Some speculation about Inuit art

Eli Inukpaluk, Shaman with a Bird Spirit, 1967-1968. Whalebone. From the Albrecht Collection at the Heard Museum. Image found here.

Press release put out by the Wichita Art Museum.

When I went a couple of weeks ago to see Arctic Spirit, a touring exhibit of Inuit art from the Heard Museum in Phoenix, I wasn't sure what to expect. But I do know that I didn't anticipate much of what I saw and learned on that visit.

I had assumed I would see a collection of older pieces--and, there are indeed a few century-old pieces of simple scrimshaw-like pieces. Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw at the entrance to the exhibit the piece you see here, accompanied by the following introductory text on the wall next to it:

From its humble beginnings in the 1950s as a way to wean Canadian Inuit (Eskimos) off welfare, contemporary Inuit art has blossomed almost miraculously into an art form symbolizing the resilience, ingenuity and vision of a people.

The part I really couldn't get past was the introductory clause: apparently, what I was about to see was the product of a culture whose contemporary aesthetic vocabulary had little or no precedent . . . and, even more importantly, had its origins in the most-worthy goal of helping this culture become economically self-sustaining.

I really was intrigued now. But something perhaps even more surprising awaited me further on. The subject of the piece you see pictured above is a popular one in this exhibit: shamans and shape-shifters in various stages of transformation. That in and of itself wasn't so surprising, nor was it surprising to learn that most Inuit had long ago converted to Christianity. But this, from another placard in the exhibit, was:

Contemporary Inuit art has given visual representation to the spirit world for the first time. A few artists depict their own experiences, but most rely on their imaginations or the stories of elders. (My emphasis)

Coming as we do from a culture that long ago worked out a visual vocabulary for depicting the gods and figures from the Judeo-Christian tradition--so long ago, in fact, that we're forgetting how to read it--to encounter a people who only within the past 50 years began to develop such a language is indeed a fascinating thing to witness, no matter that these pieces were, most likely, not intended as offerings of devotion to the spirit world but as exercises of the imagination.

Below the fold, some comments on what (I think) all this might mean.

The piece you see at the beginning of the post is a fine summation of many tendencies I noted in the works. For one thing, though it's hard to tell from the picture, this worked whale vertebra isn't very worked at all: it shows some polishing, some minimal carving and shaping, but that's it. Just as the piece depicts the bird spirit emerging out of the shaman, so also does the artwork seem to emerge from the bone but without much changing the bone itself. Many of the other pieces were very much like this: the artists let the shape of the material have a say in the final form of the pieces, thus giving them something like the quality that "found" art has. That tendency, of course, fits very well with the pieces' subject-matter of shape-shifting figures in mid-transformation, but the sensibility at work here is something very different from that of, say, Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, in which the sculptor ignores--discards, even--the original marble's outer shape. The overall feel of these pieces is an organic, fluid one, rather than one in which the piece feels removed from or resistant to the material it's made of.

This fluidity showed up in other ways in other, more constructed pieces. One, by Noami Ity, called Life on the Land, As It Used to Be, is an approximately 6' X 5' blanket with appliqués on it. The appliqués are of men, igloos, sleds pulled by dogs, wolves, walruses, whales, and seals, not placed so as to suggest divisions between land and sea. Instead, the figures seem to float in space, as if to suggest the interrelatedness of all these entities. I wondered at this. Is the absence of a horizon somehow evocative of the shape-shifting landscape--the annual thawing and freezing of the sea and tundra--the Inuit live in? Is the lack of segregating of these figures into their "proper" spheres an implicit commentary on the Inuits' history as subsistence hunters and the fact that they would travel on the ocean as well as the land to find their prey?

These remain questions, I'm sorry to say. If there's a disappointment about this exhibit, it's in the utter lack of explanatory text accompanying the names of the pieces and their makers. I would hope the exhibition catalogue has more information, but I didn't take the time that day to look in it. Or, perhaps, contemporary Inuit art is still so new that its aesthetics are still being worked out. The exhibit did note two facts worth mentioning here, though. For one thing, the tendency used to be that artists wouldn't spend more than a few days on a piece. The pieces are far from unfinished-looking, but as a result of this tendency, as I noted earlier, the outer, original form of the material used is integrated into the piece, contributing to its overall meaning. The other note is that, as Western influences have become better-known among Inuit artists and a market for these pieces becomes larger, newer pieces tend to have a more worked feel to them. The exhibit even has a couple of traditional landscape paintings, another reflection of that influence.

It's hard for me, an obvious outsider to this culture, to know how to respond appropriately to this latter point, especially given this art's recent emergence. One risks romanticizing these people by engaging in a more-PC version of wanting to find the Noble Savage embodied in and evoked by these pieces; and I have to confess that one of my favorite pieces in the show, a recent large print titled Hundreds and Hundreds. Herds of Caribou, shows what might be a strong Escher influence. Also, it's important to remember that this art came into being in the first place with the intention of its being sold. That's true of much art, of course, but the experience of seeing pieces in museums minus their price tags allows us to put aside speculation about the market the artist was aiming for and instead concentrate more on loftier thoughts such as Meaning and Creativity and Representation. So, then, this exhibit, quite apart from showing some wonderful pieces of art made by a people from this hemisphere whom I, at least, know little about, also indirectly raises questions about art that exhibitions usually don't address. That, too, is all to the good.