Mimicry as a Method of Subversion in Indigenous Art

Written by Stephanie Haney
Edited by Paige Suhl

An English proverb says imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This posits that to mimic someone is to pay them a genuine compliment—an homage to their original work or ideas. However, in the context of contemporary Indigenous art and culture, mimicry can be utilised as a method of subversion. Historically, art created by Indigenous peoples has not been afforded the same prestige or respect that Western art is given. This hierarchical disconnect is especially evident in museums, as their collections have, at many different times, been criticised for perpetuating colonial ideologies and oppressive policies.¹ Often this is because Indigenous artwork is not displayed as art. Instead, it is presented as an artefact, savage and utilitarian instead of civilised and enlightened. This is partially due to salvage anthropology, a practice characterised by the colonial desire to uncover, claim and preserve the heritage of cultures already suffering from losses of integrity.² Salvage anthropology influenced how white settlers came to understand Indigenous cultures and their histories, promoting the widely held and racist view that Indigenous peoples failed to advance to the sophistication of European society.³ Imitation of the colonisers’ art challenges this narrative. Through imitation the artist portrays Indigeneity by borrowing from classical European art, from which Indigenous cultures are typically excluded. By reclaiming this style as their own, Indigenous artists parody and critique the gravitas accorded to European society while distinctly excluding the coloniser from their art form. Mimicry of European artwork and artistic mediums in contemporary Indigenous art subverts the established colonial narrative. This mocks the notion that only European art is civilised and enlightened by re-working Western depictions to reflect Indigenous worldviews and historical perspectives. This paper will look at work created by two Indigenous artists from Turtle Island, Kent Monkman and Rebecca Belmore, to analyse the significance of mimicry through the use of the colonisers’ materials or style and the expression of Indigenous themes and objects as they relate to anticolonialism.

Before exploring the work of Monkman and Belmore in-depth, scholarly perspectives on mimicry will be outlined. This section of the paper establishes the concept of mimicry as an anti-colonial resistance method and provides insight into its historical significance. Further, this background demonstrates how mimicry preserves Indigenous identity. In his book The Location of Culture, Indian scholar Homi K. Bhabha discusses the meaning behind mimicry for the colonised “other.” Bhabha posits that imitation inherently subverts the colonial state or subject by normalising it in a way that it no longer appears perfect or seamless.⁴ It takes the post-Enlightenment civility away from the colonial subject, discounting its prestige while simultaneously appropriating it through mockery.⁵ In this way, mimicry can be thought of as a double entendre. Throughout history, the goal of a colonial state has been to force its colonised subjects to adopt their culture and way of life—to dominate the globe. Mimicry technically grants the colonisers’ wishes, but in a way that can disrupt their power rather than reinforce it.

Figure 1. Kent Monkman, Bacchanal, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 72” x 120” (182.8 x 304.8 cm)

Figure 2. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Bacchanal of the Andrians, 1523-1526. Oil on canvas, 68.8 x 77.9 in (175 x 193 cm). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Image: Museo Nacional del Prado.

When applying Bhabha’s conceptualization of mimicry to contemporary Indigenous art, imitation is used to threaten colonialism's “civilising” mission. An example of this can be seen by comparing Kent Monkman’s painting, Bacchanal (fig. 1), to its 15th-century counterpart (fig. 2), Bacchanal of the Andrians, by Italian Renaissance artist Titian. In addition to the insertion of Indigenous figures into this scene, Monkman’s homoerotic portrayal of gender non-conforming people plays with ideas of gender and sexuality through an Indigenous lens. Before colonization, Indigenous peoples “held intersex, androgynous people, feminine males and masculine females in high respect.”⁶ These identities are known under the umbrella term “two-spirit” or fall under Indigiqueer. “Two-spirit” is a term used to refer to all gender and sexual variance among Indigenous peoples of North American descent.⁷ Indigiqueer is a term that was created in 2004 and is used by Indigenous LGBTQIA+ peoples who do not feel as though “two-spirit” aligns with their gender or sexual orientation. These terms have political connotations and reconnect with Indigenous gender and sexual identity traditions that reject the Eurocentric binary categories.⁸ Monkman’s fluid depiction of identity blatantly disrupts colonised conceptions of gender, mocking its rigidity.

Figure 3. Passamaquoddy artist, Untitled, ca. 1830. Wood carving with pigment in Annali Lateranensi (1937), volume 1. 19. Propaganda Fide Library, Rome. 

Using mimicry to maintain and represent Indigenous identity is not exclusively a contemporary convention. There is scholarly evidence that points to mimicry contesting settler colonialism that dates back to the nineteenth century. In Dr. Gloria Bell’s article on Indigeneity and the visual culture of Catholic colonisation, she analyses a Passamaquoddy cross located in Rome (fig. 3).⁹ Bell asserts that this artefact signifies an Indigenous perspective on the iconography of sacred figures, stating that the figure presents the suffering of a Passamaquoddy man as Christ.¹⁰ Furthermore, Bell considers how the figure showcases the adoption, rather than assimilation, of Catholic practices into carving traditions, “presenting a First Nations man as the human face of the divine.”¹¹ This form of resistance is pertinent as Passamaquoddy peoples went through a series of hardships, such as being removed from their lands and combating attempts by missionaries and the government to force their assimilation into settler society.¹² This artefact dating back to the 1830s demonstrates Indigenous peoples’ well-established use of the arts to assert their identity and alter Western mythologies to fit into Indigenous worldviews. Therefore, the historical significance of mimicry lies in its ability to retain Indigenous identity, spiritual beliefs, and cultural practices.

As outlined above, mimicry in Indigenous artwork is used to undermine the colonial state and settlers by discounting its prestige and mocking its artistic integrity. Mimicry is achieved by utilising traditionally European materials or stylistic elements to express Indigenous beliefs and cultures. This enables Indigenous artists to re-establish their art as civilised and enlightened, subsequently normalising the European equivalent. Furthermore, this allows the artist to preserve and adequately depict Indigenous identity by inserting Indigenous figures and entities into Eurocentric landscapes. In their work, Monkman and Belmore do both things. Each artist uses characteristically European mediums to reimagine settler art through an Indigenous lens, specifically from the Renaissance era. The Renaissance is an epoch that reflects the pervasive and institutionalised Western bias within art history.¹³ This is because art that emerged from this period connoted a level of sophistication and prestige that non-Western art could not achieve under the dominant Eurocentric aesthetic. Artistic practices of non-Western countries during the Renaissance era were typically marginalised,¹⁴ as their styles were deemed “primitive” and inferior. This type of Eurocentric narcissism is also undoubtedly reflected in settler colonialism: propelled by the idea that European society was the most civilised, enlightened, and, therefore, worthy of the most land. The status of Renaissance art reinforces a binary of “civilised” and “uncivilised” cultures. Thus, mimicry of art from this era can be conceptualised as an attempt to subvert the hierarchy.

High Renaissance paintings can be characterised by a linear style.¹⁵ In his painting, Bacchanal (fig. 1), Monkman subsumes the formal linear technique of classical European art to stylistically mimic Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians (fig. 2). Monkman’s clear communication of shapes and the sharp outline of bodily forms shows the use of linearity. Monkman’s linework is undoubtedly crisp, allowing his subjects to stand out against the foliage in the background. Further, both Monkman’s and Titian’s work look like they have been drawn rather than painted, another characteristic of the linear style.¹⁶ This linearity and attention to Renaissance artistic style extends to Monkman's depiction of the human figure. Artists in the Renaissance were obsessed with realism and naturalistic representations of the human body.¹⁷ While Monkman’s figures do not represent an ideal body in the Renaissance era, they are all painted with stark realism. The piece's focal point is the Indigenous man bent over closest to the viewer. The ripple of his muscles and the length of his tendons are clearly defined and illuminated in sunlight. In an interview with Vice Magazine, Monkman described the European settler artistic style as belonging to a “vocabulary of painting that many consider to be obsolete.”¹⁸ This perspective promotes the idea that imitation of a coloniser’s style would be a purposeful mockery, not an acclamation. The artist further asserted that revitalising these Western artistic traditions could demonstrate how Indigenous traditions have been under assault by European cultures.¹⁹ Therefore, Monkman’s imitation of the European linear style is strategically used to upend colonial narratives.

Monkman extends the theme of subversion beyond the formal aspects of the artwork to its contents. In Bacchanal (fig. 2), Monkman depicts an array of nude and semi-nude Indigenous and seemingly European figures. Based on their androgynous appearances, one can conclude that Monkman is depicting gender as a fluid concept. As mentioned above, this aligns with two-spirit traditions and the Indigiqueer perspective. In June Scudeler’s article “Indians on Top”: Kent Monkman’s Sovereign Erotics, she presents a framework for analyzing how Monkman plays with sexuality and gender to discuss power in his work. According to Scudeler, Monkman uses ideas of sexuality and gender to counteract the erasure of two-spirit people from colonial narratives.²⁰ Fluid representations of the body and sexual sovereignty for Indigenous peoples are necessary to reveal the repressed desire and problematic fascination between two-spirit people and settler men contributing to the gender binary.²¹ In Bacchanal, Monkman depicts the white individuals as feminine males, leaving the Indigenous figures to be perceived as more stereotypically masculine. Monkman achieves this notion of gender fluidity by painting the white figures in stereotypical feminine clothing (e.g. pink dresses), adorning them with beaded jewellery, and showcasing their bare breasts. By portraying the European figures as not subscribing to the gender binary, Monkman brings the colonisers’ repressed sexuality to light, prompting the viewer to rethink Eurocentric conceptions of gender and disrupting colonial authority.

Figure 4. Rebecca Belmore, Binjiya’iing Onji (From Inside), 2017. Marble, installation view. Filopappou Hill, Athens, documenta 14, photograph: Scott Benesiinaabandan

Despite not personally considering her art a form of decolonization,²² Rebecca Belmore’s sculpture (fig. 4), Binjiya’iing Onji (From Inside), subverts colonialism nonetheless. Belmore’s sculpture is made entirely out of marble, a material that came to be associated with prestige, religious piety, and economic prowess in the Renaissance era.²³ White, male, European artists primarily utilised the material to create some of the most well-known sculptures in the world (i.e., Michelangelo's iconic David statue). Belmore’s piece was sculpted with the look of a wigwam dwelling in mind, a sphere-shaped house that Indigenous peoples historically used before colonization.²⁴ By adopting this material to reinvent a historically significant structure, destroyed and discontinued by white settlers, Belmore rejects the assimilation demanded by colonialism and represents the struggle of Indigenous peoples for the preservation of their cultures. Using the colonisers’ material to portray a structure representing Indigenous autonomy promotes anticolonialism. Belmore’s sculpture upends colonial narratives as it reimagines something deemed savage and utilitarian as civil and enlightened. Therefore, Belmore’s expression of Indigeneity through a Eurocentric medium discounts its prestige.

The work highlighted from Kent Monkman and Rebecca Belmore subverts the long established colonial narrative, and preserves Indigenous identity through mimicking colonial materials and style while simultaneously expressing Indigenous themes and objects as they relate to anticolonialism. Monkman and Belmore’s imitative works are beautiful and, although achieved through the use of traditionally European materials or style, simultaneously threaten the civilising mission of colonialism. Critical analysis and a careful eye are essential to uncovering how imitation of the coloniser’s art is used as a method to upend damaging colonial narratives. In this paper I have aimed to show, within both an academic and historical context, how using mimicry as a method of subversion serves to establish an art world that affords Indigenous artists and artwork the same level of prestige and respect that Western art has always received. These contemporary artists, and the other Indigenous artists who paved the way (e.g. Passamaquoddy artist circa 1830), are undoing and reimagining the European art tradition to reveal and reframe the inherent colonial ideas embedded and promoted within it.

Endnotes

1.  Ruth B. Phillips, “Undoing the Settler Museum,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 8.

2. Samuel J. Redman, Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2021), 9. 

3. Redman, 7.

4. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 123.

5. Bhabha, 123.

6. Walter L. Williams, “The ‘two-spirit’ People of Indigenous North Americans,” The Guardian.

7. Janice Ristock et al., “Impacts of Colonization on Indigenous Two-Spirit/LGBTQ Canadians’ Experiences of Migration, Mobility and Relationship Violence,” Sexualities 22, no. 5–6 (September 2019), 768.

8. Ristock, 768.

9. Gloria Bell, “Competing Sovereignties: Indigeneity and the Visual Culture of Catholic Colonization at the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition,” in Journal of Global Catholicism: Vol. 3 (2019): Iss. 2, Article 3.

10. Bell, 30. 

11. Bell, 30.

12. Bell, 30.

13. Diana Newall and Grant Pooke, Art History : The Basics (version Second edition.) Second ed, The Basics, (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2021), 196.

14. Newall, 28.

15. Newall, 16.

16. Newall, 16.

17. Newall, 6.

18. Andrew Nunes, “Kent Monkman's Massive Renaissance-Style Paintings Upend Colonial Narratives,” (VICE), n.p.

19. Nunes, n.p.

20. June Scudeler, “‘Indians on Top’: Kent Monkman’s Sovereign Erotics,” in American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39, no. 4 (2015): 19. 

21. Scudeler, 19.

22. Wanda Nanibush, “An Interview with Rebecca Belmore,” in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 1 (2014): n.p.

23. John Nicholas Napoli and William Tronzo, Radical Marble: Architectural Innovation from Antiquity to the Present (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), 4. 

24. T. T. Waterman, “North American Indian Dwellings,” in Geographical Review 14, no. 1 (1924): 1.

Bibliography

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