The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 18901915.

AHAA Reviews April 2011

Reviewed by Jessica L. Horton, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, jessleehorton@gmail. com .

In The Indian Craze , Elizabeth Hutchinson endeavors to give the eponymous phenomenon of European American fascination with, and consumption of, Native American handicrafts around the turn of the twentieth century its modernist due. As she explains, prior scholarly accounts locate the integration of Native art into the mainstream of American modernism in Native painting of the interwar period, dovetailing with the consolidation of formalist discourses a la Greenberg. In contrast, Hutchinson identifies the aestheticization of indigenous objects such as baskets, pottery, and rugs in a range of Victorian-era practices, from the creation of Indian corners in private homes and department store windows, to pictorialist photography, to political advocacy. She eschews the common labeling of such activities as anti-modern, a term that segregates interest in Native forms from modernity in keeping with the Arts and Crafts Movements critique of industrialization. Hutchinson prefers to see the Indian craze as integral to a period of proto-modernism, marked by a higher degree of fluidity, not only between cultures but also across such familiar binaries as art and craft, aesthetics and politics, than would later be permitted. Her book explores the contradictions and possibilities of this period, highlighting forms of cross-cultural agency while avoiding the extremes of celebratory revisionism and heavy-handed critique of unremitted racism.

Key to Hutchinsons argument is the triangulated relationship between the terms in her subtitle, Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation. Hutchinson claims that her study intervenes in discourses of cultural primitivism, a term which is frequently understood as situating indigenous cultures outside of and in opposition to modern culture (4). In fact, Hutchinson reiterates a now-accepted postcolonial understanding of primitivism as a European American cultural construction that indigenous peoples have variously internalized, shaped, and contested. Through her analysis of the formative years between 1890 and 1915 encompassed by the Indian craze, Hutchinson positions Native artists as significant participants in American modernity, particularly its aesthetic dimensions. Transculturation helps her do this connective work. Borrowing from Fernando Ortizs use of the term to describe cultural mixing, or hybridity, in Cuba, Hutchinson explains that transculturation involves more than the simple replacement

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of traditional beliefs with European ones; instead it led to the creation of new cultural forms that reflect marginalized peoples diverse relationships to mainstream culture (5).[1]

Beyond the introduction, mentions of primitivism and transculturation are relatively sparse compared to the repetition of variants on the third key term in her subtitle. Though Hutchinson aims to historicize the modern, modernity, modernization, and modernism, not to advocate for these terms, she nonetheless uses them to authorize inclusion and bestow artistic legitimacy on the select Native subjects she engages. For example, she opens with a provocative sketch of Winnebago artist Angel DeCora, who lived a bohemian life in a New York City garret, where she played music and ate chop suey with other struggling artists (2). In Chapter Four Hutchinson argues that Native performers, by adopting self-conscious poses before a camera lens in New York City, demonstrated themselves to be modern artists (169). A question emerges from The Indian Craze that is never quite resolved: must historical engagement with Native artists diverse relationships to mainstream culture be premised on establishing their modern credentials (5)?

This ambiguity is compounded by a slippage in the textat times productive, at times obfuscatingsurrounding what the modern is . In her opening chapter, Unpacking the Indian Corner, Hutchinson reads the colorful, tactile displays of handcrafted Native American artifacts in late Victorian-era homes as signs of a modern sensibility :a sensitivity to the material object and a capacity for taste that were distinctly modern pleasures (16). She traces the emergence of these tendencies to turn-of-the-century commercialism, evident in window displays at Wanamakers and other department stores that linked Indian crafts with home decorating. She closes the chapter with a reference to modern spatiality , arguing that the consumption and production of Native art in urban centers is essential to understanding the landscape of modernization (50). Her use of a landscape metaphor is a touch ironic, given that Hutchinson foregrounds the city as a site of modernization over the rural communities where the majority of Native peoples liveda reasonable, but inevitably constraining, response to the limits of existing Native Studies scholarship.

In Chapter Two, The White Mans Indian Art: Teaching Aesthetics at the Indian School, Hutchinson begins to expand this purview through a consideration of modern temporality in the Native industries program developed by Indian schools superintendent Estelle Reel between 1898 and 1910. She argues that the modernization of Indian students through art education disrupted seasonal cycles integral to creative production within their communities, thereby introducing them to the alienation and drudgery of industrial labor (63). Here modernization

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assumes connotations of degradation. Limited to an analysis of policy and period photographs, Hutchinsons potentially rich exploration of temporal conflict is over all too quickly.

Chapter Three, Playing Indian: Native American Art and Modern Aesthetics, couches a thesis about modernist aesthetics in a wide discussion of turn-of-the-century exhibitions and art writing. An advocate of pure form, influential non-Native educator Arthur Wesley Dow joined others in promoting the potential for indigenous art to teach modern artists crucial lessons about form and technique. It is here that Hutchinson carves out a new importance for the Arts and Crafts Movement ideals in American art history, arguing that decorative arts, especially those made by Native hands, aided the transition to high modernism by merging social concerns with a non-narrative, formalist vocabulary. Aiding Hutchinsons larger goal to put Native artists back into history, this argument nonetheless raises concerns that Native objects will be subsumed in a conventional narrative of the ascendancy of American modernism (6). Hutchinson points to fundamental problems with this trajectory when she states that racism undermined Native artists ability to be seen as modern artists, but could do more to interrogate the values that underlie the label, modern (8).

In Chapter Four, The Indians in Ksebiers Studio, the complexities of modern identification are paramount. Hutchinson shows how non-Native pictorialist photographer Gertrude Ksebier communicated her identity as a modern artist and a modern woman through her published portraits of Native performers in Buffalo Bills Wild West show who visited her New York studio. Ksebiers embellished photographs of Indian men self-consciously posing for her camera reveal both the photographers and sitters awareness of the essential performativity of modern identities. In some of the photographs, the men are busy drawing or are posed in front of their drawings, suggesting that Ksebier may have sought to associate her creative pictorialism with their artistic expression. In addition to advertising her credentials as an artist, Ksebiers darkroom manipulations of Native bodies are laced with sexual desire, aligning her with a growing number of women who challenged conservative feminine values through appeals to racial difference. Hutchinsons lively and complex analysis leaves open a question of whether it is the demand to perform, or merely the content of these identities, that is quintessentially modern.

Hutchinson returns to the work of DeCora in the final chapter, Angel DeCoras Cultural Politics. Moving between DeCoras political writings, illusionistic drawings and paintings, development of an arts program at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and stylized pan-Indian book designs, Hutchinsons analysis highlights the challenges inherent in merging modernist aesthetic discourses with progressive Indian agendas at the turn of the century. DeCoras varied activities and changing attitudes reveal the racial and aesthetic politics of modernity to be a field of contestation. Here, more than in any other chapter, we get an in-depth glimpse of one of the diverse relationships to mainstream culture that Hutchinson promises at the outset (5).

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By highlighting the various strands that comprise Hutchinsons engagement with modernity, I am not suggesting that they cannot productively coexist; on the contrary, the authors refusal to reduce modernity to a singular definition is an enriching element of the text, permitting a variety of subjects and objects to connect and at times conflict in unexpected and non-totalizing ways. The promise of The Indian Craze is to prevent modernity from appearing as an irrefutable historical development, unfolding in a linear timeline of its own creation. I say promise , because it is precisely this potential that is not fully realized in the book. Hutchinsons project begs for a sustained analysis of the relationships between spatial, temporal, aesthetic, and ideological dimensions of modernity, more fully accounting for their rise as a matter of contingency and contestation (as opposed to inevitability). As it stands, modern is a shifting descriptor, but its referent too often goes unperturbed. Or, to appeal to Hutchinsons landscape metaphor, modernity risks becoming the naturalized ground upon which indigenous and non-indigenous actors carry out their transcultural work. Still, Hutchinsons unprecedented attention to the locations of Native art during a formative period of early modernism should rightfully be understood as an opening, not a closure. Through rigorous engagement with these foundations, future scholars indebted to her work might begin to conceive of modernitys others as agents not just of the modernization process, but of a wider range of historical possibilities.

1) Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar , trans. Harriet de Ons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 97103. Originally published in Spanish in 1940 and in English in 1947.

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