American Indian Culture and Research Journal

A CULTURAL FRAME FOR TRADITIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN ART At the 2005 Native American Art Studies Association meetings in Scottsdale, Arizona (a prestigious Indian art market locale), the renowned contemporary artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an enrolled member of the Flathead Salish Nation, gave an impassioned appeal for critical writing on “fine, high, new media or cutting edge art” produced by Native Americans. Commenting that this work is often derided as “bastardized,” she exhorted her audience of Native artists and scholars, together with academics, museum curators, and art dealers from around the world, to write about the work in a mainstream art journal, not an anthropology journal or Native Peoples magazine. She implored us to differentiate contemporary from traditional American Indian art. With her provocative plea for writing that addressed what she termed the proper placement of this work within the contemporary art world, Quick-to-See Smith hit the issue of artwriting squarely on its head. Coined by the art critic, art historian, and philosopher David Carrier, artwriting is a term that describes the representational work of getting art seen, talked about, evaluated, collected, and, ultimately, institutionally ensconced in museum collections and art-historical canons. As Carrier maintains, this discursive practice is rhetorical and “seeks to persuade the viewers that the works described are aesthetically significant. . . . [T]he value of contemporary art . . . remains to be established.” By providing visual instruction, artwriting directs the reader to see objects in specific ways as works of art. A means of educating collectors in evaluative criteria and distinctions in the quality of work, it steers them to particular features of objects and often specific artists and art. As an important way of offering instruction in how to see the artistic significance of objects, a chief component of artwriting is to construct genealogies or lineages of artistic “genius.” This mode of artwriting connects contemporary practitioners to past artists with established reputations, tracing the descent of talent in the assessment of “master” status from one generation to the next. I apply Carrier’s critical insights, and those of artist and critic Victor Burgin, to a field in which they have not been utilized: traditional Native American art.