Pure Objects, Pure Persons: Artwriting and the Cultural Frame of Traditional Native American Art
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: At the 2005 Native American Art Studies Association meetings in Scottsdale, Arizona (a prestigious Indian art market locale), the renowned contemporary artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an enrolled member of the Flathead Salish Nation, gave an impassioned appeal for critical writing on "fine, high, new media or cutting edge art" produced by Native Americans.Commenting that this work is often derided as "bastardized," she exhorted her audience of Native artists and scholars, together with academics, museum curators, and art dealers from around the world, to write about the work in a mainstream art journal, not an anthropology journal or Native Peoples magazine.She implored us to differentiate contemporary from traditional American Indian art.With her provocative plea for writing that addressed what she termed the proper placement of this work within the contemporary art world, Quick-to-See Smith hit the issue of artwriting squarely on its head. 1 Coined by the art critic, art historian, and philosopher David Carrier, artwriting is a term that describes the representational work of getting art seen, talked about, evaluated, collected, and, ultimately, institutionally ensconced in museum collections and art-historical canons.As Carrier maintains, this discursive practice is rhetorical and "seeks to persuade the viewers that the works described are aesthetically significant. . . .[T]he value of contemporary art . . .remains to be established."By providing visual instruction, artwriting
Author: Lea S. McChesney
Language: English
Topic: Art, Politics, and Modernism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W262970882