the exhibition match the book's dialogue in terms of exploding these ideas out into an open visual and experiential context? Not quite. Is it nonetheless a key first step into what could be the most important contemporary art discourse to evolve in Santa Fe ever? No question about it.
Relations
is primarily a dialogue among peers and, well, in a broad sense, relations; the conversation about what it means to be indigenous and to make art or maintain a museum from that perspective is one that is not naturally open to everyone on all channels. But by launching this dialogue to public consumption on the same weekend as blockbuster events like the International Folk Art Market and the SITE Santa Fe biennial,
Relations
offered its questions and answers to other major, ongoing art conversations. It's a pretty thought, but in the sense that those conversations tend to be at least as exclusive as
Relations
is at its base, I'd have to plead pessimism on the odds of reciprocity. Still, one can always hope and, in rare cases, prod.
A central element of the dialogue at the IAIA museum is the pigeon-holing of indigenous aesthetics, the Western economic model that drives artists into the creativity-quashing game of reinforcing decorative stereotyped images because-for the most part-white folks will buy them. The ferocity and conviction with which this practice is railed against and challenged within the
Relations
dialogue is, more immediately, a shot across the bow of Santa Fe's most notable event, Indian Market, but the ramifications in terms of the Folk Art Market are clear: Beware of canning your cultural identity for consumption-the long-term cost may well outweigh the short-term gain.
Issues raised in terms of
SITE Santa Fe (1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199)
are less explicit and more to do with why art is made, how aesthetics are enforced and the dynamics around lionizing individual artists. The indigenous dialogue begins its grappling chatter with SITE through an almost funny series of one-upmanship. Biennial curator Klaus Ottmann has foregone the tradition curatorial conceit of an intellectual "theme" for his exhibition because he wants viewers to appreciate the art without the burden of a preconceived filter. He also wants to deflect the growing trend of the celebrity curator and refocus attention on the artists. IAIA goes one better by declining to obviously identify any of the individual artists as a casual visitor strolls the show. The exhibition design, the placement of works and, in many cases, the completed works themselves are done, in a generic sense, by the tribe. Creating with a sense of "we" rather than "me" is another primary exploration of
Relations
.
Ottmann has no explanatory placards on the walls at SITE. IAIA has no placards, period.
Relations
, surprisingly, contains not only an equal amount, but arguably better, video art than the SITE biennial. The dialogue provoked at SITE is meant to be intimate and personal; the indigenous dialogue is broad spectrum and communal. If SITE's biennial lives up to its title,
Still Points of the Turning World
(through Jan. 7, 2007),
Relations
is a turning point on a still world. Physicist and author Fritjof Capra has used Western science frameworks to propose an altogether more "indigenous" perception of systems theory; Many of the questions posed by both
Relations
and
Still Points
are better asked in unison than in opposition.
Consider work by some of the individuals in
Still Points
: the intuitive explorations of Jonathon Meese; the culturally driven assertions of Wangechi Mutu; the identity questions asked by Catherine Opie; the disconnect lamented by Miroslaw Balka; and the intense observation-of-the-other instilled in the work of Cristina Iglesias. The pertinent questions about who we are, how we live from within a culture that understands our holistic survival requirements and what role art and artists serve in creating that culture, are very much the same for all. Just because paintings laid side by side will prove to be made from entirely different strokes doesn't mean their respective values will be confined to entirely different folks.
