Neither
heat nor being a woman nor an Indian nor a hot woman Indian artist would keep
Jaune from her appointed rounds. Movement seems to be key to her and her
work, movement from place to place, person to person, group to group, time to
time, painting to painting. Movement
inspires her, and she is peripatetic. We
asked what she’d been up to, and she eased into a monologue: there was a show, Common Ground, a few months ago in New York at the American Indian
Community House, with work by three Indians (Jaune, George Longfish, and Peter
Jamison) and work by three Anglos selected by them (Harmony Hammond, Paul
Brach, and Allan Gussow); her adventures with Coup Marks, a co-op organization
of Flathead Indian craftsman she founded, which she has had shows, this year in
Washington, D.C. and New York; the PBS film on her completed last year; fund
raising efforts for the Indian Reorganization Act, an upcoming lecture to a
group of anthropologists in Seattle; and her painting that, judging from the
amount of work in the studio, she’s doing plenty of.
We
knew Jaune, a mixture of French-Cree and Shoshone, was raised on the Flathead
Reservation in Montana, and that she often travels back to visit and attend
powwows. Coup Marks sounded curious, and
we asked her to elaborate:
“I
decided to set it up last fall, and I talked to the people about marketing, and
asked them to bring me their work. They
brought it to me in pockets. Safeway
bags, and a lot of it was kitschy. I had
to be diplomatic with them, pick what would go in New York, et cetera. What I want to do is instill contemporary,
marketable ideas on the reservation, get across that idea to them. I’m a bridge, a connector of people. The people are so poor, I want to create a
cottage industry there. But it’s
important that I eat potluck at home, and the next week have lunch in a fancy
restaurant with the director of public relations for Philip Morris. So many Indian professionals . . . I’m proud
of the number of Indian professionals – doctors, lawyers –but many of them
these days don’t go home, see the kitsch on the walls, the way they live.”
Stringing
ideas together like beads, Jaune continued:
“I’ve
been talking with Lucy Lippard (a feminist New York art writer and curator) and
she’s excited about doing an Indian kitsch show, maybe at P.S.1. I saw a pickup truck last year at Crow Fair
and the whole thing was totally
covered with beadwork. Think of it!
“My
point is I want people to know we’re alive!
Collectors only want the old stuff.
They don’t buy the contemporary stuff, some of which is so beautiful
(her voice slipping to a whisper), so well crafted. They keep talking about the Vanishing
Americans, but we’re everywhere, and we find one another. But we’re low-key, we don’t have a Martin
Luther King, and so we get overlooked.
“Some
people think I’m wasting my time doing this sort of thing, writing all the
letters I write. But this networking (an
example of newspeak, which we’ve been hearing frequently as 1984 approaches) is
important. I hear about their
loneliness, their jobs, alienation. A woman
who works on movie lots in L.A., a fisherman who wrote me – they don’t
understand that Indians cross all the lines, from the conservative Pueblos to
urban Indians. A lot of professional
Indian people I know carry medicine bags.
They still sing. It isn’t made
up, it’s authentic ritual that lives.
Some things change. You don’t
wear kilts or Pilgrim clothes anymore, so don’t expect me to grunt and wear
feathers. There’s body language that has
survived, a sense of humor that’s black.
In Denver, New York, I’ll find Indians or they’ll find me. It’s like a Jew is a Jew is a Jew. So getting around for me has been very
valuable. I talk at public schools,
colleges . . . It sounds like I don’t paint, but that’s what I do all day when
I’m here. I become a hermit. When I travel, I’m gone no more than four
days, and I’m like a whirling dervish while I’m away. I don’t know if I make any difference, but at
one high school I showed films on Oscar Howe (a pioneer contemporary Indian artist) and me, and slides,
and afterwards all the kids ran out of the room except for these five little
Indian kids who came up and asked if they could shake my hand.
(Jaune’s eyes quickly
filled with tears at the memory, and she went on.)
‘I
told them how long it took me to get through college, 22 years, that I mailed a
matchbook cover to the Famous Artist School, how hard I had to work to become
an artist. Some bubbles have to be
burst. So many young Indian artists when
they get out of I.A.I.A. (Institute of the American Indian Art, in Santa Fe)
thing they’ll be famous like Gorman and Scholder . . .”
She
mentioned several other ambitious projects – to instigate the first major
Indian Institute and Exhibition Hall in Washington, and curate a show of Native
American photographers (scheduled to be shown at the Southern Plains Museum in
Andarko, Oklahoma, in December), a fascinating project which, in light of the
Indian prejudice against the “Shadow Catcher,” will undoubtedly be
controversial. But underneath all her
projects is her fervent belief that Indian culture is alive and well and living
all over the place, and the idea that her personal and public power originates
in her work, her painting.
“I
talk to a lot of anthropologists, and I can’t make them understand that I’m as
authentic as those living at the Pueblos.
Because I live off the reservation and went to a university (she has a
M.A. from the University of New Mexico), doesn’t mean I’m vanishing! I’m here, and I’m giving back!” she said with
quiet fierceness. “Where my power comes
from is my work. If I could hook up with
a major publisher, I could generate money . . . the college at home (on the
Flathead reservation in Montana) needs so much money. But I haven’t been able to bastardize what I
believe about my work to generate money.
I’m mostly interested in originals, and my work has changed a lot, which
many dealers don’t like. I think it’s
research and development. “
Jaune’s
work has been evolving steadily in recent years. During her student days of the ‘60s and ‘70s,
her painting and sculpture contained decidedly Indian subjects but they were
executed, though skillfully, in a mainstream mode of contemporary realism. There are several examples of work from this
period in her home, including a Larry Riverish portrait of four Indians, one of
whom is only roughly sketched on raw canvas, and a life-sized sculpture of an
Indian Madonna with American Flag skirt, bird feather hands, and antique gold
framed portrait for a face.
In
the late ‘70s, however, Jaune began to find her singular voice. She simplified her drawing and began to
develop a vocabulary of a child-like pictographic symbols which she incorporated into abstract swatches
of color suggesting landscape. In her
series of drawings and paintings such as Wallowa Waterhole, Porcupine Ridge,
and Kalispell, the subjects of which are related thematically and emotionally
with places she was intimately associated with, often from childhood
experiences, she managed to fuse contemporary and ancient painting styles. The synthesis she has achieved in her style
yields work that is rife with associations.
Past and future vision combine to make a statement about the present;
urban Indian alienation, rural Indian poverty, and ancient Indian ritual work
side by side in her work to belie the notion of the vanishing Americans. Ledger book symbols become Cy Twombley, a
Blackfeet robe could well have been designed by Agnes Martin, the color fields
on a Hunkpapa drum are pure Rothko. Jaune’s
work is shaped by such ideas, and the result is art that speaks richly of the
artist’s vision of the world and her place in it. As she has said, “It’s like being able to
speak two languages and not finding the right word that is common to both to
express myself.”
Her
most recent series of paintings, Sites, which are on view this month at the
Marilyn Butler Gallery in Santa Fe, uses real and imagined archaeological sites
as the starting point for her work. They
are more abstract than most of her earlier paintings, and in the laying of
color and obscuring form, they are deeper.
She set the series about the studio, offered us soda and water, and
talked: “These aren’t realistic
paintings of sites, but the essence of my feeling about the site. I do love the land, and these are
landscapes. Usually they are
inhabited. They are not dead
places. The wind is moving, trees are
moving, anthills . . . there’s movement from present to past present to future. I compress time, but the work is about the
present. It’s like . . . Most Indian
people relate to the land, and they often talk about going home. That’s the deep attachment to where you’re
from. I think of the land as being
alive. It’s now, it’s my environment. I live in it.
“And
somehow my knowledge of art history adds to my sense of place. Going through Leonardo’s notebooks is like
sitting in Chaco Canyon. Each
contributes to a heightened sense of how things relate. We reach out behind and ahead, and find our
place in the midst of things.”
One
of the paintings, Mesa Verde,
features fields of white and green, and pictographic forms resembling shells,
corn, and a man dancing. “There’s a back
and forward sense of time,” she commented about the painting. “You find shells around here, shell fossils
up in the Sandias. I put a dancer in the
corn on one side, and these fossils from millions of years before on the other. So the dancer is young, very young by
comparison. I like that idea. It’s like a dry ocean here. It even smells like the ocean sometimes.
“This
one is the garbage dump,” she said of another, Pecos Ruin, “but it’s a site,
too. It has all the relics of
society. Here’s the brass bed, an old
rubber tire. It’s a romanticized garbage
dump, but that’s how it felt. Painting
is an adventure for me. It’s what I
uncover in the studio. By the time the
gallery opening comes, I’m already thinking about the next series, the next
adventure.”
Jaune’s
horse Cheyenne had been standing patiently at the studio door for half an hour
with his head in the room. A two-by-four
across the door frame keeps him from walking in. He clomped his right front hoof in an attempt
to get his share of his mistress’s attention.
She patted his head, kissed his nose, and fed him some broccoli. We asked if the horse in the dump painting
was Cheyenne:
“That’s
him. He’s in a lot of my paintings. He makes them alive, present.” We noted that it was true; Mesa
Verde, the one in the Site Series
without a horse, had an eerie floating quality peculiar to the series.
Digressing
from the subject of her work, we asked about the Charles Bronson poster hanging
prominently in the studio. Bronson does
not appear in the paintings. “He’s a
Mongolian, a Pole from Pittsburgh. I love
him. In the movies he’s always on the
side of the minority. I like him for
that reason, and in his films there’s a tinge of violence , he’s that silent
hero, invincible but offbeat.”
Cowboys,
Indians, and horses, three triggers to the imaginations of many American kids,
were the reality of Jaune’s childhood.
She told us that her father had no formal education and therefore
couldn’t hold a regular job, but he bought, sold, and traded horses – an old
Indian way of life – and rodeoed when he was a young man. At times, the family had as many as 40 head
of horses, and it’s not surprising that they appear so frequently in her
work. “Leonardo said that next to man,
the horse was the noblest creature,” she explained, “and they are wonderful to
draw.”
“Here’s
Cheyenne again,” she said, indicating another painting, Cottonwood Canyon, with rich and heavy cream and burgundy
paint. “This one is really Baroque, the
density and the royal colors. It’s
strange . . . See the vertical pole with the four black dots? Many societies put up poles to mark their
clan, where they live. The circle is for
the site, the kiva, for what was.”
Approaching the painting for a closer inspection, we noticed that Jaune
had collaged various materials onto the surface. “I use muslin or calico, things that ribbon
shirts are made of, or rice paper, things I like. Occasionally, I throw a paper towel in,
though don’t tell museum curators that.
I leave the structure underneath – drips from the early washes. It tells you what’s inside, how it was
constructed. And it reminds me, too, of
the texture of the rock walls around here, how strafed they are by the wind and
the sand. I get that tactile feeling of
landscape while I’m painting. It’s
rough, scarred.”
“These
are all landscapes,” we commented, “but you don’t put horizons in them.”
“I’ve
never painted them. I don’t know
why. Maybe it’s psychological. I’m tied to the earth, and not as concerned
with the sky. As (painter) Charles
Garabedian said, ‘The fun is wandering around in the fog with the cliff
nearby.’ I get so carried away with
painting and constructing paintings, and if I didn’t put the pictograph figures
in, they’d be totally abstract paintings.
I don’t attach rational meanings to the figures, and yet they’re
universal ways of talking with people. Wherever
you are, whoever you are, X marks the spot.
Often I’ll make a shape, a tool shape for example, and later I’ll find
out what it is in a book or something.
They are common bonds.”
Jaune
had spoken earlier about her social and political role as being a connector,
and it occurred to us that her paintings served as a bridge of sorts
themselves. Much of what she paints is
Indian in origin, but she is always trying to connect the ancient Indian forms
and meanings with the contemporary forms and meanings of cultures which,
ostensibly, are very different. We would
venture to say her purpose , in the current Site
paintings in particular, is to present views of the continuum of time and space
of which we are all a part, drops of water in a long river.
Often,
however, her own people do not appreciate, much less understand, what she’s
doing. Not long ago, Jaune showed one of
her works to an old woman on the Flathead Reservation. “What’s it good for?” the puzzled woman
asked. “That made me laugh,” Jaune said,
recalling the incident, and it’s not surprising, given her response, that she
does not consider herself to be an Indian painter. The analogy she drew was with James Joyce,
who, though an Irish writer, was not fully understood or appreciated by his own
people.
Nevertheless,
she is fiercely proud of her heritage and the aesthetic contributions that her
people have made to art. Jaune glories in making comparisons between Paul Klee
and an old Naskapi bag, for example.
“The Indian has no word for art, and that’s an important distinction,”
she said. “Your shoes, leggings . . .
something was added to them to make them beautiful. Art was on everything. They would make beautiful little cases to hold
their ration cards which they used to buy their wormy beef!”
Jaune
knew at the age of six that she wanted to be an artist. What she loved about art then, some 38 years
ago, is what inspires her to work today.
“It’s the feelings, the pleasure of drawing or painting, that going into
your own world, closing out the outside.
When I’m working, I’m literally out to lunch, I don’t know what day it
is. There are classical and Romantic
artists, and this may be simplistic, but there are those who know exactly what
they’re doing and those like me, who don’t.
Not everything comes out right, it’s not all art, but I’m pleased and I
know it’s good when the work talks back.
That makes the outside, the other reality, more intense, too.”
Whether
inside or out, she relishes intensity.
Another aspect of outside reality with which Jaune has a passionate
connection is feminism. She first felt
prejudice toward her as a woman artist when she was a teenager in art school,
and a teacher told her that, although she could draw better than the men in the
school, she could never become a painter.
“That was hard,” she said in a soft quivering voice. “But times have changed. Women have pushed. If it weren’t for Lita Albuquerque, Judy
Chicago, Lucy Lippard, Jennifer Bartlett, Joan Mitchell, and others, I’d still
be making things and giving them away. I
know these people, and I feel close to them.
I wasn’t in the feminist movement, I guess because I was fighting my own
battle of survival at the time. But I
understood it and what they’ve done for women artists. Where I was, there was no movement. I was raised by my father as a person, not a
woman. I helped him put in fence
posts! Most Indian women are raised to
be independent for economic reasons. The
conflicts I found were later, as an adult, and that was their problem, though I
had to deal with the consequences. So
you can’t really call me a feminist. I
don’t know what you would call me. How
about humanist?”
Stephen
Parks, August, 1983
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