Review: Beauty over context in museum exhibition on Plains art

The pieces are fascinating; the display cases well-constructed allowing good views of the objects, and the exhibition halls facilitate an easy movement and flow of the crowds. Yet the specter of deracination hangs like an ancestral ghost, one hushed by a frenzy of appreciation for the cult of the aesthetic object.

The sins of Western culture as regards to its Indian policy scarcely rear their ugly head. They are alluded to through asides in secondary material and discrete videos on the Met’s website, like an excerpt from Most Serene Republics (2009), a documentary film shown at the 53rd Venice Biennial about Native Americans who went to Europe to participate in Wild West shows and died there in the 1800s and early 1900s. An argument can be made that these issues have nothing to do with the objects’ importance as art, which is like saying the Sistine Chapel has nothing to do with Christianity.

In terms of the caliber of the pieces, the stories they tell, and the history of the Plains Indians over the four centuries they trace, the show delivers. The oldest one, a human effigy pipe from approximately 100 B.C. to 100 A.D. shows both how ancient the sacred ritual of smoking tobacco was, and how sculpture was already stylistically developed. The Indians did not have a word for “art” so animal skins, objects, and everyday functional items served as ceremonial, spiritual, historical, and mythic items. As trade increased, European objects like beads, metal bells, guns, and fancy cloth made their way into the pieces on view, including those collected by French traders Lewis and Clark on their 1804-1806 expedition, traditionally thought of as “ethnographic” or more derogatorily, “primitive."

Native peoples first came in contact with Europeans in the 1500s through traders who imported horses, weapons, and ultimately diseases like smallpox and later cholera, measles, and scarlet fever, decimating a number of the Plains tribes in the 1800s. The horse enabled native peoples to efficiently hunt their main source of food, buffalo. A piece like the “Three Villages Robe” shows how the relationship and history of tribes were painted onto natural canvas robes, as the tribes did not possess a written language, serving as repositories of a tribes’ history.