Kent Monkman's Fourth World (PDF)

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Kent Monkman Kent Monkman was born in 1965 in St. Mary’s, Ontario, Canada. He identifies as a Cree artist and is a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation. Working across painting, film, video, performance, and installation, he is one of the most prominent and...

​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Kent Monkman Kent Monkman was born in 1965 in St. Mary’s, Ontario, Canada. He identifies as a Cree artist and is a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation. Working across painting, film, video, performance, and installation, he is one of the most prominent and widely recognized Indigenous North American artists working today. His artworks address histories of colonization and Indigenous culture. Monkman’s Fourth World, like many of his paintings, both appropriates the artwork of other artists and blurs the time periods of cultural encounters. “Appropriation” is an artistic technique in which one artist strategically uses the form of another artwork to give it new meaning. The term began to be commonly used in the 1980s, at which time artists such as Sherrie Levine showed photographs that had been taken of other photographs, rather than live subjects. Although a Levine image might look identical to that of an earlier, modern photographer like Walker Evans, their two photographs communicate differently because of the time in which they were made, the identity of the artist, and their intention in making the work. In the case of Monkman’s Fourth World, two well-known artistic traditions are cited: nineteenth-century American Romantic landscape painting and twentieth-century site- specific sculpture. Monkman depicts three blonde-haired male figures—two on horseback and one waving his camouflage shirt wildly above his head—corralling a small herd of bison, or, as they are commonly called, buffalo, through two curved walls set beneath the Yosemite Falls. The depiction of the famed waterfall in what is now Yosemite National Park is based on a painting titled Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall from 1864 by the German-born, American painter Albert Bierstadt. Alongside contemporaries such as Thomas Moran and Thomas Hill, Bierstadt was part of an influential group of American artists who traveled throughout the western United States in the late nineteenth century, painting dramatic vistas of mountains and waterfalls to be displayed back in the East. These large-scale paintings showed the American West to be a landscape of fantastic drama and beauty, drawing upon the conventions of European Romanticism to stir interest among the American public in expanding the land claimed by the United States all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Associated with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, these paintings also played a direct role in convincing members of Congress to dedicate national park lands to protect the kind of environments shown by Bierstadt. The Romantic tradition of American landscape paintings of the West had the effect of protecting places like Yosemite National Park from large-scale settlement. However, the occupation and governance of those same lands by the United States government also brutally displaced their Indigenous inhabitants, many of whom were either killed directly or worked to death as part of the massacre of Indigenous populations across the nineteenth century now often referred to as the California genocide. None of the Miwok peoples who lived on that land in 1864 are shown in Monkman’s painting or in Bierstadt’s original, which only shows two groups, one group of white pioneers gathered around a campfire and a second group seen by the water on horseback. Fourth World instead depicts contemporary men “playing Indian,” which is to say, performing their own appropriation of Indigenous cultural practice for personal enjoyment. They each wear green camouflage, which from head-to-toe remains a means for hunters to disguise themselves in the wild. Although when worn topless, the camouflage becomes more of a fashion statement, aligning its wearer with the mass popularization of military style. The fact that these cultural appropriations are all shown in the same space emphasizes that the history Monkman paints is decidedly complicated. For example, the horses that these men ride—and which became deeply associated with Native Americans during this period of the “Wild West”—were themselves an animal that had been introduced to North America by European colonists beginning in the sixteenth century. The second artistic appropriation in Monkman’s painting is the copper-colored walls through which the bison run. They are a copy of the artwork Clara-Clara (1983) by the American artist Richard Serra. The color itself is not copper, but the weathered color of rusted COR-TEN steel, a material preferred by Serra for his large-scale, site-specific sculpture. First associated with the Post Minimalism movement of the late 1960s, Serra worked alongside the Land art movement to establish site-specificity as a key element of his outdoor sculpture. In fact, Serra has been uniquely influential in solidifying the idea of site-specificity for art historians as a result of a contentious public hearing surrounding his work Tilted Arc in the 1980s. Originally installed in lower Manhattan in 1981 using public funds, Tilted Arc was cast in controversy following complaints from a small number of federal white-collar workers employed in the area. As a result, a hearing was organized to discuss relocating the sculpture. Despite Serra’s adamant testimony that moving the sculptural element of Tilted Arc was tantamount to negating its site-specificity and therefore the work as a whole, the sculptural element was removed from its site in 1989, prompting Serra to declare that his work had been destroyed. Buffalo being chased off a cliff, painted by Alfred Jacob Miller in the late nineteenth century. Traditionally Native American hunters would use natural land formations, like two narrow cliffs, to direct bison for slaughter. Clara-Clara was also similarly moved; it had been created for the Beaubourg area of Paris but was moved to Paris’s Tuileries Garden for the exhibition Monumenta 2008.Rather than including Clara-Clara as only an abstract sculpture, Monkman deploys it in The Fourth World as a buffalo jump. Traditionally Native American hunters would use natural land formations, like two narrow cliffs, to direct bison for slaughter. The presence of Clara-Clara in Monkman’s painting similarly invokes an impending slaughter, alluding to the mass killing of bison that took place across the nineteenth century to the point that the animals were on the brink of extinction. At once utterly frank about the seizure of lands in the American West and the mass killing of Indigenous people and animals alike across the nineteenth century, Monkman’s painting is also purposefully impossible. It is an image that plays upon the different ways in which it seems realistic because of the many incorrect assumptions that the general public still holds about the differences and unique cultural practices of specific Indigenous communities. As Monkman has commented: The more I looked at art of the nineteenth century going backwards in time, the more I realized that those paintings of that time were a manifesto, this visual manifesto of colonization and this was the visual record, this was the European’s imagination of what he saw North America being and how he saw himself taking ownership of it and how he saw the Aboriginal people relating to himself but also to landscape. Similar to Will Wilson’s critique of Edward Curtis’s stereotyped photographs of Native Americans, which we will discuss shortly, the work by Monkman invokes George Catlin’s earlier paintings of the nineteenth century documenting and effectively type-casting native subjects. This diminishing of culture and its ability to thrive connects with the phrase “Fourth World” that Monkman includes in the title of his painting. Following the more common nomenclature of First World, Second World, and Third World, the Fourth World refers to cultures that are without their own sovereignty because they are forced to exist within another political nation. It is a problem at the heart of the impossibilities depicted in The Fourth World