Sometimes artwork can be difficult to see. There are times when I have looked at a work and been unable to understand why the artist has gone to so much trouble. Most of the time, when this happens, I am missing something. Certainly, I am looking at the work—I am noticing its physical properties, thinking about how it was made, placing it within my own previous contexts—but I am not seeing it. The source of the work lies in my perceptual blind spot.
Such was the case when I first encountered Dylan Miner’s exhibition, Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag (Native Kids Ride Bikes). The exhibition had all the trappings of a typical sculptural installation, with the bikes displayed on shallow pedestals, preparatory drawings installed on the wall and a video describing their creation projected on the other wall. The description of the project places it clearly within the art-theoretical category of “social practice,” in which the social interactions surrounding the project are often more important than the physical remains of that interaction.
The social interactions at the center of Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag were between Miner, who is a member of the Métis people, and native children at local schools in Michigan where Miner teaches. His project also contained an aspect of community-building: Students learned about the culture of their people and were introduced to native concepts and values that could not be discussed in a public school classroom. They spent time working together to make these objects, and connections necessarily formed between the students, the artists and others involved.
There is a temptation to view these connections as the work itself: The work was done in a particular arena, and the physical object produced is simply “the result of this encounter.” Within this view, the encounter is of primary importance and the art object is of secondary importance. Miner himself, in his artist’s talk on April 18, said that he considered his “work” to be the time spent with the students collaborating on the project. And this, too, was my initial reading of the work in the museum.
But I do not think that this is the most important aspect of this work. For me, it took something the artist said in his talk to open up a more significant interpretation. As he introduced himself, Miner took a moment to acknowledge the peoples who originally lived in this area. He said that it was something he had been taught to do. The nod of respect to the native inhabitants of the now-thoroughly developed university-owned parcel of land upon which he spoke was both humble and humbling. It contained within it an acknowledgement of a history that we all know, but for the most part choose to forget, to overlook, to ignore.
That moment remained with me, and it later became clear that the real work in Miner’s project—for the audience who encounters it in a museum—is to make visible a people (or their history) who have become invisible. The tremendous failure of justice that persists in European and American dealings with native peoples is hard to look at, so most people ignore it. At the center of Miner’s work, it seems to me, is an attempt to present the face of that legacy so that it can be seen and acknowledged.
The low-rider bicycle is a contemporary and urban cultural artifact shaped by hip-hop culture—it is deeply tied to the spaces in which Miner’s collaborators live. By taking these bikes and making them visibly “native,” Miner and his collaborators show themselves to be actors within this contemporary urban culture—not relics of a lost historical era. That these particular people made these particular things means that I cannot confront their existence through a romantic or historicizing lens. Instead, I am required to look at my contemporaries, recognize their roots, acknowledge the historical injustices and acknowledge the ways these are perpetuated through current political structures.
As this aspect of Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag has become clearer to me, I see Miner’s project more and more in the light of James Baldwin’s characterization of the artist’s mission in his 1962 essay, The Creative Process, as he outlines the artist’s duty to reveal the interior of the self, both personal and national: “We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations.”
The significance of telling the truth about a nation’s past is that this history is inflected through its current citizens. And to stand in proper relationship to these citizens, citizens who have suffered from historical injustice, I must first face them as my contemporaries—that is, I must see them. It seems to me that the promise of Miner’s work, as it moves about in the sphere of art museums and galleries, is to make possible this kind of visibility. But I must also ask the question: If some historical wrong has been done, and if that historical wrong continues to wound this person I see before me, what would be a fitting penance? What would reconciliation look like?
The low-rider bikes, insofar as they attempt to hold together the contemporary moment, historical tradition and an acknowledgement of historical injustice, are working to give a shape to a potential space for genuine recovery. The punch of the exhibition and talk, for me, is to demand that I face that question. How do I respond?
Brian Prugh is a graduate student studying painting at the University of Iowa. He also writes art criticism for the Iowa City Arts Review, found online at iowacityartsreview.com.
