ABSTRACT
Kent Monkman is a Canadian Cree artist initially trained as an illustrator but he has expanded into the fields of painting, sculptural installation, film/video, and performance art. Since 2004, Monkman has developed and performed his alter ego persona, named ‘Miss Chief Eagle Testickle’ for video, photographic, painting, and performance works that often challenge and confront historical representations of the Indian subject normalised within nineteenth-century Euro-American paintings as primitive, savage, and vanquished. These oppressive categorisations were constructed primarily through the white, male, European gaze by explorers of the New World who painted American Indian subjects and landscapes for posterity’s sake, even as the process of colonialism threatened Indian existence. Monkman’s knowledge of the ordered hierarchies created within these visual fields permits a post-colonial reinterpretation of history that troubles notions of Indian identity created by imperialist narratives focused on the ‘disappearance’ and genocide of Native peoples. This process of interrogation, or unsettlement, is linked to recent theorisations of settler colonialism that examine power relations to reveal ‘a larger project of disappearance constitutive of ongoing processes of settlement’ (Rowe and Tuck, 2016: 7). Monkman’s recreation of nineteenth-century romantic landscapes and his staging of ‘Miss Chief’ within those spaces reveal the artist’s turn toward a critical practice combining institutional critique with different media in dialogue with ‘theatricality’. In Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, scholar, Shannon Jackson discusses works like Monkman’s that address political issues but differ in their themes and assumptions about the role of aesthetics in social inquiry (Tuck, 2016: 14). In contemporary art, this ‘social turn’. as Jackson describes it, is hard to define because, like performance, it challenges strict divisions about where the art ends and the rest of the world begins (15). This ambivalent space is where Miss Chief Eagle Testickle functions as representative of the ‘two-spirit’ person once celebrated in pre-colonial Native societies but now mostly theorised within post-colonial queer methodologies by Native and non-Native scholars alike.
