Barbara Babcock's Mudwomen and Whitemen

Barbara Babcock’s Mudwomen and Whitemen

I just returned from jurying the painting division of the Heard Museum’s Indian Market, so I reflected on Barbara Babcock’s two articles, in particular, her piece “Mudwomen and Whitemen.” What I am struggling with is how anthropologists and sociologists don’t seem to look at the psychology and the mindset of the artist in general before embarking on their analysis of the Native American artist. When I spoke with my fellow jurors at the Heard, for example, it was the Native Americans who spoke a similar “language” about shape, color, form, content, and what moved them about certain works of art, while it was the non-artist (anthropologists?) jurors who looked for entirely different things in the work we saw. They were the ones trying to keep the traditions alive by pointing out “errors” in how some of the artists depicted katsinas or how they articulated certain forms, ignoring that in the arts, the rules are meant to be broken—challenging the norm is part and parcel to artistic practice, and it is the same for all artists. Babcock seems to understand this, by saying that each piece of pottery in Pueblo culture is made with a unique voice and spirit, but she seems to assert that this is unique to Pueblo potters and not to other media, cultures, or artists in general. She questions the “relations of power whereby one portion of humanity can select, value, and collect the pure products of others,” but this is a question that goes far beyond Native American art—this question is one that has shaped the whole of artistic practice.

After spending fourteen summers in Santa Fe working for a prominent art gallery there, I know first-hand the art market there and how Native American art is romanticized by the city, the galleries, and the artists themselves. Just like artists all over the world, some work within the expected norms and system, and others choose to challenge the prevailing styles and take their chances that the market will support them or not. It is not a situation of domination and victimization--but artists create knowing the rules of the game and money is the prize. While I have not studied Pueblo pottery in such depth, nor from the standpoint of the anthropologist or the sociologist, I could relate to the objects and artists to which Babcock referred because I have sold such work and worked with these artists preparing exhibitions. Quite frankly, once Native American artists are away from the scholar or collector, what they have to say about their art is no different than any other artist—the mythologizing and the spiritualizing of their art is often dramatized because that is what is expected of them. Artist to artist, they talk about the same struggles of the marketplace, of materials and processes, and of artistic breakthroughs—in essence, the everyday of the artist.

While Babcock admits a nostalgic bias of her own and attempts to re-write her interpretations, she still seems to be romantically captivated by her subjects (would she revel in wearing any other artists clothes or is she proud of the possibility that she has “gone native”?). She seems to ignore that such things as challenging artistic norms, innovation in style and technique, and the flair of personal style and independence are common traits within a broad range of artists of all genders and cultures throughout time. First, she recalls the scholar’s statement, “grasping for cultural legitimacy and survival in the industrialized West in the past century, native peoples have accepted the economic option of converting culture into commodity.” While I find this true that commodity has a strong place in keeping Native American culture vital, it sounds like Babcock still romanticizes the Native American in that they are made to be victims of commodity in order to retain their culture—“grasping” for cultural legitimacy. Without commodity (whether the greater art market or inter-group trading for objects or services) few artistic endeavors thrive—the market has always been a factor in the arts because it is a product that is created for either ritual or aesthetic uses (the idea of art for art’s sake is a modern concept).

Long before Anglos invaded this country, Native Americans readily traded their pottery, beadwork, basketry, and other objects within and between tribes and Russian traders, and often borrowed stylistically from others’ designs. Artistic innovation was always highly prized, and trading (translate, selling) also affirmed the quality and desirability of their art. Possibly true that “the non-Western woman is the vehicle for misplaced Western nostalgia,” but Babcock is complicit in romanticizing their unique artistic products as well. She heralds Narajano-Morse’s “Pearlene” alter ego image who speaks her mind and displays attributes not common to stereotypes of the Pueblo woman (and, by the way, she is highly rewarded for this by her inclusion in international exhibitions of Native American art), and delights in the fact that Helen Cordero has an obsession with bloomers and Porsches—almost showing shock or surprise that such Native American women artists would have any interests in or influences from a greater cultural world (“forcing my attention to cultural overlays and hybridity”). How charming she makes this artist, but so too has Fritz Scholder, R.C. Gorman, T.C. Cannon, and Charles Loloma been made famous by their interest in Rolls Royces and eccentric lifestlyes, not to mention a slew of Anglo artists--like all of us, we are drawn to luxurious things and if we are sucessful enough to get them, we get them, no?).

While she sees the error in overlooking the small details of the artists’ lives, my objection to her approach is that she is seeing these women artists within a strictly Anglo/Native American comparison of domination and subjection rather than placing these women within a bigger context of how artists on the whole have worked creatively within a system that rewards their innovations and quality with commissions, sales, and social acceptance. She does not look at the history of cultural hegemony and the general discourse about art and art practice that occurs daily between artists themselves. She still looks at the Pueblo Indian woman artist as a separate, unique group rather than acknowledging these women are artists who share many commonalities with other artists who have the same basic agendas concerning their work.

Babcock redeems herself when she says that “the Indian appears everywhere. . . as a mystified ideal, yet nowhere in dominant discourse do Indians speak with their own unmediated voices.” Here she hits on the issue I have raised—that scholars in this field are not addressing them as artists but as cultural objects, and that there is a vast difference between the artists who supply contemporary tourist-oriented shops and the artists who have established themselves for their independent vision and technical virtuosity. Maria rose to prominence because she created innovative, highly proficient work that rose above the rest of what was created in her field at the time—the same kind of rewards given to other artists around the world. But not everyone who creates innovative works is guaranteed a ready reception, in fact, being initially rejected for innovation is a bigger guarantee of later critical acknowledgement.

Her section on Los Alamos and Pueblo pottery was also of interest to me because I recently wrote a paper on the photography of Meridel Rubenstein who depicted that very topic of Native American art and culture, the nuclear bomb, and the scientists who worked there in a series that ultimately became a full exhibition at SITE Santa Fe. However, the subservient role in which she places Native Americans in the Los Alamos project is perhaps slightly skewed to make them again victims in this association. From my research, it appears that while Pueblo women might have cleaned homes and given pottery as gifts, they also sold their wares, sold their services, and interacted in ways that was mutually respectful and beneficial to all parties (see the story of Edith Warner and how members of San Ildefonso pueblo helped her to build a home on their land in order to create a teahouse for the Los Alamos physicists while providing employment opportunities for themselves later to help her with her enterprise.)

Finally, I agree that the singular image of the Indian maiden carrying an olla on her head has become the ubiquitous, exoticized, and biblicized symbol of the Pueblo used to encourage tourism to the area, an example of “the implied and valued proper role of woman—as well as relations between culture and nature, and production and reproduction.” But Babcock falls short on her point when she drags the artist Bill Schenck into the equation of an artist who refuses to see who Native American women artists really are, preferring instead a romanticized stereotype. She says that Schenck and others prefer fictions that sell, “they want those shiny black Santa Clara ollas that look like “ancient” potteries are supposed to.” But in acknowledging that she originally did not see Pueblo pottery for what it really is and righting her wrongs by looking into the realities details of their work, she lumps Anglo male artists into a sweeping category who still revel in exotic fictions. In fact, Schenck is precisely critiquing the mystique of the Southwest through tourist brochures and the movies. Had she taken the time to learn of Schenck’s greater body of work and his artistic motives in the use of his various images, she would know that he is purposely using this symbol of exoticism much like he also depicts images of the romanticized cowboy in popular culture to make a point about the selling of the West. Before condemning other artists to support her case of objectification and oppression, Babcock needs to examine the artistic motives of those she highlights before she assigns them as being complicit in the continuation of myths.
-Julie Sasse