BWW Reviews: The Epic Sweep of THE PLAINS INDIANS: ARTISTS OF EARTH AND SKY

There is much about how The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky is set out that summons the vastness, the melancholy, and the vitality of this exhibition's subject. And on account of the subtle treatment that this subject and its aura demand, setout is paramount. The material that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has gathered is almost poetic all on its own: here you will find war clubs, ceremonial robes, carved pipes, and feathered headdresses produced by the Native Americans who inhabited, and in some cases still inhabit, the Great Plains. Such material could nonetheless start to lose its poetry and its integrity in a cursory, corny-captions and rows-of-cases presentation. We have all seen artifacts vaguely like these--have perhaps seen too many of them, where pop culture has gotten its hands on American Indian culture--and perhaps we all need to be reminded what we are really looking at.

What we are looking at is a stoic yet touching display of over 130 items. Despite its reputation for artifact-littered sprawl, the Met has actually become phenomenally good at matching its artifacts to its installations. This was the case with Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age, which followed a meandering structure that, by turns, evoked an Assyrian palace and a mythical labyrinth. This was the case with Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry, which echoed the elegant bombast of Coecke's compositions with its towering halls and deep-perspective layout. This, undeniably, is the case in Artists of Earth and Sky. For the exhibition backdrop, the organizers have chosen a pulsing blue sky--for the floorplan, a wander and return and wander forth again arrangement that nonetheless has a lucidly chronological organization. Wandering through Iowa or Montana may feel a little like this, but one way or another the items on display feel right at home. The natural is reconciled with the manmade in the decorated hides and glass bead fauna of the Great Plains, just as it is in the indoor vista that the Met has crafted with complete earnestness and infused with transporting magic.

The oldest artifacts in Artists of Earth and Sky lay out the fundamentals of Plains Indian culture and spirituality: from these creations and these principles, the rest of the exhibition unfolds with easy grandeur. Right near the entrance, you will find small stone renderings of buffalo, along with ancient pipes--some as old as 100 B.C.--that assume the shapes of brutally harmonious human effigies. Not much else survives from the early stages of Plains Indian culture, with the exception of the rock carvings that can be found in Wyoming, Montana, and elsewhere. Fortunately, a fair number of garments, pipes, and headdresses from the 18th century forward have survived, and some of these are showstoppers--most obviously, a robe that bears a the image of a mystical bird, that approaches geometric abstraction years before European artwork did, and that will stop you dead and hold you in contemplation.

For some of the longest-lived tribes of the Great Plains, the 19th century was a time of both transformation and tension. Horses entered the visual universe of these Native Americans and the buffalo (at least on the basis of this exhibition) were relegated to the background. How powerfully the horse activated the Plains Indian imagination is evidenced by a wooden horse effigy from 1880: the animal is depicted in a purposeful, coolly furious leap, its neck elongated and its four legs swept swiftly back. There is an elegiac air to much of this segment of the Met's show--the railroads encroaching, the buffalo verging on extinction, even that relentless wooden horse riddled with painted wounds. Yet the artists of earth and sky themselves pushed into new media. Notebooks and sheets of paper offered a new format for the rebus-like, at times brutal graphic arts of the Plains tribes. And by the mid 1800s, glass beads had assumed a considerable importance in garment decoration; by the end of the century, they would become absolutely essential.

The early 20th century found the Plains Indians playing new and in some cases more elaborate variations on old techniques and even older motifs: feather headdresses, geometric patterning, and glass beads everywhere. Although the show's turn-of-the-century section offers a few different sources of allure--including a glass bead valise and an enormous Lakota headdress--it also serves as a pivot to the final, contemporary section of Artists of Earth and Sky. Here you will find bright and engaging items in a traditional vein-a powwow dress, a horse mask--along with larger and darker statements about the uneasy place of Native American heritage in today's America. Bently Spang's War Shirt (assembled from low-key personal photographs), Arthur Amoitte's Wounded Knee III (which uses mixed media to highlight an infamous massacre of Plains Indians) and Dana Claxon's Rattle (which fuses traditional rhythms and meditative video art) all exist in a buzzing space between past and present. Such works are perhaps too obvious, perhaps too accessible--select a few poignant Plains Indian themes, knock them into shape using techniques from the sort-of-experimental artistic mainstream. Still, there is an earnestness to these last entries, and an air of reassurance. Without losing sight of their culture's past tragedies, the newer artists of the Plains have found a secure place in the artistic present.

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