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Fearing for Wolves
John Haberin New York City
Alan Michelson, Mitch Epstein, and Kent Monkman
Alan Michelson has little reason to fear for wolves, but he can still evoke their fearsome power. They gather in darkness, taking on the sheen of night.
As a Native American, Michelson has every reason to fear for nature and for his nation. His videos tease out the parallels, not simply accusing, but drawing one in. He might have drawn in Mitch Epstein as well, for photographs of threats to the environment and the peoples who embrace it, literally and figuratively. Their lands, protests, and rituals have rarely looked so desperate for warmth and tree hugging so bare of comforts—and yet the flag still flies. Last, anyone who braves the winter chill sweeping across Fifth Avenue deserves a titanic welcome, and the Met provides one with two paintings by Kent Monkman in the museum's Great Hall. 
At twenty-two feet each, they present the arrival of European settlers in North America and its aftermath.
They tell, too, of Native American displacement. Yet they begin with Welcoming the Newcomer and end with Resurgence of the People, and they see the histories of two peoples as intertwined. A Cree artist of part Irish descent based in Toronto, Monkman sees his own history as tied up in Western art as well. In their references, the two works include a bit of a survey course at that. Once the Met had architecture by Calvert Vaux, the landscape architect for Central Park, and later extensions simply enclosed it. Yet glimpses peek out here and there to this day, much like past art and indigenous tradition.
Sacred ground
Alan Michelson may never be entirely at home among wolves, but he cannot tear himself away. Nor can the viewer, but as a great deal more of an outsider. One can imagine oneself within their slowly moving circle, uncertain whether to flee in terror or to share in the magic. A book called Wolf Nation has told their story—of sacred ground, exploitation, and extermination. Native Americans regarded them with reverence, and if European settlers instead struck out, it was not often in self-defense rather than for their pelts. For Michelson, a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, the story applies to his ancestors as well. He means it as an accusation, but it takes its power from that fraught circle of reverence and revulsion.
The book lends its name to four videos at the Whitney. He might think of it as his nation as well, although he is in fact a Mohawk. He still feels the terror and the magic, as first the darkness and then the pillagers bore in. A second video recalls a literal scorched-earth campaign—the Sullivan expedition in 1779, as troops under John Sullivan and James Clinton burned and plundered Native American lands, not to mention Native American waters. They conducted only one major battle, but it was enough to uproot the Iroquois confederacy by destroying its livelihood. No wonder the Haudenosaunee referred to George Washington, who organized the campaign, as Town Destroyer.
Like the white armies, Michelson is relentless. In Town Destroyer, a colorful and unruly growth spews out from a bust of Washington, set amid the elegance of Mount Vernon. I would have said that Washington was hardly the worst of sinners against the indigenous people, certainly not compared to Andrew Jackson and two centuries of terror—and that, after slavery, this was not the worst of his sins. Historians argue that the Haudenosaunee fought on the side of Loyalists, Washington's real target, while the Six Nations fought on both sides. No matter, as Jaune Quick-to-See Smith insists as well, as it was enough to do them all in. I may not have completely changed my mind, but I am shaken in my beliefs all the same.
I am also shaken emotionally, because this artist challenges the viewer with the sheer pleasure of his images. In Sapponckanikan, Lenape for a tobacco field, greenery once again flourishes at the foot of Ganesvoort Street—but this time within the Whitney. A monitor in the lobby reimagines its sunlit surroundings. Maybe the Lenape cultivated tobacco not for commerce but as a sacred herb, because the sacred is not simply natural. It looks ready for curing and smoking all the same. It could pass for pot at that.
In Shattemuc, pleasure deepens into a different kind of reverence, one that feels familiar today. The video, named for the Hudson, takes one on a slow ride downriver. It cannot help documenting the cruel human footprint along the way, especially close to New York City. It looks idyllic all the same, and it makes one feel a part of the natural flow out to sea. I have felt that way myself after numerous trips to Dia:Beacon, the sculpture center at Storm King, Hudson Valley MOCA, or the castle that Thomas Cole built to convey his vision. A prison, hospitals, housing, and industry are all the more visionary at night.
Phone apps make two of the works interactive, although they do not, for my money, come all that much more alive. (Washington's bust and a tobacco plant or two are good enough for me.) The works may also elide their mixed allegiances. Maybe Sapponckanikan was a sacred herb, but it is still addictive, and a tobacco company would love to make it look so healthy. Still, Michelson understands that anyone can be tarnished by the sacred. He counts on that for his visual impact. Drifting visually down the Hudson, I could feel myself coming home.
A fateful embrace
Tree hugging sounds like one of those cute and cuddly things that coastal liberals do, but might it not be just a little belligerent? The teen in a photograph by Mitch Epstein sure looks that way, from his pursed lips to his stubborn hold on a trunk. He belongs to the Sunrise Movement, which describes itself in martial terms as "an army of young people to make climate change an urgent priority." He may seem at first to be wearing boxing gloves, but he has already taken the gloves off. The red belongs to a thick pipe enclosing both arms for extra security. He and the tree, like humanity and the earth, are locked in a fateful embrace.
That embrace is clear even before humanity appears, in two of a dozen large-format photos. They belong to the tradition of nature as comforting and awe inspiring, as for Ansel Adams, and of documentary photography as disconcerting and disorienting, as for Garry Winogrand. Rubble rises up almost to the faces on Mount Rushmore, as if to bury them under construction, and they themselves are shrouded in mist. A mountain and the vast Southwestern plain leading toward it look awesome enough, but more distant cacti look like gaunt, crippled men. Utility poles and wires in the foreground, below eye level, leave one uncertain where one stands. One can see where Epstein stands all the same.
He calls the show "Property Rights," as in corporate and private interests that sneer at tree huggers, but he has other rights in mind as well. They include tribal rights in North Dakota, where a pipe like that on the boy's arms might carry precious water or Canadian oil in defiance of sacred land. They include what the Sunrise Movement would see as rights to a greener future. Even in so small a show, Epstein has crossed America, like Robert Frank or Lee Friedlander in "America by Car" in search of them all. Property for him, public or private, is always contested ground, much as for such other artists of Native American or Canadian descent as Gabrielle l'Hirondelle Hill and Esteban Cabeza de Baca. Once people enter, it is also uncertain ground.
Who is that woman peering through a fence? From its sheen or the bag on one arm, she might be checking out a shop window, but the fence divides Arizona from Mexican at Nogales. Who are the five bodies in heavy winter clothes in a loose procession across a stark but rich winter landscape? A colorful emblem in the leader's arms identifies them as Native Americans, in a "prayer walk," but they could be marching in defiance or in mourning. Two men seated beside their piled-up belongings and a makeshift shed might pass for good old boys. Yet one of them, too, has Native American features, and their protest signs cry out for "water as life."
Silos and tents in a distance shot add up more to a mess than a village, like roosting places in a larger clump of trees in Pennsylvania. And Epstein has a knack for the shifting border between chaos and community. It is what makes for contested ground. On a wall, old notices have become a thick, torn mass of black and white. In a refugee camp at El Paso, only the bottom of two beds is made, although the top, too, has a towel on its pillow for the next dispirited guest. Here two is definitely not company.
Still, the land rises above both chaos and community. The men at their shed really should throw away some of their crap. A third pure landscape captures mesas in Petrified Forest National Park, in Arizona. What they lack in vegetation they make up for in pale blue, pink, and white curves, almost like freshly fallen snow. A flag hung upside-down marks a veterans' protest at a Sioux reservation, but Epstein does not dwell on their anger. It is not at half mast, and it still flutters proudly in the wind.
Welcome to the Met
With its crowds and sheer size, the Great Hall offers at best an imposing welcome. High ticket prices for admission are now mandatory for anyone from outside New York State. Monkman must compete with two imposing statues as well—an pharaoh in ancient Egypt carved nearly four thousand years ago and the goddess Athena. Still, the Met is putting art on view for free. It follows its first commission for the building's façade, by Wangechi Mutu, and it is just catching up with free lobby galleries at the new Whitney Museum and the expanded Museum of Modern Art. (The lobby at the Whitney's former home is now free, too, but as a bookstore for the Met Breuer.)
Europeans here sure need a welcome. Their ship has vanished, and survivors are just now swimming ashore. A few still cling to an overturned lifeboat, and a black man is still in chains. Indigenous people do their best to pull them onto a truly green world, although one points his bow and arrow to the sky. Before long, they will have to fight back for every inch. Still, Monkman insists, it is not just their story.
He calls the commission mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), after the Native American term for the newcomers. And by the second scene they have the upper hand. Now the Native peoples are at sea, crowding into a lifeboat. Europeans armed with automatic rifles guard the channel from a rock raised above the waters, with no other land in sight. Then again, one can just as easily take the canvases in reverse order, from shipwreck to shore. In that sequence, light breaks increasingly through the stormy sky.
Monkman further disrupts chronology by pairing his figures. Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, his cross-gendered alter ego, rescues a settler in one painting and has the helm of the lifeboat in the other. A black slave becomes a doctor rescuing an ashen face from the sea. Three women on the lifeboat attest to a birth, while a woman on land is dying—or just sexually aroused. The paintings slip in and out of the present, too, as with the longbow and military-grade weapons. Miss Chief (love it!) wears high heels, but little else, and a drowning man a necktie.
Tattoos could refer to present-day fashion or tradition, while the lifeboat could belong to today's refugee crisis and rising seas to climate change. Monkman wants to have it all, so long as it is all politically correct. He also wants to claim art history, especially Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Miss Chief at the helm riffs on Washington Crossing the Delaware, the 1851 painting by Emanuel Leutze in the Met's American wing, and a statue of Victory by Augustus Saint-Gaudens—who also, it turns out, sculpted Hiawatha. Other poses quote John Singleton Copley, Eugène Delacroix, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Gustave Courbet. Permit me if I cannot also help seeing Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault.
Monkman is a savvy student, from his bright acrylic colors to his command of foreshortening and anatomy, but still at heart a student even in his fifties. His wooden boat people are mostly wooden and, like the packed lifeboat, over the top. In the real world, these figures would overturn it—even if Leutze and others before him happily looked the other way. The trouble with wanting to have it all is that it all may not add up. Still, he has every right to locate his history of Turtle Island, or North America, in the island of Manhattan. Even as a Canadian, he can hold out a welcome.
Alan Michelson ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through January 12, 2020, Kent Monkman at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 19, 2021. Mitch Epstein ran at Sikkema Jenkins through October 5, 2019.