The Venice Biennale is the world's oldest and most important survey of contemporary art. When artists have been chosen for the Biennale, you know they've truly arrived. This year, two native North Americans had prominent spots in the exhibition. Does this mean that native art in general has reached a new level of art-world recognition? Or is it a fluke, or even the kind of tokenism that could disappear again?
James Luna, a Luiseno Indian from Southern California and a leading native artist, was featured in a Biennale project organized by the Smithsonian's new National Museum of the American Indian. Rebecca Belmore, a member of Ontario's Anishinabekwe native group, was chosen to represent Canada in its national pavilion. The two artists answered questions about their Venice experience, and the current state of native art, in a recent conference call. Highlights from that conversation are printed below.
Luna, who is 55, is based on the La Jolla reservation near San Diego. His Venice exhibition included a "chapel" -- complete with pews and sacred vessels, but also featuring video and sound -- dedicated to Pablo Tac, a Catholic Luiseno who in 1832, at the age of 10, set sail to join the priesthood and learn missionary skills in Rome, and who died there nine years later after completing the first outline of Luiseno grammar.
Luna also programmed a number of outdoor performances. Dancing in the middle of a pseudo-ceremonial stone circle, he put on a series of costumes that represented all the cliches of nativeness, and then some. There were the usual trappings: moccasins, loincloth, an eagle feather, a war shirt, a Winchester rifle -- most of which have little to do with Luna's own West Coast culture. And then there were strange updatings and hybridizations of such cliches: His war shirt had sports webbing up the sides; his loincloth was a blue thong with cheesy leopard spots. At various points, he put on the black leather vest of a Hell's Angel, tied a robber's bandanna over his face and donned a gondolier's straw hat. It was as though Luna was trying to inhabit everything an Indian is supposed to be, has been, or could be as nativeness comes up against the modern world. You want native? Luna seems to say. Okay, I'll give you native, in forms you've never even imagined.
Belmore was born in 1960 into the Lac Seul native band in Upsala, Ontario. She now works in Vancouver, where she is one of that city's most active and prominent artists. In Venice, she filled the Canadian pavilion with a curtain of falling water, onto which she projected a pungent video loop, a bare few minutes long. It begins beside the ocean near Vancouver, with a shot of a bonfire on a beach. Belmore is then shown standing waist-deep in the surf, struggling to fill a battered steel bucket. Back on land, she strides toward the camera, then throws the bucket's contents at the lens. Rather than the clear water we expect, however, the screen is covered in a veil of blood. The press release for the installation says that it "has an ambiguous meaning that is associated with awakening and emerging. There is a sense of a task to be done; one of ritual and portent." The work touches on many of the central themes of native culture and history: land, fire, water and the native person's presence among them. And then, of course, all this becomes drenched in red.
Blake Gopnik: What in general were your impressions of being in the Venice Biennale?
Rebecca Belmore: It was overwhelming. And then you end up at home and you wonder, "Well, what the hell was that?"
James Luna: I [once] said, "I'm probably not very interested in going to Europe." What I was thinking was that there were places in America that needed to see my work, and [their audiences] would get it way beyond Europeans. But I've changed my mind on that. This is a very important benchmark for me. I'd be a fool not to take advantage of it.
Gopnik: Did either of you think that being identified as native artists helped you carve out your own territory at the Biennale?
Belmore: I think there were certain people who were interested in my being aboriginal, but largely I think it wasn't an issue. In the work that I was making, I was trying to talk about something that connects all of us -- all human beings. Although I see myself as an aboriginal woman, at the same time I'm insisting that I have something to say to the world that's important and is relevant to all of us.
Luna: On the Artnet [Web site], they were talking about my performance and were curious about what it was and what I was trying to do: Was it really ritual? Was it performance? And someone said, "No, it's not traditional -- but Luna's Indian all the time." And I thought that was great: "Indian all the time." I'm going to put it on a T-shirt.
Rebecca and I are native artists, but sometimes in her work she speaks to native issues very blatantly, at other times it's very subtle, and at other times it's just artwork. And I've chosen to go another route, where the subject and the look [of my works] are more identifiable as native. So I was really gratified that we were together on the same bill. Because just by that very fact, people saw the diversity in quote-unquote "contemporary" native art. I don't like having all our eggs in one basket.
