Public Displays of Grief

In Precarious Lives, Judith Butler suggests that, by submitting to the pain of mourning for others, we agree to “be changed, possibly for ever” by it. The “full result” of this transformation “we cannot know in advance” but we do know it is not the same as we are now. Am I the mourner here? Watching my parent (the land) being carted away? Or am I witnessing a call to the heavens, a ritual unfolding in the unfurled fabric on the ground? Relative to the large scale of the flowers, the viewer feels strangely small and I have several passing impressions while looking at them: a memory of being curled in my own mother’s bed with the sheets drawn up around me, cocooned by the floral pattern of a very well-worn bed set; the magic lanterns the Victorians used to project colonial fantasies of monsters and far off lands; and a scene from a book I was just reading (Butcherbird, for those interested) where a young couple goes for a walk in the woods and the author describes the shadows of leaves and dappled light on their faces as they move deeper into the forest. There is also a passing resemblance between the half “circle” of the covers and the shape of teacups. Linklater’s covers draw attention to the domestic space of the tipi and positions the viewer (at least this viewer) in a space of longing for it.           

Lit in clear, neutral light, there are also two large tipis in the exhibit space—one in the center of the room and one affixed to the far western wall that juts out sideways into the room like a thorn. The tipi-sculpture in the center of the room, what grief conjures (2020), animates some of the central questions in the show around mourning, family, and land. Inside the tipi is a plastic statue of the Venus de Milo wearing an oversized pink hoodie with a blue silkscreen design of a pinhole camera photo of grazing bison whose blue, blurry bodies leave ghostly traces or imprint in a circular frame. Venus stands on top of an avocado green refrigerator with a fake wood paneled handle, which is nearly identical to the one I had in my childhood home. (Closing my eyes, I can still see its yellowed plastic interior.)

Unlike that fridge, which has an omnipresent hum, this fridge is silent, strapped to a moving dolly that is standing on a wooden pallet. The tipi poles around the column of Venus atop her fridge are painted white with speckled gold from what looks like a sharpie pen. The poles reach up into the skylight. The whole piece is so tall that the curators had to remove a panel in the ceiling for the sculpture to stand upright, exposing a light fixture and some errant wires. This is one of the most dynamic elements of the sculpture—the tipi exceeds the frame of the room, gesturing to the limits of the museum to house its grandeur and largesse but also refusing the seamlessness of the museum as a technology of colonial representation.

Venus, the dolly, and the pallet suggest moving in multiple registers. She leans forward about to take a step, and the dolly, strapped the fridge, is ready to be moved but both sit immobilized. Carved during the Hellenistic period, the transitional moment between Greek and Roman ascendency, the De Milo statue references the imperial appropriation of indigenous divinities as Aphrodite transforms into Venus. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, is an idealized feminine figure while the fridge is a symbol of nourishment. Fixed in place, caught in the idioms of empire, these symbols of womanliness and the maternal suggest the difficulty of grieving the land in a context where “home” itself has been appropriated, bound up in new economies of signification and expropriation.

There is an arrested momentum in the piece, especially when we know, too, that tipis were constructed to be moved around. The ceremonies that come out of grief are reflected in the title: grieving people inevitably become “conjuring” machines whose memories of the lost loved one appear frequently and unbidden. The title reflects all the pastness that seems to plague us when we lose something but also the practices that emerge when we are grieving that demand us to heed this call inside of us.

Is this piece trying to break the hold of grief by making a private feeling public? Or is it representing how grief becomes encrypted within our internal landscape, clinging stubbornly to coded images that seem to hold us forever in place? Will expressing our grief for the land finally allow us to “move forward” or do such images belie an impossible fantasy of separation from something that is inextricable from ourselves? Like the death of the parent, the deathliness of the land leaves unresolved the connection we continue bear within us despite the moment of loss, a puzzling point of pain whose call we try to answer by returning to metastatic images of the past.  

These large sculptures are some of the most dynamic pieces of the show. The tipis in various states of assemblage and position gives the viewer the impression of moving through different dimensions and states of being. All the tipis in the room have been painted white (which was a little on the nose for me but still effective). dislodgevanishskinground (2015) is distinct for having considerable wear on the poles and viewers can see a wood grain peeking through. Skeleton-like the tipi stands sideways on the gallery wall, seemingly out of place. The cover has been tied to the top and allowed to dangle loosely over the floor. The title of this piece is a fun play of words. To dislodge something is to unsettle it; dis lodge might also mean this lodge. The end of the phrase could either be vanish, skin, ground or vanishes, kin, ground. The partially attached tipi cover makes me think of skin as covers were traditionally made from animal hide. This lodge is dislodged from kin, skin, and ground but the lodge also seems to have some form of power. It can vanish skin and ground, make them disappear. A third tipi, landlesscolumnbundle (2019), stands disassembled and upright with its poles bundled together with rabbit and mink fur coats. The tipi as a structure is an elegant piece of Indigenous infrastructure that has a great capacity to hold, protect, and transport life. Rendered as a bundle of sticks wrapped in fur, I see the parallels between this structure and our skeletons wrapped in flesh, a comparison that evokes for me some of the density of reference that the show makes between different forms of embodiment and relationships with the land.

Along the far wall, three tipi covers decorated with geometric charcoal patterns have been hung along the far wall. In front of these semi-circles are a set of mirrored tables with a series of eerie white sculptures set atop them. In front is a set of mirrored tables featuring a series of eerie white sculptures. Upon closer look, these sculptures are laser printed copies of Indigenous belongings now housed in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts Collection: a Kwakiutl Raven Mask, Chief’s Mask, and Headdress; a Tsimshian mask; a Haida Model of a Totem Pole; a Santa Clara Pot with Bird Design; a Rio Grande Pueblo Pot; and a Hopi Kachina doll. These figures have now become little ghouls, zombified in the museum space. Their white, greenish, ghostly cast reminds me vaguely of the slime from Ghostbusters and the inside of a Kinder egg surprise. Rendering them, quite literally, in a low-fi medium that freezes and mummifies these kin in ectoplasmic goo. Set atop a mirrored table, these characters literally "reflect" the museum back at itself, the ways that such spaces seek to capture and arrest the liveliness of Indigenous worlds. The museum as a landscape of inversion, perversion, and mirroring ideological injunctions back at the viewer. These objects speak to the ways that whiteness becomes a mask, distorting and recontextualizing these works. At the same time, the mirrors below them hint at another possible world that is also the world we are already in: the tipis peopling this room, appearing inverted in the mirrored tables, hint at another place that peaks out at us from somewhere else, a somewhere else that is already the place we're walking through.           

The canny sophistication of this show is inspiring and prompted deep reflection from this particular viewer. The exhibit as grieving ceremony suggests that by accepting certain forms of pain, we might be able to transform into something new, changed by virtue of our acceptance of certain kinds of loss. How close is this other world that Linklater promises us? How far? What kinds of grief must we surrender to move beyond our colonial nightmare?