Neoglyphix presents Wildstyle West

Coinciding with the Indian Fair and Market at Heard museum is another exhibition of Native art, this one with more of a street edge. Called ”Neoglyphix Wildstyle West” it features aerosol art by Rose Simpson, Douglas Miles, Dwayno Insano and Dytch 66, among others. I had to google the last two names and I’m glad I did, because both do some really impressive spraycan art. Below are some images I found. 

Dytch 66
Dytch 66

 

 

Dwayno Insano

 

Dwayno Insano

 

Neoglyphix Wildstyle West will open 2 March at Prime Cut  & Sew Barbershop and Boutique in Mesa, Arizona.

How contemporary Native American artists counter cultural appropriation with artistic appropriation

Google “Native American appropriation art” and the first five pages of results or so are all about negative cases of cultural appropriation. On these pages we can read about how outsiders misuse Native American images and cultural heritage, such as the infamous feathered headdress on a lingerie clad model in a Victoria’s Secret show five years ago. Cultural appropriation, of course, continues to be a problem and something that should be addressed and discussed. However, when typing in that search term I wasn’t looking for Native Americans as victims. I wanted to read about how appropriation is used as a strategy within contemporary Native American art. I was looking for Native American artists as agents of empowerment. To find such results buried under droves of articles about how Native American iconography has been mistreated must feel like a double slap in the face. First whites steal Native cultural practices and use it in a distorted way, then this act of appropriation steals the attention away from Native artists who use appropriation as a way to symbolically fight back.

This makes it very difficult to place the aesthetic tactics of many Native American artists into proper art historical perspective, which is a shame, especially considering how significant appropriation is for many Native artists. Appropriation is, after all, a genre of contemporary art that has perhaps been the most important hub for questions concerning artistic authorship and originality and the contextual relativity of the meaning of images. It is perhaps within the Native art community that the legacy of appropriation art today finds it’s firmest stronghold. At first sight it may come as a surprise to learn how popular Andy Warhol is in this community. I can tell you that it is not because of his “Cowboy and Indian series”, but rather because of how Warhol demonstrated that the specialness of a sign – for instance a Campbell’s soup can – can be emptied by the act of repetition and how the meaning of a pre-existing image or object can be altered by placing it within a new context.

Warhol himself was not a particularly political figure, but the strategy of appropriation, of “copying” images and making them your own, has a history of political uses.
Dara Birnbaum and Sherrie Levine used appropriation to feminist ends. By repeating and recontextualizing imagery by male originators they questioned the authenticity of representations of gender. Appropriation has also been employed to question the commodity value of art and its underlying economic structures.

Even before it was a genre of art, Raphael Montanez Ortiz performed a case of appropriation aimed at exposing the misrepresentation of Native Americans. In 1957 he used a Tomahawk to chop up Anthony Mann’s western Winchester ’73. He then put the pieces back together at random, resulting in a complete scrambling and disruption of the original narrative. “Ortiz considered his shaman-like process resonant with his indigenous heritage. His destructive act also criticized media depictions of Native Americans.” 

As a genre, Native American appropriation art comes across as something self-evident and completely natural. Artists are simply taking images back that were stolen from them. Artists such as Douglas Miles, Jaque Fragua, Steven Paul Judd, Ryan Singer, among many others, consider appropriation a way to take repossession of images that they have lost control over. In short, one might say that appropriation art is a means to combat cultural appropriation.

We’ve written about the importance of graffiti for contemporary Native artists many times here on the blog. In the hands of Native artists, painting with spray cans in public spaces is no petty act of vandalism but a profoundly political gesture. This is clearly demonstrated by Jaques Fragua who wrote “This Is Indian Land” in giant letters on a construction site in Downtown Los Angeles. The act of appropriation is performed in a spirit kindred to graffiti. For Native American artists it is about re-claiming what is rightfully theirs by symbolically taking back their land by illegally writing on it, or redefining images that have been made from an external point of view.

We haven’t written about Jaque Fragua on the blog before, so let’s continue on him. Besides graffiti, Fragua considers appropriation one of his artistic go-to’s. “The Big Chief” is for instance a commercial symbol that has become a recurring character throughout Fragua’s work. Fragua explains: “He’s a chief from a sign that’s near my reservation, at Big Chief Gas Station. If you’ve ever watched Breaking Bad, you’ve see that gas station. I lifted him and I’ve been putting him everywhere—he’s the Big Chief, right? When you put a mirror against another mirror, you start seeing the core of the truths.”

In another interview, Fragua explains the appeal of appropriation more in depth: ”Simply, it’s about imagery that continues to colonize us. By creating fine art out of these visuals and emphasizing the images ad nauseum, it creates the opposite effect. Sort of like Warhol’s soup cans.”  Fragua thus reappropriates his culture’s iconography in a way that conceptually subverts our overconsumption of misappropriated Native American images that has turned into stereotypes.

Some critics fear that appropriation as a artistic gesture has lost some of its meaning in a time when borrowing, quoting, stealing and copying is everyday practice to the point of being ubiquitous. However, for Native American artists, appropriation simply follows the rules of the game set by a white hegemony. It is the answer to a signifying practice already put in place. As such, appropriation is important now perhaps more than ever. With a president that casually refers to people of Native American heritage as “Pocahontas”, and a culture at large that hold it’s racial stereotypes dearly, appropriation as artistic weapon offers a way to strike back. Contemporary Native American artists turn to appropriation not to be trendy or edgy but out of urgency. It opens a line of dialogue that lets Native Americans have the last word on images that they were not in charge of in the first place and thus to let the public know what they think about them.

Further reading about cultural appropriation:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/cultural-appreciation-or-cultural-appropriation/

https://jezebel.com/5959698/a-much-needed-primer-on-cultural-appropriation 

http://nativeappropriations.com

 

About appropriation art:

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-the-art-of-copying-ten-masters-of-appropriation

https://www.thoughtco.com/appropriation-appropriation-art-183190 

“Okay, I think I can do that”: How to look at art and get inspired to do, well, just about anything.

There are days when you don’t have anything in particular to report – no news and no opinions. Some days you just want to write about something that makes you feel good. Something to inspire you to get off your ass and do stuff. Something in the “hell yeah!”-vein, in other words. This is one of those days. There are many things I love about Native American Art, but there is one thing in particular that keeps hold on me and it’s something that runs deeper than surface aesthetics. It is a certain attitude that shows you how powerful art can be. Art can give you a voice when other means of expression are suppressed. It is hard to find that attitude elsewhere, at least so collectively concentrated. The realization that art can show reality but also create another reality is what makes so many Native communities bubble with creativity.

The rapper Drake said in the song “Fireworks”: “from the concrete who knew that a flower would grow”, meaning that it is surprising that beauty could come from harsh circumstances. He clearly has no concept of Native Art. Or, to take an example closer to Drake’s own rap identity – New York’s graffiti culture in the late 1970s and early 80s. There is a lot about that era that reminds me of the contemporary Native art scene. That period is all about the creative ways of the disenfranchised to grow out of the concrete. Spraycan graffiti was a completely invented art form so there were no art schools to teach you how to do it. Ghetto kids were the professors and their education was on the streets where the tricks of the trade were passed from peer to peer. At the beginning there were no commercial ambitions- the practitioners had yet to find a way to monetize their art. It was just about rising above the everyday struggle by creating something beautiful and spreading it throughout the streets.
Art is empowering. It let’s you create and define your own world. When the realization of this occurs on a collective level, like with graffiti in 1970s New York, art is injected with an energy and enthusiasm that is highly intoxicating and convincing. Similarly, a lot of Native Americans today latch on to art as a source of optimism and tool for change.

I’m writing these words with one particular artist in mind: Steven Paul Judd. Few people embodies the DIY – attitude like Judd. He embarked on his artistic trajectory when trying to find some nice Native art to hang in his house. He failed to find anything that corresponded to his taste for pop art, so he simply set to work making some himself.

 

It is no accident that Judd has close ties to graffiti culture. But labelling Judd just a graffiti artist would be reductive. Creativity just pours out of him and into every facet and category of art. This guy is just pure inspiration, in the truest sense of the word. He has no proper education in the arts so he doesn’t always know the ”hows”, he just knows that he has to do it. And a lot of the times, Youtube tutorials will get you where you need to go. The quote in the title to this piece, of course, comes from Steven Paul Judd. And the mentality of going for it runs through his entire practice of art.

Not least it applies to his approach to historical iconography. Judd quite often uses familiar imagery but in a way as to make it more Native-centric. He uses art to create his own alternate version of pop-culture, for instance by fusing historical Native American iconography with the world of Star Wars, or by recasting superheroes such as The Hulk as Native American. Claiming your space in this way, despite what history and the powers that be say, is a deeply graffiti-like attitude.

In an interview Judd talks about his creative process in a way that seems to be representative of his energy and eagerness to get things done. Recently, Judd has been creating portraits of Sitting Bull, composed entirely out of Rubik’s Cubes. Which is like building a complicated puzzle, with smaller puzzles for pieces. The initial plan was to mount it on the wall but he finished the puzzle before he had figured out a way to fasten the cubes on the wall. So he just let the cubes lay on the floor, the art work now an installation rather than a wall piece.

If there’s a will there’s a way, I believe is the accurate motivational phrase here.
To continue in this vein of self-improvement, let us sum up by making it a rule that whenever you feel that things are just too damn hard, ask yourself: what would Steven Paul Judd do? If the conclusion you come up with is not “Okay, I think I can do that”, you’re doing it wrong.

The writing on the wall

 

Graffiti is an art form that does not politely wait to be discovered. It does not ask permission but pushes its message onto an unsuspecting public. Considered as a political gesture, it is easy to see the appeal of graffiti for many Native American artists. Graffiti is necessarily anti-authoritarian, as is the work set out for Native artists struggling to get their images past a white hegemony that prefers to take representation of Native culture into their own hands.  

Graffiti is first and foremost known to be an element of Hip Hop culture, but the use of spraycan paint in the public arena also has roots in punk culture. Some bands would apply spray paint over stencils to get their names onto street walls. Some activist artists also took to illicit stenciling. One early artistic use of spray painted stencils to deliver a public message explicitly relate to Native American history. In 1979 John Fekner stenciled the message “Wheels over Indian trails” on the Pulaski Bridge Queens Midtown Tunnel in New York, in commemoration of the thirteen tribes that originally inhabited Long Island.John Fekner

In the hands of Douglas Miles, spraycan art is infused with a Native punk sensibility all his own. His images are instantly recognizable, often combining stenciled figures reminiscent of comic drawing with written slogans, logos, and short, powerful messages. In the tradition of graffiti he paints on walls, but also on canvas, paper, skateboards, old briefcases, rusty oil cans, folding tables – anything he can lay his hands on really. In such an indiscriminating dissemination of his artistic mark, Miles evinces a spirit true to graffiti. And by repurposing discarded objects as art he shows that the objective of graffiti is to beautify, not – as the governmental outlawing of it maintains – to deface and vandalize.

miles

One might argue that by displacing a street medium such as spraycan art onto canvases and into galleries, Native culture’s engagement with graffiti today risks replaying the fate of graffiti culture in 1980s New York. When the art world caught up with what was happening on the streets, some gallery owners and agents tried to cash in by encouraging graffiti writers to transfer their art from subway cars and street walls to canvases. The results were often disappointingly, but perhaps inevitably, tame. It may not be the most self-serving thing for a gallery to state, especially when Kiva Gallery has many graffiti related art works for sale, but let´s face it: there will always be an aspect of resistance and subversion to graffiti that cannot be adequately conveyed within the confines of the gallery walls. However, for Thomas Breeze Marcus such concerns would seem to be of secondary importance. He is just as accomplished an artist on large public walls as he is in smaller format. This is in part due to the fact that his style takes inspiration from the aesthetic traditions of his tribal heritage. The incredibly intricate and interwoven designs of his paintings resemble the basket weavings of the Akimel and Tohono O’odham peoples, but also mirrors the most complex form of lettering in wildstyle graffiti.Thomas Breeze Marcus

Through its very medium, spraypaint raises political associations of taking representational matters into your own hands as much as it does a particular aesthetic. Douglas Miles and Breeze Marcus have adopted graffiti as a way to deal artistically with specific concerns of their own cultures and in the end their commitment to it is as reinvigorating for the art of graffiti as it is for Native culture.

 

 

Breeze Marcus has a great blog that documents a lot of his public works: http://brezone.blogspot.se/

Douglas Miles´ Facebook page is here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/APACHE-Skateboards/116109058377

Phoenix rising

Strolling through downtown Phoenix, Arizona, one encounters this majestic mural created by Thomas ”Breeze” Marcus, entitled, appropriately (for many reasons) ”Phoenix Rising”

Photos by Mona Terenius

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kiva gallery has this, more owner friendly piece, by Breeze Marcus

”Camp Lo Swing” by Thomas ”Breeze” Marcus