institution of colonized critique: 08 kent monkman's critical ... - OCAD

08
GEORGE A. REID AWARD 2007/08 (300/400 LEVEL)
ERIN McLEOD
BY SUBVERTING CONSTRUCTIONS of exclusion in modern art
and its history within the museum context, contemporary Aboriginal
artists are repatriating more than the stolen objects of their cultures;
they’re reaffirming their cultural identities by way of entirely fresh assertions.
Painter, performance, installation, and multi-media artist Kent
Monkman, of both Cree and Irish/English heritage, addresses the
space of the postcolonial and imposes his (exaggerated) native cultural
identities, still excluded in contemporary society by the very nature
of the term. It is his fascination with the western European construction/destruction
of indigenous culture and his reclamation of this (hybridized)
identity that enables Monkman to declare additional spaces
parallel to that of postcolonialism, while aggressively critiquing not
only the institution, but simultaneously addressing the institution of
critique.
THE SELF-REFLEXIVITY OF MODERN
ART, THOUGH INTRINSICALLY
CRITICAL, EXCLUDED OTHER
ART-MAKING PRACTICES
AS VITAL AND RELEVANT.
equalizer for emasculated peoples, as well as the celebratory
figurehead of queer culture. Here he/she is
no pure and noble savage, but rather he/she is a composite
of inverted stereotypes, a fantastical pop and
queer culture Native diva. He/She is Jean Baudrillard’s
consummate embodiment of the hyperreal. 1
And he/she is running loose in the museum!
Andrea Fraser’s essay “From the Critique of the
Institution to an Institution of Critique” discusses an
“essential feature of modernism (being) to critique
itself from within,” whereby the artist is positioned
as the antagonist. 2 The self-reflexivity of modern
art, though intrinsically critical, excluded other artmaking
practices as vital and relevant, as well as artists
working outside the eligibility of the artist-as-
genius western model. As the postcolonial
environment evolved concurrently with
the postmodern art era, contemporary artists
of varying marginalized places emerged
with their own qualifications of admittance
into the museum, by dismissing those art
practices that excluded them. However, indigenous
artists still contend with cultural
colonizing, as those very depictions are still
valued for their historical significance. Even
in an environment that functions as postcolonial
to everyone else, the “post-Indian” 3
era has only just begun, and remains intrinsically
bound to its colonized past.
Repatriation is an arduous, sensitive process
within the museological community,
who can be understandably (though not so
justifiably) hesitant to part with valuable objects,
and with valuable contexts of history.
2 Andrea Fraser,
“From the Critique
of the Institution
to an Institution of
Critique,” Institutional
Critique and
After, Ed. John
Welchman. (Zurich:
JRP/Ringier,
2006). 126–127.
3 David McIntosh,
“Kent Monkman’s
Postindian Diva
Warrior: From
Simulacral Historian
to Embodied
Liberator,” Fuse
Magazine. 29. 3.
(2006) 13.
INSTITUTION OF COLONIZED CRITIQUE:
Monkman’s brilliance is realized through the seductive nature
of his work, and by a new means of valuation within the art institution
(through playfully vicious slings at the old). Monkman’s sadomasochistic
alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle becomes the unlikely
KENT MONKMAN’S CRITICAL
HYBRIDITY
1 “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being
or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without
origin or reality: a hyperreal.” Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession
of Simulacrae,” A Post Modern Reader, Eds. Joseph P. Natoli,
Linda Hutcheon, (New York: SUNY Press, 1993) 2.
56 INSTITUTION OF COLONIZED CRITIQUE:
KENT MONKMAN’S CRITICAL HYBRIDITY LINE BREAK 57

58
These contexts have maintained institutional
authority. Monkman takes the most subversive
advantage of these contexts where
their values still permeate. Within the museum,
Monkman exposes the authoritative
structure for what it is and has long been: a
constructed narrative that is not at all a politically
neutral space. For Monkman the critique
is, just as Fraser suggests, “historically
bound in the conceptual social field.” 4
4 Fraser, “From the Critique of the Institution to an
Institution of Critique.” 128.
5 Paul Kane (1810–1871) was a famous artist/explorer
who documented the “vanishing races” of First
Nations peoples in the 19th C, but very much through
the lens of European master painting, often dressing
up his subjects in inauthentic finery and staging “authentic”
scenes for ethnographic/historical posterity.
“Paul Kane about” The Art of Paul Kane. 2007. Cine-
Focus Canada Inc. 21 January, 2008, 10 April, 2008.
6 George Catlin (1796–1872) was a showman and
entrepreneur who also specialized in portraits of First
Nations peoples and wrote and lectured extensively
about the “primitive” cultures he encountered in his
many travels throughout North America.
“George Catlin and his Indian Gallery,” Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institute. 21
January, 2008, 10 April, 2008. .
The outright exclusion of aboriginal artists within
the museum and the very particular framing of objects
as ethnographical and anthropological specimens
only spurs on Monkman’s attack of the likes
of Paul Kane 5 and George Catlin 6 as major bases of
protest. Yet Monkman is an exceptional painter in
his own right, and clearly lovingly labours over the
sublime landscapes and explicitly detailed depictions
of cowboys and Indians at play (and consensual punishment).
This becomes clear in Portrait of the Artist
as Hunter (2002), referencing Kane’s Buffalo chase
paintings of the late 1800s. Here epic clouds swoosh
across a vast prairie, with rising foothills and mountains
behind. Miss Chief rides bareback, an insanely
long headdress and pink chest plate adorn his/her
perfect physique, as he/she points an arrow at a bareassed
cowboy riding just ahead…or is it that buffalo
singled out just ahead that he/she points to? This
appears to be answered in the small acrylic painting
Heaven and Earth (2001) as a quizzical buffalo stands
to the left of the prairie scene, bleeding from spear
wounds in his haunches, as a virile young Indian
mounts an eager cowboy, pants down, bound, and
on his knees. Miss Chief reinvents Kane’s construct
of authenticity, by confusing sexual conventions and
literally deflowering the notion of the hetero cowboy
and noble Indian.
MISS CHIEF REINVENTS
KANE’S CONSTRUCT OF
AUTHENTICITY, BY
CONFUSING SEXUAL CONVENTIONS
AND LITERALLY DEFLOWERING
THE NOTION OF THE HETERO
COWBOY AND NOBLE
INDIAN.
INSTITUTION OF COLONIZED CRITIQUE: KENT MONKMAN’S CRITICAL HYBRIDITY
AMAZINGLY, MONKMAN SUBVERTS ALL OF THESE
TENETS AS HIS MAJOR STRATEGIES OF HYBRIDITY
AND CRITIQUE.
Isabelle Graw suggests a “duality of assumption
and context” in the practice of institutional critique. 7
Monkman’s reinterpretation of value should be, and
is, alarming within the museum context because it
challenges an authoritative cultural standard. However,
the contemporary climate is a place for seemingly
constant recontextualization of histories. Just
as Kane and Catlin imagined their respective contexts,
Monkman reminds us that theirs are but one
narrow utterance in what should be a choir of historical
and cultural representation.
In the large salon-style painting, Si je t’aime prends
garde à toi (2007) (acrylic on canvas), the scene depicted
is uncharacteristically tender. Instead of a
rough n’ randy coupling between dominant Indian
and submissive cowboy on the wild plains, here is
the artist and his sculpture embracing with a passionate
kiss. The red-headed white artist wears buckskin
pants and moccasins and his studio is full of Native
paraphernalia; the life-sized sculpture turns to reallife,
hot-blooded, Native man with this kiss, naked
atop his horse as a Raven/cupid flitters above them,
referencing the artist’s infatuation with the exotic
Other. This beautiful creature comes to life because
of the artist’s (erotic) envisaging.
Throughout Monkman’s work we can see the
consideration with which he weighs how drastically
art practices have both conceptually and
practically changed since the era of modern
art. In Loretta Todd’s essay “What More
Do They Want?” she makes a distinction
that modernism was an era that “devalued
our cultural complexities…Modernism
contains the basic tenets of the Enlightenment:
a hierarchy of cultures, the subduing
of nature, and the supremacy of technical
and scientific reason.” 8 Amazingly,
Monkman subverts all of these tenets as his
major strategies of hybridity and critique.
Jose Munoz defines the concept: “Hybrid
catches the fragmentary subject formation
of people whose identities traverse different
race, sexuality, and gender identifications.” 9
As an artist working in what we still consider
the postmodern era, Monkman addresses
the narrow view of modernism, but weaves
his way around that postcolonial space of
the postmodern that excludes his contemporary
cultural identity.
One of Monkman’s most obvious strategies
of hybridity is his brash imposition
LINE BREAK 59
7 Isabelle Graw,
“Beyond Institutional
Critique,” Institutional
Critique
and After, Ed. John
Welchman, (JRP/
Ringier: Zurich,
2006) 137.
8 Loretta Todd,
“What More Do
They Want?”
Indigena: Contemporary
Native
Perspectives in
Canadian Art, Eds.
Gerald McMaster
and Lee-Ann
Martin (Vancouver:
Douglas and
McIntyre, 1992)
72.
9 Kerry Swanson,
“The Noble Savage
Was a Drag
Queen: Hybridity
and Transformation
in Kent Monkman’s
Performance and
Visual Art Interventions,”
Sexualities
and Politics in
the Americas, 2.2
(Fall 2005) Qtd. in
Swanson. 2.

10 Jeremy Gilbert-
Rolfe, “Beauty and
the Contemporary
Sublime,” Uncontrollable
Beauty:
Toward a New
Aesthetics, Ed.
Bill Beckley (New
York: Allworth
Press, 1998) 40.
11 Kerry Swanson,
“The Noble Savage
Was a Drag Queen:
Hybridity and Transformation
in Kent
Monkman’s Performance
and Visual
Art Interventions,”
Sexualities and Politics
in the Americas,
2.2 (Fall 2005) Qtd.
in Swanson. 2.
60
of queer culture into the hallowed halls of
modern art history. But is it imposition, or
inquisition? It’s difficult in our contemporary
age not to read the repressed homoerotic
tensions that linger throughout 19th
century colonial painting, particularly
depictions of the exotic Other as natural,
savage, and animalistic. Miss Chief as the
Drag-Diva impresario simply camps up
what was indubitably always there. In his
essay “Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime,”
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe picks up from
art historian Winckelmann’s suggestions
of sublime power (in relation to beauty). He
discusses the retooling of sublimity in the
postmodern era:
For my part I want to suggest a model in
which the sublime is androgynous and
beauty irreducibly feminine…not least
insofar as the difference for me is not to
be found between the active and the passive,
but rather between the transitive
and the intransitive. I’ll suggest that the
12 “The concept of the spectacle brings together and
explains a wide range of apparently disparate phenomena.
Diversities and contrasts among such phenomena
are the appearances of the spectacle – the
appearances of a social organization of appearances
that needs to be grasped in its general truth…that
has invented a visual form for itself.” Guy Debord, The
Society of the Spectacle, (New York: Zone Books,
1995) 10.
IT IS AS IF MONKMAN SEES
THE MUSEUM AS HIS OWN SUBLIME
LANDSCAPE TO BE
CONQUERED.
sublime is nowadays a technological sublime—a
product of reason that is out of control and has in
practice replaced its own ground with one of its
own making. 10
Miss Chief Eagle Testickle embodies these very
notions of the new sublime. He/she prances around
the stuffiness of bureaucratic authority and divines a
fresh perspective on authoritative history (or histories),
all the while liberating the very thing he/she
mocks from his/her sexually ambiguous perspective
that had been left repressed in modern art history.
The concept of hybridity infuses Miss Chief with
his/her transformative power, especially within the
institution, a meaningful site for intervention. He/
She conjures First Nations archetypes of the Trickster
and the Two-Spirited—someone who is both
male and female at once. This state of being was accepted
practice until its oppression via colonization
and the introduction of Christianity to First Nations
cultures. 11
Charlotte Townsend-Gault’s mention of Debord’s
concept of the spectacle 12 suggests an unintentional
assertion of cultural identity by the artist Bill Reid in
the 1950s and 60s, begging the question in snooty
INSTITUTION OF COLONIZED CRITIQUE: KENT MONKMAN’S CRITICAL HYBRIDITY
modern art circles, “who may speak with authority?”
13 She goes on to call “hybridizing tendencies”
and “strategic essentialism” of Native art (of the
modern era) as giving an authority and ownership
to Native artists, and to their culture and practices. 14
While Monkman’s Cree ancestry allows him a different
critical voice of authority, his mixed Cree/Irish
heritage adds yet another intriguing dimension to
his hybrid approach. The viewer need not necessarily
understand institutional ideology to get the joke
however, although anyone growing up in the Canadian
school system is well aware of the iconic place
the Group of Seven still inhabits as Canada’s first art.
Yet Miss Chief satirically flips this construction;
it is the institution that is marginalized, minimized
and put in its naughty little place. It is as if Monkman
sees the museum as his own sublime landscape to be
conquered.
Monkman’s recent exhibition at the Museum of
Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), The Triumph
of Mischief in collaboration with the Art Galleries
of Hamilton and Greater Victoria, reflects the
culmination of his hybridizing strategies as a multimedia
call for institutional and historical accountability.
THE VIEWER IS FOREVER
ENCOUNTERING THE CONTEXTUAL
CLASHES OF THE MODERN
AND THE POSTMODERN,
IN BOTH MEDIUM AND
MESSAGE
AT ONCE.
What makes Monkman so accessible,
beyond the enticing audacity of his narratives,
is his ability to speak from multiple
perspectives at once, through both subversion
of subject/object as well as literal
variety in medium and media. As much
as his paintings speak (albeit explicitly) to
the traditionally labour-intensive honing
of one’s innate modern era talents, Monkman’s
multi-media approach constitutes
another decisive strategy of critique. Monkman
is a painter, performer, a filmmaker, a
photographer, and an installation artist. He
is also an illustrator, costume designer, and
set designer with seemingly equal prowess.
Comfortably melding contemporary
art practices, Monkman toys with the static
notions of modernity still infiltrating the
institutional space and literally layers in his
contemporary multi-view critiques. The
use of repetitive themes (with Miss Chief
taking top billing) through varying visual
perspectives and media enforces Monkman’s
viewpoints, in tandem with his strategy
of spectacle and humour. The viewer is
forever encountering the contextual clashes
LINE BREAK 61
13 Charlotte
Townsend-Gault,
“Struggles with
Aboriginality/Modernity,”
Bill Reid
and Beyond:
Expanding on
Modern Native Art,
Eds. Karen Duffek
and Charlotte
Townsend-Gault,
(Seattle: University
of Washington
Press, 2004) 229.
14 Townsend-Gault:
230.

15 “Edward Sheriff
Curtis,” Edward S.
Curtis Gallery, 21
November, 2003,
10 April, 2008.
16 Gerald
McMaster, “The
Double Entendre
of Re-enactment,”
(Toronto: V-Tape,
2007) 21.
17 Jane Wark,
“Dressed to Thrill:
Costume, Body,
and Dress in Canadian
Performative
Art,” Caught in the
Act: an anthology
of performance
art by Canadian
Women, Eds. Tanya
Mars and Johanna
Householder
(Toronto: YYZ
Books, 2005). Qtd.
in Wark. 94.
18 McMaster: 22.
19 Isabelle Graw,
“Beyond Institutional
Critique,”
Institutional Critique
and After, Ed. John
Welchman, (Zurich:
JRP/Ringier,
2006) 141.
62
of the modern and the postmodern, in both
medium and message at once.
Yet it is extreme humour, in parody and
satire that allows Monkman to make his
most poignant points, as seen in the Taxonomy
of the European Male, a film series projected
onto a bearskin rug that recounts the
ethno-erotic behaviours of the endangered
European white male. Surrounded by a crystal
chandelier tipi altogether entitled Théâtre
de Cristal (2007), the mood is set for boy-toy
romance. His most recent short (silent) film,
Shooting Geronimo (2007), uses the aesthetic
of Edward Curtis 15 photographs in black
and white, and is a “double take on shooting,
first as a filmic event then as an accidental
incident,” 16 as Miss Chief, giggling, looks
on. Another painting of the MOCCA exhibit
has Miss Chief in full pink diva regalia atop a
sleigh mushing a team of primped up poodles
and assorted yappy lap dogs, set against
a pristine Canadian winterscape.
In her essay “Dressed to Thrill: Costume,
Body, and Dress in Canadian Performative
Art,” Jane Wark discusses parody in particular
as a strategy that Linda Hutcheon
describes as “undermining the Romantic
fallacy of originality,” thus exposing the relationships
between the “social agents” of
the original and the Other. 17 Monkman uses parody
to expose the limits of the authoritative socio-economic
structure and here Fraser suggests can be the
site of counter-culture. 18 Miss Chief performed a séance
at the Royal Ontario museum in October 2007,
conjuring the spirits of both Kane and Catlin, including
multiple costume changes, of course.
Gerald McMaster, in his interactive essay “The
Double Entendre of Re-Enactment,” pinpoints the
potential risk of Monkman’s approach to the critique
of the institution when he says:
For contemporary Native American and Canadian
artists… the difficulty in re-enacting the
stereotype hinges on the absurd degree to which
they acutely address—through the strategy of humour—something
that is almost completely lacking
in the works of non-Natives. 19
MONKMAN USES PARODY
TO EXPOSE THE LIMITS OF
THE AUTHORITATIVE
SOCIO-ECONOMIC
STRUCTURE.
INSTITUTION OF COLONIZED CRITIQUE: KENT MONKMAN’S CRITICAL HYBRIDITY
MONKMAN’S MASOCHISTIC
MIMICRY BELIES THE THOUGHTFULNESS
Here again, the space of hybridity that runs parallel
to the postcolonial leaves open the opportunities
for Aboriginal artists to explore and repatriate that
experience of historical otherness. Graw also implies
a potential warning, in her investigation into the
“paradoxical construction” of Institutional Critique:
The double scene of this critique reminds us of two
things—of the deep entanglement between artists
and institution and of the degree to which institutions
have determined the shape or direction of
works especially made for or about them. 20
Monkman’s approach however, regardless of
whatever consenting institution it attacks, offers
another level of narrative, as David McIntosh states,
that “cuts across simulated histories and the subject/
object differences that construct the coloured gaze’s
fetish facticity.” 21 He suggests that Monkman, as
much as Paul Kane by their nature of being artists,
are each “subjective hunters.” 22
OF HIS ARTISTIC EXECUTION.
Monkman’s masochistic mimicry belies
the thoughtfulness of his artistic execution;
however it drives home the implicit frustration
of generations of Aboriginal artists with
the institution’s part in this stereotype construct.
Every Monkman piece is humourous
or tongue-in-cheek to some degree, and
this makes for more palatability for viewers.
Monkman considers his contemporary audience,
always, and fun is to be had, always,
at the expense of those long dead, but also
of those environments that today exist to
serve an increasingly diverse public and
therefore must be increasingly accountable.
Hence he is continually welcomed into the
institutional space.
As Monkman continues to challenge the
institution that houses a history he is set to
open up, he also refreshes that history—
albeit as now only one of any number of
potential histories—by the very act of addressing
it. Yet Monkman’s imagery, though
no more outrageous, one might say, than
what the institution has portrayed as an authoritative
voice over a marginalized and,
LINE BREAK 63
20 Isabelle Graw,
“Beyond Institutional
Critique,”
Institutional Critique
and After, Ed. John
Welchman, (Zurich:
JRP/Ringier, 2006)
141.
21 David McIntosh,
“Kent Monkman’s
Postindian Diva
Warrior: From Simulacral
Historian to
Embodied Liberator,”
Fuse Magazine.
29. 3. (2006) 18.
22 McIntosh: 18.

64
until recently, voiceless culture (within
the museum environment), Monkman’s
imagery is still so graphic, still so explicit,
it is not something one would want their
grandmother to stumble across in the Canadiana
section of their local art institution.
Or…would one? It will be interesting to see
how Monkman’s works, especially his luscious
salon-style paintings, hold up over
the years. While they may always work in
tandem with the depictions by Kane, Catlin,
et al. as ulterior histories that have awaited
mainstream consideration for almost 200
years, will they lose their impact as Kane
and Catlin fade deeper into postcolonial
disfavour? There is so much more to Monkman’s
body of work than to imply it depends
solely upon these colonial references
to be sustained; there are many layers of
consideration beyond simply this historical
commentary. But at the same time, the issue
of cultural colonization remains frighteningly
relevant. Cultures around the world
continue to suffer eerily similar injustices.
Monkman’s subversion of the rape of a culture
demands an explicit representation, especially
at ground zero of cultural authority:
MONKMAN’S SUBVERSION
OF THE RAPE OF A CULTURE DEMANDS
AN EXPLICIT
REPRESENTATION.
the art institution. As campy as Miss Chief and his/
her world of the hyperreal may be, the coping mechanisms
of humour and spectacle are valid responses
to an equally ridiculous era in North America of the
repression of cultural identity and oppression of
rightful indigenous practices.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baudrillard, Jean , “The Precession of Simulacrae,”
A Post Modern Reader, Ed. Joseph P. Natoli, Linda
Hutcheon. New York: SUNY Press, 1993.
Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, New York:
Zone Books, published in 1967, reprinted in 1992.
“Edward Sheriff Curtis,” Edward S. Curtis Gallery, 21
November, 2003, 10 April, 2008. .
Fraser, Andrea, “From the Critique of the Institution
to an Institution of Critique,” Institutional Critique
and After, Ed. John Welchman. Zurich: JRP/Ringier,
2006.
“George Catlin and his Indian Gallery,” Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institute. 21
January, 2008, 10 April, 2008. .
INSTITUTION OF COLONIZED CRITIQUE: KENT MONKMAN’S CRITICAL HYBRIDITY
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, “Beauty and the Contemporary
Sublime,” Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New
Aesthetics, Ed. Bill Beckley. New York: Allworth
Press, 1998.
Graw, Isabelle, “Beyond Institutional Critique,” Institutional
Critique and After, Ed. John Welchman,
Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2006.
“Kent Monkman”, Cybermuse, 12 April, 2008
Liss, David, “Kent Monkman Miss Chief’s Return:
Subverting the Canon through Sublime Landscapes
and Saucy Performances,” Canadian Art, Fall 2005.
McIntosh, David, “Kent Monkman’s Postindian Diva
Warrior: From Simulacral Historian to Embodied
Liberator,” Fuse Magazine. 29. 3. 2006.
McMaster, Gerald, “The Double Entendre of Re-enactment”,
Toronto: V-Tape, 2007.
“Paul Kane about” The Art of Paul Kane.
2007. CineFocus Canada Inc. 21 January,
2008, 10 April, 2008. .
Kerry Swanson, “The Noble Savage Was a
Drag Queen: Hybridity and Transformation
in Kent Monkman’s Performance and Visual
Art Interventions,” Sexualities and Politics
in the Americas, 2.2. Qtd. in Swanson.
Todd, Loretta, “What More Do They Want?”
Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives
in Canadian Art. Eds. Gerald McMaster and
Lee-Ann Martin. Vancouver: Douglas and
McIntyre, 1992.
Townsend-Gault, Charlotte, “Struggles
with Aboriginality/Modernity,” Bill Reid
and Beyond: Expanding on Modern Native
Art, Eds. Karen Duffek and Charlotte
Townsend-Gault, Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2004.
Wark, Jane, “Dressed to Thrill: Costume,
Body, and Dress in Canadian Performative
Art,” Caught in the Act: an Anthology of
Performance Art by Canadian Women, Eds.
Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder. Toronto:
YYZ Books, 2005.
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