Art can function as a contact zone due to its ability to act as a space where different cultures meet and exist simultaneously, through processes of cultural assimilation and cultural frictions. Mary Louise Pratt conceived the term contact zone and defines it as the “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths”[1]. Art functions as a contact zone because it is a site where the different social, cultural and economic factors of two converging cultures can be represented. The artwork produced in the contact zone between Native Americans and European colonists from the time of European invasion until American Indian defeat highlights the processes of collaboration and invention that occur between different cultures that are perceived as divergent and disparate. When art is produced in a contact zone it is constructed through adaptation, appropriation, transculturation, and selection to represent the space of contact and conflict. Native Americans adapted their artworks to fit into a Western market driven by tourism and commodity, mediating between European and indigenous designs, and translating between differing definitions of objects of use, artworks and commodities. The Native American influence on colonial art was metaphorical rather than aesthetic. The representation of the Indian in colonial art situated the painting in the New World, distinguishing an original American painting style distinct from European canons. This unbalanced exchange of cultural influence, accurately reflects the highly ‘asymmetrical relations of power’ within the colonial contact zone.
The extent to which art can function as a contact zone is limited by the artwork’s ability to only reflect the single interpretation of the artist, and its vulnerability to be distorted from production to reception. The diverse visual representations of Native Americans by colonists portrays the complexity of interactions within a contact zone, and illustrates the need to look at a variety of artworks in order to fully understand the contact zone. The removal of an artwork from its original context and its later display, subjects an artwork to interloping interpretations, and differing discourses of selfhood and nationhood. The exhibition of Native American art within a Western museum dictates its classification and definition, disregarding its original context and meaning. The viewer’s perception of the contact zone is altered by the display of the art object, whether it is displayed in a public or private space, a non-western or western space or a permanent or temporary exhibition. Art can function as a contact zone but the extent to which a contact zone can be visually represented is dependant on its translation from the contact zone to its audience, from a space of heterogeneous networks of communication to the museum and its public. An artwork can function effectively as a contact zone if you consider the context of the artwork, and the effect of space and time on modifying its meaning.
The overlapping and mixing of European and Native American cultures produced a new system of meaning and exchange. Richard White refers to this space as a ‘middle ground’, a place “in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages.”[2] The artworks made by Native Americans in the period of the colonist’s expansion function as contact zones by responding to the spread of Anglo-American culture, and depicting the effect of this dominant culture upon their preexisting customs and traditions. Due to an advancement of transport and infrastructure in the Victorian period, as a product of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth-century, tourism in North America swelled to include middle class tourists, as well as upper class travelers.[3] The importance of production introduced a new category of art, the art of commodity or souvenir.[4] European schemes of economic and political hegemony pressured the aboriginal people to adapt to exist within a capitalist system based on production and commodity. The injection of trade goods, and the disappearance of land and game with the reshaping of the North American landscape, meant that commodities and souvenirs came to dominate Native American artistic production, and for many was a main source of livelihood. Native American souvenir art combined European decorative features with Indian objects, or Indian patterns with western objects, to create hybrid products. Fig. 1 is an example of a hybrid object, an Iroquois interpretation of a western picture frame. Aboriginal souvenir art functions as a contact zone, as it acts as an object of self-definition for the Native Americans, but is still adapted to conform to models created by the dominant culture. Native Americans were able to take advantage of new techniques of production and the market of tourism to retain their financial and stylistic independence through the production of souvenir art. However the aboriginal appropriation of European conventions of Indian-ness, through the consumer’s position of power- demand dictates what is produced- meant aboriginal makers had to re-imagine themselves within European conventions of Indian-ness, destabilizing their own identities. [5]
Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe, 1770 (Fig. 2) represents the contact zone between the Native Americans and the colonists, from the point of view of an America-born colonist. West was a transcultural artist, commemorating a British general but rendering the commemoration in an American style. He commented on the Native American situation through the realistic representation of an American Indian, whilst illustrating the effect of American and European codifications visually and metaphorically upon the body of the Indian.
The Death of General Wolfe examines British-Indian relations, fore-grounded by the dominant presence of the Native American within the scene.[6] The Native American and General Wolfe physically and compositionally complement each other, through their positions low on the ground and the curve of the Indians back matching the curve of Wolfe’s arm. However their differences are as striking as their similarities, the contrast between Wolfe’s uniform and the Native Americans nakedness, as well as their distinct features and complexions. The Native American was not recorded to be at the death of Wolfe, suggesting that West’s insertion was a conscious comment on the politics of contemporary America.[7]
Native American aesthetics did not dictate colonial art. However, the inclusion of the American Indian in The Death of General Wolfe is vital in identifying the setting as modern America. The Native American figure is a signifier of transculturation, within a setting of contact and conflict. The incorporation of Indian figures and accurate renditions of indigenous objects into colonial paintings allowed artists to distinguish themselves from Europeans. Americans adopted an identity of difference; inspired by the differences they were experiencing through contact with aboriginal cultures, to celebrate their distinction from the Old world.[8] West’s exterior influences outside of Western canons and experiences led to the first modern history painting.[9] West enhanced his popularity by entertaining people’s perception of him as a curiosity. West’s biography, which he collaborated on towards the end of his life with John Galt, chronicles West’s early training under Native Americans.[10] Galt also records West’s response when he first encountered the Apollo Belvedere: “My God, how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!”[11] These records portray West’s self-awareness in exploiting his status as exotic and unique, a man of and influenced by America, with the authority and ability to depict its history. West’s depiction of a Native American in The Death of General Wolfe symbolises the New World and West’s involvement in the New World, separate from the control of Europe. West’s painting acts as a contact zone to deal with the influences of American, British and Indian cultures upon him, dealing with issues of assimilation and re-invention to create an image that combines elements from different cultures to create a new object.[12]
The artist’s interpretation of the contact zone is individual, so when exploring a contact zone, a variety of artworks, by artists from both cultures need to be studied, alongside other elements, such as literature, sartorial codes and changing customs. The fact that one person produces an artwork affects the extent to which art can function as a contact zone, because an individual’s perception cannot fully represent the diversity and multiplicity of a contact zone. The Death of General Wolfe only deals with West’s experience of the contact zone, a white male colonist.
In order to understand the Indian-white contact zone further I will look at images of Native Americans created by colonists with different political and geographical situations than West. The Native American in The Death of General Wolfe symbolises a contemporary American development of a seated Indian chief, with his chin resting on a bent arm, becoming codified as the Vanishing Native American.[13] The various visual tropes of Native Americans during the establishment of the colonies, from their codification of a Vanishing race to a violent savage, portray the different relationships between the colonists and the Native Americans. The figure of the Native American in an artwork was a visual manifestation of the contact zones that existed within this period. George Caleb Bingham’s Concealed Enemy, 1845 (Fig. 3) is a stereotype of the Native American as a violent savage.[14] The vanishing race trope was a justification for the expansion of the frontier, presenting the Native American demise as inevitable. The violent savage trope was a justification of the colonist’s violence towards Native Americans as self-defense. The Native American in Concealed Enemy is hidden, rifle in hand, staring down at two vulnerable frontiersmen. This is a depiction of the white man as a victim to unjustified violence. These images of Native Americans as savages are dramatised to theatrical images of mindless violence. John Mix Stanley’s Osage Scalp Dance, 1845 (Fig. 4) is a spectacle of violence with a clear moral message. The contrast created between savage vs. civilization, and evil vs. good is clearly split along racial lines, forcefully condemning the ways of Native Americans and warranting violence towards them.
Another mode of representing Native Americans is their removal from the depicted scene, as in Binghams’ Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, 1851-2 (Fig. 5). Through omission, the Native American’s presence upon the land is diminished, coinciding with the common notion that the American wilderness was empty until the arrival of the whites, permitting genocidal behavior by reducing the status of Indians to non-human.[15] The visual removal of Indians from art reflects the ideology of racial erasure. Indian hating could take form in a denial of their existence. Through the concealment or removal of Native Americans from visual imagery they are characterized as treacherous and sneaky, as violent savages and as inhuman. These artworks show the negative stereotypes associated with Native Americans, created by whites to justify their removal. The paintings create visual narratives through the use of common tropes, to reveal the violent conflict between the whites and the Indians in the contact zone.[16] By looking at a variety of artworks produced within a contact zone, it is possible to conceive the effectiveness of art as a contact zone through its ability to portray the networks of communication, processes of misunderstanding and the hierarchies of power between different cultures; but what happens when the artwork is displayed outside of its contact zone?
Spaces of display affect the extent to which art can function as a contact zone. An artwork can contain many contact zones within one image, so can have different meanings for different viewers. The viewer’s interpretation of an artwork can alter the image of a contact zone through manipulation and appropriation. Art can function as a contact zone but the extent to which a contact zone can be visually represented is dependant on its translation from production to reception, and the discourse between varying notions of selfhood and nationhood which can modify the meaning of an artwork.
The process of collecting has an important role in inscribing the qualities and characteristics that are associated with an artwork. The translation into a public or a private sphere, its intended setting or an imagined (western) alternative, or a permanent or temporary exhibition modifies the meaning and role of an art object. The acquisition of an object of Otherness authorises the possessor to imagine a world of difference, and label the object according to one’s own categories.[17] Western hierarchies of media, genre and conditions of production do not coincide with Native American practices. Therefore the artwork is adapted or folded to fit into Western categorisation.[18] Native art must be classified as an artifact, an artwork or a commodity. The choice to display an art object in a public sphere deems it is art or artifact, whilst its placing in a private sphere deems it as a commodity. Native American art in the Victorian era was often regarded as commodity, because it was purchased by tourists to display in their home. Therefore through the processes of commoditisation and industrialistion, a Native American bow or wampum belt, originally used as a weapon or unit of exchange between tribes becomes an object of stationary display within a western private home.[19]
The removal of Native American art objects from the contact zone into the museum allows for its meaning and use to be dictated completely by the dominant culture, and the object is no longer part of a cultural exchange between two merging and clashing cultures. The Native American’s definition of what constitutes “art” is vastly different from Western concepts. When an indigenous object is placed within a museum it must adhere to Western canons and hierarchies of art. The Indian’s do not have a word for “art”, nor do they have words for “religion” and “tradition”. All three concepts have interactive definitions that form a notion of culture, not art. In the West, art is determined by its formal properties and its value. The passive display of artworks in a Western museum starkly contrasts with the Native American perception of art objects as active, i.e., a Navajo blanket “walks in beauty.”[20]
Iroquois people do not deem Iroquois masks as art. The Iroquois, Rick Hill, speaking at a Recursos de Sante Fe symposium in 1993 explained that the mask’s aesthetic qualities are simply by-products of their functional role, and do not justify their exhibition. The masks have spiritual, sacred and memorial importance for the Iroquois people. Therefore when a False Face Society great doctor’s mask (Fig. 6) was chosen for a prospective exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian it was quickly met by animosity from an Iroquois selector and was rejected for the exhibition.[21]
Native American art objects are inseparable from stories and history, they cannot exist statically within a museum context because they are still living, relevant, and transforming; they are still objects of a contact zone.[22] A museum addresses a homogenized audience and does not account for the different interpretations made by people from different cultures in asymmetrical power relations.[23] Museums cannot simply interact with a public, they must operate in contact histories, negotiating and crossing community boundaries.[24] The removal of an object from a tribal place to a metropolitan museum is a regressive process as it transfers the object from a contact zone to an arena where only one culture can dominate. Museums must act as a contact zone, as “places of transit, intercultural borders, contexts of struggle, and communication between discrepant communities.”[25]
A contact zone is an area that allows processes and spaces for developing individual or communal notions of selfhood, involving a dynamic network of people, traditions and cultural influences. Art is a contact zone through its ability to develop narratives of identity and its articulation of cultural appropriations and differences. An art object exists within and effects cultural, social and economic interactions through its role as a commodity and a ritual object for use or display. However forming a national identity through visual narratives can be problematic because it is a subjective process that allows the creation of an individual imagined history or community. Through a selection of remembering and forgetting, a narrative of identity and nationhood can be created to suit the individual.[26] Therefore, it is not enough to look at one artwork from a contact zone. The production and reception of an artwork must be received in equally heterogonous conditions, so the original intent is not confused. Therefore globalised, homogenised settings for display, such as ‘national’ galleries, museums and biennales, which are part of the process of creating a uniform national identity, are unsuitable for the display of artworks functioning as contact zones. The diverse network of notions of identity through visual representations become lost when translated into a fixed space promoting a global identity. Art can function as a contact zone but is limited by the structures that receive an artwork; a framework that is too homogenous to accommodate art from a contact zone.
[1] Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” in Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosksky, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 606.
[2] Richard White, “Introduction,” in The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, Richard White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x.
[3] Ruth B. Phillips, “Souvenir, Commodity, and Art in the Northeastern Woodlands,” in Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900, Ruth B. Phillips, (University of Washington Press, 1998), 6.
[4] Ruth B. Phillips, and Christopher B. Steiner, “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter,” in Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, eds. Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner, (University of California Press, 1999), 3.
[5] Phillips, and Steiner, “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter,” 3-4.
[6] Vivien Green Fryd, “Rereading the Indian in Benjamin West’s ‘Death of General Wolfe,’” American Art Vol. 9, No. 1, (Spring, 1995): 73.
[7] Green Fryd, “Rereading the Indian in Benjamin West’s ‘Death of General Wolfe,’” 74.
[8] Ibid., 78-9.
[9] Ibid., 73.
[10] Ibid., 79.
[11] Susan Rather, “Benjamin West, John Galt, and the Biography of 1816,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 2, (June 2004): 325.
[12] Green Fryd, “Rereading the Indian in Benjamin West’s ‘Death of General Wolfe,’” 79.
[13] Ibid., 80-82.
[14] David Lubin, “Bingham’s Boone,” in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America, David Lubin, (New Haven: London: Yale University Press, 1994), 70.
[15] Ibid., 85.
[16] Lubin, “Bingham’s Boone,” 86.
[17] Phillips, and Steiner, “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter,” 3.
[18] Ibid., 6-7.
[19] Phillips, “Souvenir, Commodity, and Art in the Northeastern Woodlands.”
[20] Ralph T. Coe, “Art and Indian Culture at the Crossroads of a New Century: A Postlude to the Exhibition ‘Lost and Found Traditions: Native American Art 1965-1985,’” in Art and the Native America: Perceptions, Reality and Influences, eds. Mary Louise Krumrine and Susan Clare Scott, (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University, 2001), 272.
[21] Coe, “Art and Indian Culture at the Crossroads of a New Century,” 272-3.
[22] James Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, James Clifford, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 191.
[23] Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” 194.
[24] Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” 204.
[25] Ibid., 213.
[26] Benedict Anderson, “Memory and Forgetting,” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, (London: New York: Verso, 1991), 204-5.
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