Lecture 9: Classicism as Colonisation

Key Ideas

1. Reliance on Christianity & the classical body to idealise & legitimise indigenous people

   • Colonial desire to graft ancient Greek culture onto non-Western cultures

2. Normative template of naturalistic, ideal (white) beauty

3. Classical form as 1 way in which colonisation becomes visible in art

Aby Warburg’s time in Hopiland

• From 1895

• In the southwest of North America (later became the state of Arizona)

• Goals:

  • Warburg was interested in ancient myths, magic, & ritual

  • Wanted to experience a living ancient culture

    • Idea that indigenous people were a ‘dying race’ - wanted to capture their ways of life before this happened

• By the time Warburg arrived, there had already been significant changes to the Hopi way of life

  • E.g. recent Dawes Allotment Act of 1887

  • Forced indigenous people to give up their communal ways of life in favour of:

    • Patriarchal nuclear family models of living

    • Capitalistic attitude towards private property & land ownership

• Took photographs

  • Incl. photos of secret Hopi rites: he promises not to publish them, but this was violated after his death

• In the years after his return, his mental health suffers and he’s admitted into an asylum

  • To prove his sanity, he gives a lecture about Hopi rituals

  • Describes its kinship w/ ancient Greek imagery

    (A) Colonial desire to graft ancient Greek culture onto non-Western cultures?

    OR

    (B) Egalitarian endeavour/humanist scholarship that is radically cosmopolitan?

Historical context

19th century European fascination w/ ‘Indian’ bodies

• Varied manifestations:

  • Novels

  • Plays

  • Writing, painting

• Perversely, indigenous people were facing unspeakable violence in the content of North America & were driven out of their homelands

Social Darwinism

• The notion that the indigenous people of America were a dying, vanishing race

  • The survival & endurance of certain types of bodies over others

• The North American Indian by ethnologist & photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis

  • Photography publication

    • Intended to record the dwindling cultures of Native American tribes

  • Argued that the rapid decline in native populations resulting from centuries of conflict w/ European settlers was not only natural, but inevitable

Reliance on both Christianity & classical form to contain, idealise, & sanitise the indigenous body

• Eroticising and/or classicising the indigenous body WHILE also signalling its imminent extinction

  In sculpture: blending ideal beauty & fantasy of ‘Indianness’

  • Esp. those carved in marble

  • Features marking out a body as:

    (A) Indigenous

    • Headgear, costumes

    • ALTHOUGH often by this time, indigenous people were no longer dressing in these styles

    • Capitalised on the very qualities that made indigenous people vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, & genocidal attitudes about their existence

      • E.g. wildness, mystery, an opaque way of life = antithetical to European civilisation

      • Romanticised idea of a primitive, ‘backwards’ culture

    (B) Classical

    • White European facial features, nudity

      • Classical civilisation being also long lost serves to yoke the indigenous body to death & disappearance

• By BOTH racists & American artists

  • Many artists who were born/raised in American colonies were quick to seize the currency of this figure

    • Used their European training to gain credibility

    • Used their North American origins to lend a sense of authenticity to their depictions of indigenous people

Such works take qualities of Indigenous life and reflect them through the prism of ideal beauty = claim them as part of a European aesthetic tradition

• The violence inflicted upon indigenous people is legitimised, fetishised, & presented as an inevitable historical development

The Wounded Indian (1848-50), Peter Stephenson

Historical context

• Peter Stephenson

  • An anglo-American artist born in England, then moved to America

  • Spent time as a young artist in Rome

    • Studied Greco-Roman sculpture

The Wounded Indian

• Exhibited at the Great Exhibition (1851) in London

  • Curated according to different nations

  • This work appeared in the American section

• Material: American marble

  • From a quarry in Vermont

  • This fact is repeatedly emphasised during its exhibition

Analysis

• Figure based loosely on the ancient Roman sculpture ‘the Dying Gaul’

  • BUT there is some attempt to racialise the figure

    • Lacking a straightforward Greek profile

    • Lacking the pulpy, fleshy quality that most Greek sculptures have

      • Instead, visible sinews, muscles & tendons, not fully smooth

• Suicidal gesture of the figure

  • Wounded indian

  • Arrow held by the figure themselves

    • Could be read as pulling out the arrow OR piercing themselves with it

    • In the context of genocide: idea that indigenous people are, rather than being killed by colonisers, killing themselves

      = absolves Americans & European audiences of guilt

Interpretation

• Represents an indigenous man as:

  (1) A quintessentially American figure, signifying America

  (2) A figure possibly in diametric opposition to another burgeoning conception of America

  • As a civilisation of people of European descent

• Kate Flynn:

  • Do Native Americans carry the symbolic weight of being the country’s original (& hence more authentic) inhabitants?

  • OR are Native Americans seen as outsiders to American culture, where narratives of ‘American-ness’ are constructed against them?

The Dawn of Christianity (1855-56), Erastus Dow Palmer

Historical context

• Palmer spent his entire life in New York

• Imbibed classical principles from afar (taught in American academies)

• Intended audience: Christian, 19th century Americans

Description

• A young Indian maiden wandering listlessly in her native forest, gathering bird plumes

  • Marked out as indigenous:

    • Costume & headgear

  • Marked out as classical:

    • Naked from the waist up

    • Facial features

• She finds a crucifix

  • Seen for the 1st time

  • Gazes upon w/ wonder

Interpretation

• Her nudity & face remain obstinately classical

• Voyeuristic undertones

  • She is deeply absorbed in curiosity

  • The power of the crucifix symbol is so strong that we trust she shares in that power = has no awareness that we are watching her

    = allows us to take in her idealised body

• Implies the wiping out of indigenous religion in favour of Christian beliefs

  • Implies the death of identity

The Marriage of Hiawatha (1866), Edmonia Lewis

Historical context

• Edmonia Lewis

  • Was of partly African & Native American descent

    • It was a crucial part of her self-fashioning as an artist to claim that her mother was pure Ojibwe (Native American)

      • This was proved likely untrue in reality

      • Lewis wasn’t actually able to grow up in a reservation because her family had been excluded (mixed race; her father was black)

  • Worked in the tradition of European naturalism & classicism

The Marriage of Hiawatha

• Part of a series of Indian figures (1866-1972)

• Based on a popular fictional poem, The Song of Hiawatha, by white American author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  • Based on a legendary Ojibwe figure

    • Perpetuates the myth of the Noble savage

    • A stock character who is uncorrupted by civilization

    • Innate goodness and moral superiority of a primitive people living in harmony with nature

Interpretation

• Represents an Indian body as it had been seen through the eyes of a white, male practitioner

  • Claimed ‘knowledge’ of Indian life

  • Conforms, in some ways, to a longer lineage of how white European figures (poets, sculptors, painters) have sought to depict & idealise indigenous people

    • Aesthetic colonisation

• At the same time, a statement of Lewis’s own agency & subjectivity as a person of indigenous descent

  • Reclamation of agency in relation to the indigenous body & identity

  • E.g. subversively focused NOT on their naked flesh (which historically attracted male collectors) BUT on decorating their bodies in clothing

  • E.g. Lewis exaggerated her own connection to her Native American ancestry

• Used the widespread fascination garnered by ideas of indianness to her advantage

  • Capitalised on popular culture’s fascination w/ the ‘romantic primitive’ (Myth of the Noble savage)

    • E.g. fantasised the form & dress of the 2 fictional characters

• Reflected her canny understanding of the power of the mythic Indian & white American culture