Sovereign Monkman
How a Cree visual artist reclaimed the American landscape by reappropriating the techniques of his colonial predecessors.
Kent Monkman, a Cree visual artist, filmmaker, and performer known for flipping the Euro-western art canon on its head, has gained incredible acclaim for (re)claiming sovereignty over his work, his rightful space within the landscape painting tradition, and the histories he (re)tells through his visuals (Scudeler 2015: 19). Monkman and his "gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle" have increasingly become pioneers for the indigenous visual art community; his varied works, all powerful responses to and engagements with the exclusionary western art world, have been exhibited across a wide range of leading institutions, including MOMA, The Royal Ontario Museum, and Palais de Tokyo (Monkman n.d.). At age 58, Monkman has been unanimously regarded for years now as a "significant catalyst" for "critical interventions" and changes "in the cultural landscape" (Madill n.d.).
Visual sovereignty, quite the lofty contemporary term, is widely discussed and defined. Livingston argues that the term is “often understood through law and policy as the right to self govern” (2015: 98); however, Bunda asserts that it can be defined as “an embodied identity, which is articulated through indigenous productions like literature and art” (2007, as cited in Livingston 2015: 98). In a similar vein, Rickard has called visual sovereignty “one of the most dominant expressions of self-determination”; a photographer of Tuscarora First-Nations descent, she argues that one cannot "consider Indigenous art without understanding the complexities and nuance of sovereignty," and writes that sovereignty is "a means to protect and reimagine our philosophies and ways of life. Art or making culture is integral if not central to the affirmation of these ideals" (2017: 82, 84). Expanding the term further, and crucial to Monkman's positionality as an Indigenous artist responding to his colonial predecessors, Cunneen writes that "the very survival of Indigenous people and culture is an act of sovereignty in settler colonial states that premised their own assertion of nationhood on the physical and cultural demise of the Native" (2017: 386). With these definitions in mind, this essay will demonstrate the vast array of ways Monkman reclaims visual sovereignty through his work. "My mission," he writes, "is to authorize Indigenous experience in the canon of art history that has heretofore erased us from view" (Monkman 2020: 17). This mission continues to be undoubtedly, revolutionarily successful; as Morris writes, "In a sustained demonstration of Indigenous visual sovereignty, Monkman uses his art to supplant settler narratives with a flow of indigenous knowledge" (2020: 283). Monkman's success in this realm has stemmed from a foundational question: in his wording, "were there images inside this [European settler] landscape painting tradition that I could look to to challenge, to investigate, to research?" (U-M STAMPS 2022: 8:33). This essay will highlight the critical ways Monkman's work has engaged with this question. After discussing the life and works of George Catlin and Albert Bierstadt, two key Monkman influences, this essay will employ Livingston's term "quee(re)appropriation" to demonstrate the ways in which Monkman's landscape paintings are both an act of indigenous survivance and visual sovereignty (2015). Through his unwavering reappropriation and subversion of the works and techniques of his Euro-western colonial predecessors, Monkman shakes the Euro-western art canon, subverts the colonial gaze, disrupts the perpetuation of 'deliberate amnesia,' and problematizes the Western fixed and linear understanding of history, instead emphasizing its subjectivity and fluidity.
Figure 1: Catlin, River Bluffs, 1320 Miles above St. Louis 1832
George Catlin (1796–1872), who, alongside artist, "assumed the role of ethnologist, geologist, and even oceanographer," is known for his role in 'recording' the Upper Missouri during the era of Jeffersonian exploration and expansion through his landscape paintings (John 2004: 603). Catlin's work and ideologies parallel those of the Hudson River School, a "nationalistic" and inherently colonial group of landscape painters that The Met has called "America's first true artistic fraternity" (Tikkanen n.d.; Avery 2004). As John contends, Catlin viewed himself as a necessary historian of the indigenous people he encountered. As he himself wrote, ‘[…] nothing short of the loss of my life, shall prevent me from visiting their country and becoming their historian”; he goes on, “I have flown to their rescue [… so that] they may rise from the 'stain on a painter's palette,' and live again upon the canvas, and stand for centuries yet to come, the living monuments of a noble race'" (2001: 184, 194). Demonstrating his inescapable colonial gaze through his language, Catlin believed it his mission to preserve the people and environments he witnessed by freezing them, in history, onto his canvas. As Gareth contends, he "[desired] to document the western landscape scientifically" "for imperial, nationalist purposes"; however, as Catlin's verbiage suggests, his landscapes were anything but objective (2001: 189; 2004: 612). While he clung to "principles of direct observation and sought to reproduce the Indian West 'realistically,'" his intrinsically Western, "picturesque and romantic" gaze over the landscape kept him "necessarily […] bound to the self-same literary and artistic conventions he sought to avoid" (Gareth 2001: 189, 195, 190).
Monkman once explained that “one curator called him my nemesis, and I think that could be true, but he’s a man of contradictions, and I think I’ve been interested in his work for that reason” (U-M STAMPS 2022: 23:17). His landscape titled River Bluffs, 1320 Miles above St. Louis, is a primary exemplar of this contradictory position. His wish to historicize and document the indigenous people onto which he projected his problematic gaze is here seen through the title, which traces the distance to the nearest pocket of 'civilization' (Gareth 2001: 191). However, his role as a painter— an innately subjective profession— not only kept him from achieving this goal, but perpetuated the immensely harmful stereotype of "the solitary Indian" (Gareth 2001: 187). River Bluffs depicts a single indigenous person viewing their surrounding vast, uninhabited environment. As Livingston articulates, the augmentation of this inaccurate symbol, and Catlin’s landscapes more broadly, “both literally and metaphorically took lands away from indigenous inhabitants, either by painting them out of the paintings so that the land seemed open to new settlers or in framing the current inhabitants as either ignorant savages or children of nature, neither of which could effectively use the land the way the almighty intended it to be used” (2015: 108-109). Catlin's paintings, through their untrue and oversimplified portrayals, work to strip the indigenous communities they fail to depict of their sovereignty. The removal of the land's inhabitants from the canvas was a detrimental act, Catlin being one of a select few whose artistic interpretation of the West became the broader guide for the settlers' collective misled understanding of the American landscape.
Figure 2: Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California 1868
Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), whose career "began in the 1850s at the height of the mature Hudson River School," "extended this aesthetic construction" through his paintings of "the American sublime landscape" (Miller 2001: 41; Livingston 2015: 109). Thirty years after Catlin, his works moved away from Catlin's false objectivity and toward "an ideal image of a pristine, golden land fresh from the hand of the Creator" (Miller 2001: 46). Bierstadt's paintings embody what Monkman terms "deliberate amnesia" (U-M STAMPS 2022: 37:20). To quote him, [T]his period of modernity has probably been the most vicious in terms of that [….] intention for us […] to forget the past, to move away from the past, and European modernism was very much […] intentional, […] there were horrific things that were happening in Europe and people wanted to forget it but you know, for first nations people to be on the receiving end of that […] deliberate amnesia, it's been very painful and obviously very devastating to have culture and languages lost (U-M STAMPS 2022: 37:30).
Many critics have commented on this association; as Morris notes, Bierstadt's nature paintings—like Catlin's— maintain an "elision of Native subjects," creating for the European viewer a false representation of the landscape (2020: 269). Miller writes that "Bierstadt used aesthetic convention— in this case the idiom of the picturesque— as a way out of history," and indeed, his work titled Among the Sierra Nevada reveals this technique (2001: 40). With its dramatic sky, glassy water, piercing mountain range, and grassy shores, all devoid of humans, Bierstadt’s landscape is "sealed off from history," untouched by humanity; its sublimity promotes an almost biblical feel, rather than a depiction of the western terrain (Miller 2001: 59).
Despite the two painters varying intentions, Catlin's being more scientific and Bierstadt's more artistic, both artists imagined and perpetuated a false perception of the American West. Two members of the very small and privileged percentage of white settlers who expeditioned westward in the 19th century, their works’ distorted illusions further instilled in “Eastern imagination” the harmful deception of a landscape available for settler taking (Miller 2001: 52). Far from their influence fading over time, as Monkman articulates in Shame and Prejudice, the works of these artists “that depict and celebrate the European settlers’ expansion and ‘discovery’ of the North American landscape” are displayed in museums across the country and world, which rests in stark contrast to the colossal lack of portrayals of "the dispossession and removal of First Peoples from their lands" (2020: 17). The exclusion of Indigenous people from art history is a centuries-old colonial phenomenon, one that Monkman is acutely aware of and vigorously rectifying.
Figure 3: Monkman, History is Painted by the Victors (2013)
Moving away from Catlin and Bierstadt, Monkman’s response to his predecessors is here founded in Livingston’s concept of “quee(re)appropriation,” which she defines as “a specific form of reappropriation, a form that challenges the heteronormativity of dominant hegemony and highlights the confrontational and direct nature of the reclamation in the form of reappropriation” (2015: 95). As she articulates, the concept of reappropriation is crucial to “contemporary conversations about sovereignty as it offers a number of strategies for contemporary indigenous people to both return to a time before colonization, but also as a way to envision a future that is predicated on the past and sidesteps the assimilationist colonial narratives” (Livingston 2015: 105); Monkman enmeshes these strategies ingeniously into his landscapes. Using his work titled History is Painted by the Victors as the exemplar will illustrate the multiple ways in which Monkman reclaims visual sovereignty. As this 2013 landscape demonstrates, his employment of quee(re)appropriation allows him to critically respond to the preceding Euro-western art canon, reappropriate Catlin’s self-portraiture with his two-spirited alter-ego Miss Chief in order to subvert the colonial gaze, reject the perpetuation of ‘deliberate amnesia,’ and stress the subjectivity and fluidity of history.
As Miss Chief writes on the inside cover of Volume One of her memoirs, “This is my story. Some of it is true. Much of it is truer than your truth” (Monkman and Gordon 2023). As with his writing, Monkman’s paintings stress a clear audience to which he responds, using his canvas as his platform. Crucially, as Saul stresses, the Western art scene that Monkman borrows from was in fact itself created out of a refusal to “[inherit]” passed-down traditions; instead, these artists turned to “the arts of Africa, the Pacific, the West coast of Canada, the Arctic […] In other words, they were taking the forms, the power, the imagination, and the emotions of indigenous creativity in order to deal with frustrating Western issues” (2020: 212). Thus, Monkman’s command over these influences is in fact simply a reappropriation, a reclaiming of indigenous sovereignty via the taking back from the Western art world the very techniques that were first taken from indigenous communities.
His paintings are a direct response to the works of his predecessors, "appropriations of […] landscape painting from the Hudson River and Rocky Mountain Schools and the works of the famous painter of Indians, George Catlin" (Livingston 2015: 106). A clear recreation of Bierstadt's aforementioned landscape, this 2013 work portrays— with brighter color— a near carbon copy of the composition of Bierstadt's 1868 work: a nearly identical body of water and bunching of trees in the foreground, and a view of the striking mountain range and imposing clouds in the background. Morris writes that this “imitation” works “to parody the subject matter of that earlier tradition, which had strived to diminish the lives of Native peoples by all possible means” (2020: 269). Indeed, while Monkman recreates Bierstadt’s “surreal aspect” in his own work, as Saul contends, he then “carefully portrays the authors of evil and wrongdoing” (2020: 212). It is Bierstadt’s diminishing, his perpetuation of ‘deliberate amnesia’ via his landscapes, devoid of humanity, that Monkman rejects; in stark contrast, Monkman “populates the false histories Bierstadt promulgated” by bringing his recreated foreground to life, not with animals, but with Miss Chief and a group of white settlers (Perry 2020: 91).
While he reappropriated Bierstadt's aesthetics, Monkman took from Catlin the technique of inserting himself within his own work. He asked, "How can I create an artistic persona that can then live in my work and be that artistic persona, the person with the power, the person that has the gaze?" (U-M STAMPS 2022: 14:20). The answer, his alter-ego, a "decolonial and sovereign figure," Miss Chief (Livingston 2015: 113). Following Morris, Monkman "considers Catlin's use of self-portraiture as indicative of the European artist's colossal ego," a stance which is parodied and subverted at every level via his alter-ego, down to her name, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, the wording itself "a play on mischief and the ego" (2020: 270; U-M STAMPS 2022: 15:22). It is through Miss Chief that Monkman subverts both the colonial gaze and the notion of history as fixed; as he states, "I wanted to reverse the gaze and create a character that could look back at Europeans" (U-M STAMPS 2022: 14:31). The title of this work reveals this multifold intention; on the one hand, the phrase 'history is painted' expresses the subjectivity of history, that it’s creation is an art form, and on the other hand, the phrase 'painted by the victors' speaks to the power the colonial perspective holds in this 'painting.' However, attached to this specific landscape, we see Monkman subverting the authority to create history as Miss Chief, the victor, stands behind the easel.
Monkman establishes “an ironic structural inversion” of each reappropriated “pictorial trope”— here, through crowding the shores with life, and with his two-spirit alter-ego painting the grouping of naked white settlers before her (Morris 2020: 270). Applying the term quee(re)appropriation here makes unavoidable the fact that "Monkman is rewriting history from a queer Indigenous perspective, just as he illustrates Miss Chief doing on the shores of Bierstadt's lake" (Morris 2020: 278). Not only does he locate and demonstrate the power to be found in the simultaneous emulation and subversion of colonial art, imagery, stereotypes, and perceptions of history, but, as Morris highlights, "according to Davies, Monkman's camp parodies 'make clear that behind each colonial artist's claim of scientific objectivity lurks an explosive mix of fear and lust for the “other.”’ Monkman makes no such claim to objectivity and instead lays proud claim to a long history of interracial gay male relationships.” (Davies 2005, as quoted in Morris 2020: 275).
As seen through Miss Chief, and through Monkman’s landscapes more broadly, as Scudeler writes, “Monkman’s cultural productions construct both history and gender as fluid concepts” (2015: 19). This act of blurring and disrupting Western, linear, and fixed notions of history serves many purposes. Firstly, he puts into question the legitimacy of the work of Bierstadt, Catlin, and the other Euro-Western artists that preceded him, by forcing the viewer to “contemplate how far paintings should be regarded as artifacts of history,” as they were in the period of the former two artists’ expeditions westward (Perry 2020: 85). Secondly, Monkman rejects the Western historical view as the only correct perspective; through his “aggressive quee(re)appropriation,” he “re-contextualizes […] and re-orders the hierarchy” (Livingston 2015: 106). Moreover, this act of decolonizing Western history “positions two-spirit people as the agents of their own histories,” which Scudeler argues is also “a means of ‘metaphorically reclaiming the land, and of exploring themes of racial and sexual oppression through alternative narratives of the art and mythology of the frontier’” (2015: 19). And thirdly, by destabilizing the view of history as objective in this way, by blending “fact, fiction, and our understanding of history,” Monkman parodies the idea of Western historical accounts altogether (Liss 2005). Rather, through his reappropriated, intense, layered landscapes, he puts forth the notion of history as personal, as emotionally and creatively embodied and experienced as opposed to 'objectively' documented. Furthermore, in proposing his own queer, indigenous history, the viewer is forced to acknowledge the incredible gaps and silences within the “[white-washed]” history that is prioritized, accepted, and taught (Monkman 2020: 17).
Viewed together, Monkman’s sovereign statements as made through his art become not only unavoidably inspiring, but revolutionary. Through his multifold methods of quee(re)appropriation, he created a space for himself and indigenous art more broadly within the wider art world by “rewriting the western art history canon” (Scudeler 2015: 20). Not only has Monkman challenged the exclusionary nature of this Western-dominated space, he has put into question notions of history altogether; by deliberately removing the intellectual, artistic, and historical pedestal onto which the West places itself, Monkman instead advocates for the subversive nature and inherent sovereignty of non-Western voices and artworks.
Bibliography
Figures:
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Smithsonian American Art Museum. River Bluffs, 1320 Miles above St. Louis (available at: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/river-bluffs-1320-miles-above-st-louis-4335, accessed 14 February 2024).
Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among the Sierra Nevada, California (available at: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/among-sierra-nevada-california-2059, accessed 14 February 2024).
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