Canadian Cree Kent Monkman is a prolific artist whose lighthearted paintings, performance art, super-8 movies, antique tintypes, multimedia presentations, & mixed media installations poke fun at racist Hollywood depictions of First Nations people in art and movies. Monkman reverses the roles in the caricaturized cowboys-&-Indians scenario so that it is the 'Indian' whose insists on capturing 'the European Male' in images before he disappeared forever, as though they were peculiar scientific specimens.
Monkman's satirical work focuses scrutiny on cultural filters. To this purpose, he created a public performance persona (inspired by popstar Cher) of a very flamboyant drag queen. In her maribou and dyed feather war bonnet, beaded and open-toed stiletto mocassins, dreamcatcher bra/breastplate and Louis Vuitton quiver, Miss Chief swans over Monkman's visual narratives that completely revise the traditional white view of North American history.
"I have for many years contemplated the race of the white man who are now spread over their trackless forests and boundless prairies and I have flown to their rescue, that phoenix like, they may rise from the stain on a painter's palette, and live forever with me on my canvas." — Miss Chief's soliloquy from Robin's Hood.
Monkman draws upon every method and material used to not only record the exploration and settlement of North America, but often to contrive folk stories about it and romanticize the people, places and customs beyond all semblance to reality, usually for exploitive purposes.
Monkman's art attracted so much animosity, it was banned from the Royal Ontario Museum's Shapeshifters, Time Travellers, and Storytellers Exhibition in the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2007, instantly elevating him to cult hero status.
Biizarre Practices of Traditional Western Artists
- Altering the apparel of First Nations models in paintings, photographs and western movies so that they appeared more savage and earthy. Long after First Nations people had adopted the European style of dress, western moviemakers and photographers insisted on posing them half-dressed, or in skins and feathers — past styles of dress and adornment impractical for the environments in which people now lived (buffalo skins when buffalo were near extinction?), or the occupations on which their survival depended.
- Altering the poses of aboriginals while attempting to 'document' them in traditional occupations. In Paul Kane's infamous oil painting, Hunting Fish, an Indian, who wears nothing but some fancy scarlet hipwaders, holds an enormous blazing torch aloft in one hand, while preparing to hurl a javelin at a freshwater fish in the other, all while balancing upright in the front of a canoe!
- Self-insertion, self-aggrandisement, and invalidation of the 'other'. George Catlin once depicted himself in a group of adoring Natives who crowded around his easel and stared reverently as he worked. Catlin also catalogued his paintings and woodblock prints of Natives, which reduced the artists' original models to numbers, nullifying any spiritual or personality quality that otherwise might have been revealed, essentially turning them into objects instead of people. Also, the sheer quantity of prints which Catlin produced betrays a certain mindset, one of greed. In his rush to commit their images to woodblock and paper, Catlin missed the more essential quality of a good portrait, that of revealing the subject's inner self, knowledge of which takes time, intuition and relationship to cultivate.
- Writing condescending and self-important opinions of people within the societies they attemped to document:
Early 20th-Century Movies and Photographs
A digitalized Super-8 movie, "Shooting Geronimo" is the centerpiece of Monkman's multimedia installation, Miss Chief's Magical Winter Count (with traditional Swampy Cree Beadwork), 2007. It is projected against two simulated buffalo hides painted white and fixed with machine-loomed crystal beads. The movie narrative utilizes Monkman's trademark historical revisions: Indian actors turning the tables on a predatory movie maker with the help of Miss Chief. Winter counts were pictographic records kept by the Plains people.
In the movie, Group of Seven Inches — so named because it was shot by Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon at Tom Thompson's cabin in Kleinburg, Ontario — Miss Chief loosens up some "European Males" with liquor, then poses them in clothing which more accurately reflect her ideas about how they should look, than how they would naturally and presently appear. In Robin's Hood, Miss Chief attempts to enlist Robin Hood and Little John as models. The monologue is like something out of Rousseau's rhapsodies on 'noble savages.' Both films are projected onto simulated buffalo hide on the floor of Théâtre Cristal, Monkman's parody of a tipi, created entirely of crystal beads and a chandelier.
Monkman has also created a limited edition set of photographed chromogenic prints on metallic paper that mimic the antiqued appearance of old tintypes.
Through these different media, Monkman turns the tables on history.
Presently Monkman is being featured at two important solo exhibitions in Calgary: The Triumph of Mischief at the Glenbow Museum, and Treason of Images at Trépanier-Baer Gallery. Monkman's exhibition The Beauty of Distance will be showcased at the Sydney Biennale.
Simone Keiran - Simone Keiran’s book A Brief History of Western Sculpture, Quantum Books, was released at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair. Her articles ...
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