"This pot was made before there was a Santa Fe Indian Market."
Review: Southwest pottery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery. Metropolitan Museum of Art, July 14th, 2023 - June 4th, 2024. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/grounded-in-clay
“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.” Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 7.
And, let’s face it, America’s got talent. Not for arguing well, no way, but for speaking differently. The signage for Grounded in Clay has the feel of hanging at a bar (meaning the bar) in Mosquero NM listening to some long-winded story:
“Anything can be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.”
Rorty again, and this is a stance, not a prescription. The organizers of this show have taken this stance. They’ve invited a group of Indigenous people to contribute to “the first community-curated Native American exhibition in the history of The Met.”
Here’s a story. The researcher’s come to the Rez to administer a test. He sits the kids around a table, each with a pencil and each with a questionnaire. He comes back after a few minutes, and they’re all puzzling over the same piece of paper. “You’re not supposed to collaborate!” he screams. The kids look totally confused: “But we’re cousins!”
So you have a Mogollon pot in a show that’s got Pueblo in its title, described by a Diné contributor. ‘Cause we’re all cousins.
Like Rorty says,
I have defined ‘dialectic’ as the attempt to play off vocabularies against one another, rather than to infer propositions from one another. […] The ironist’s preferred form of argument is dialectical in the sense that she takes the unit of persuasion to be a vocabulary rather than a proposition. Her method is redescription rather than inference… [p.78]
The vocabulary is when you talk like somebody who’s part of a group, not when you try to persuade someone. It’s when you put one statement up against another like a beer and a shot. This show picks up where another ground-breaking show left off: ART/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, curated by Susan Vogel, at The Center for African Art, New York, in 1988. The idea, then, was to show various groups of African artworks and artifacts, each according to a set proposition: all spears, arranged by shape. Or: pure, abstract form with dramatic lighting.
With Grounded it’s impossible to say what the narrative is, short of: here’s an interesting bunch of pots that got picked out by a bunch of friends between beers.
It’s what Rorty, quoting Milan Kundera, for an epigraph, calls
“The fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood”
You wanna own that truth? Take it outside.
WOID XXIII-21
July 26, 2023