James Luna and the Paradoxically Present Vanishing Indian

Authors

  • Elizabeth S Hawley The Graduate Center, City University of New York

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2016.170

Keywords:

Native American, Performance Art, Agency, Vanishing Indian, Reenactment, Photography, Pose

Abstract

James Luna’s performances interrogate how representations of Native Americans have been made to fit western assumptions about the “real Indian.” Using his recognizably Native body as a marker of both presence and endangered existence, Luna links Peggy Phelan’s conception of performance as the presence of loss with the centuries-old stereotype of Native Americans as the “vanishing race”—a stereotype that continues to exert influence. In Take a Picture with a Real Indian (performed in 1992, 2001, and 2010), he invites viewers to have their photograph taken with him wearing one of three options: war dance regalia, a loincloth, or khakis and a polo shirt. Few people choose the third option. The performance foregrounds what has become a tradition of Native Americans performing/posing their native -ness as Otherness for the camera, strategically employing imagery that plays to nostalgic Western views of Native peoples as perpetually vanishing. I argue that Luna’s performances comment not only upon western preconceptions of Native Americans, but also upon the ways that Native Americans have historically reasserted their agency by manipulating such expectations, staging themselves to fit the stereotype.

Author Biography

Elizabeth S Hawley, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Elizabeth S. Hawley is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation analyzes the art production in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the early twentieth century, putting the works of American Modernists who visited the area into dialogue with the works of Native artists from the surrounding Pueblos. Hawley earned her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and her BA from Harvard University. She recently completed a Museum Research Consortium Fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she undertook research on Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of Native and Meso -American forms in his architecture and decorative designs. She is currently teaching art history courses at York College and St. Francis College.

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Published

2016-11-30

How to Cite

Hawley, E. S. (2016). James Luna and the Paradoxically Present Vanishing Indian. Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 5(1), 5–26. https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2016.170

Issue

Vol. 5 (2016): Agency in Motion: Agency and Reenactment in Visual Culture

Section

Articles

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