Tribes in the Gallery

The aesthetic eye goes foraging in the wake of historical disaster. Having striven for 300 years to dispossess and wreck the Indians with gun. bottle. Bible and treaty, white America is now focusing an unprecedented degree of interest on their artifacts, which. like deposits on the verge of a shrinking lake, mark the point from which cultures drained away. A magnificent collection of these relics, selected from the so-called "historical period" of North American Indian culture (17th to 19th centuries), is now on view at Manhattan's Whitney Museum.

It is a curious fact that even in America, the masks, totems, clothes, paintings and beadwork of the 57 Indian tribes represented in this show were the last forms of "primitive" art to win general esteem outside their own tribal context. Only ethnologists were interested. The red man's images scarcely influenced white culture--unlike African art, whose impact on early 20th century painting was fundamental. Max Ernst collected kachina dolls, and Jackson Pollock, it is said, was interested in Navajo sand paintings; but as a rule, whether it was treated as knickknacks or, more decently, as ethnographical evidence, Indian art has languished on the fringes of white perception. The Whitney, by inviting its guest curator Norman Feder (who is in charge of the Indian collection at the Denver Art Museum) to assemble some 300 works and present them as art. has done an exemplary public service. The items in the show have been chosen with meticulous connoisseurship. Their installation, by Designer George Hoehne, is a model of clarity and visual tact.

"My contention," Feder declares, "is that anyone can appreciate Indian art, regardless of his knowledge, background or previous experience." Perhaps--but in a strictly limited way. Few people could encounter the carved ceremonial masks of the Northwest Coast Indians, the Tlingit. Kwakiutl or Tsimshian, with their exquisite shell-inlay work and flowing, knife-blade forms that so inexplicably resemble archaic Chinese bronze decoration, without feeling some instant response to the vitality of their stylistic language. Through their art runs a supreme capacity to make sensation concrete: what European artist, for instance, could develop a more concise epigram of a grizzly bear's humped, sullen power than the unknown Tlingit carver who hewed one (see cut below) full-face, with shell teeth, on a house wall in Sitka? In the same way, there are painted buckskin coats and drums in the Whitney whose spontaneous, eccentric beauty of drawing is little short of breathtaking, while the bizarre and untrammeled inventiveness of some Eskimo masks would have been the envy of Miro or Picasso.

But these are aesthetic matters. Tribal art was not all or even mainly concerned with aesthetics. Its issue was use. The Western idea of an artist, making "beautiful" objects which serve no pragmatic end, did not exist. Such a man would have been an absurdity to the Sioux, the Cherokee or the Zunis. Perhaps the only point of similarity between our visual culture and the Indians' was an obsessive use of art as prestige; thus, like bankers decking their duplex walls with Nolands or Franz Klines, the Northwest Coast Indians would spend huge sums on carved totems and festive potlatches to dedicate them, simply to affirm their status and prerogatives.

Goals of Life. Indian art was always functional. The mask or totem was meant to control the powers of nature. One can only control what can be named; and the image was a visual name, a classification. Thus, to take only one of innumerable examples, the powerfully grimacing "false faces" (see cut above), which the Iroquois used to carve from living trees, are still made and worn by members of the Masked Medicine Society to cure sick tribesmen. Even the most apparently subjective dream pictures or vision paintings (of which the Whitney has one superb example from the Arapaho tribe) served to fix in a warrior's mind the exact form of the hallucination or revelation that he had induced to "teach" himself the future goals of his life.

Eloquent Imaqes. So there is nothing random about the ferocity and aggression which stare from some Indian art. It is expressive, not expressionist. Each inflection of the carver's chisel was purposeful; every shape and spot of pigment has its connections to a whole web of assumed classification and ritual, none of which has the least relationship to the systems of knowledge and memory that we as Westerners inherit.

From this, a disjuncture rises. Indian art was wholly mythic when it was not strictly practical. It grew out of day-today social necessity, which ours no longer does. Hence its unique value as cultural evidence--quite apart from its formal beauty. It is memory solidified. Thus, in the Whitney, two opposed forms of consciousness stare at each other. On one side, the whites' guilty and eclectic benevolence, which springs from an apparently insatiable desire to consume fresh art; on the other, the rigorous and once eloquent images of Indian art, veiled from us on every level except the aesthetic because the civilization in which they were once explicit has been crushed, vulgarized or uprooted. This encounter says a lot about the limits of our own culture. It should help dispose of the condescension that calls Indian art primitive.

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