Episode 042 Alan Michelson

Show Notes

This week we're back in the studio visiting an artist. Alan Michelson is a New York based artist and Mohawk member of the six nations of the grand river, a Haudenosaunee community in Southern Ontario. Alan is an astute and passionate student of history – an incredible fountain of historical facts, figures, and stories. His public art, installations, and time-based media works serve as moments where archival, appropriated, and newly captured imagery blend and give us a lens into the latest focus of Alan’s voracious appetite for history, often surfacing indigenous voices, perspectives, and truths that have been silenced for far too long. Coincidentally this episode is being released the week of the 146th anniversary of the Battle of the Greasy Grass, which Alan takes as his subject in two pieces of his we discuss in-depth, and which are currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum in the exhibition Mountain / Time.

Links from the conversation with Alan
> https://www.alanmichelson.com/
> https://www.billionoysterproject.org/
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/arts/design/alan-michelson-oysters-moma-ps1.html
> https://www.aspenartmuseum.org/exhibitions/319-mountain-time

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Transcript 

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past, present and future of art and technology. And this week we are back in the studio, visiting with an artist. 

[00:00:18] Alan: Hi, I'm Alan Michaelson. I'm a New York based artist and Mohawk member of the six nations of the grand river, which is a Haudenosaunee community in Southern Ontario. 

[00:00:29] Ben: I had the great pleasure of meeting Alan for the first time recently, and just knew that we had to have him on the show. Alan is an astute and truly obsessive student of history. He is an absolute fountain of historical facts, figures and stories, and his work reflects this, his public art installations, and time-based media works serve as moments where archival appropriated and newly captured imagery, blend, and often surface indigenous voices, perspectives and truths that have been silenced for far too long. In our chat you'll hear us talk about two pieces that Alan has in a show right now at the Aspen Art Museum called Mountain Time and I wanted to give a huge shout out to the curator of that show. The one and only Chrissie Iles famous of course, primarily for her appearance on episode seven of this show. Give it a listen if you haven't already it's Chrissie's curatorial work that brought Alan and I together. So credit where credit is due, thanks Chrissie. 

Before we dive in, I want to send a huge shout out and thank you to all of you that are leaving glowing reviews for the show. It's always great to hear from all of you and your reviews, really help other people discover the show, which in turn helps in my fundraising efforts to ensure that we have a budget to equitably compensate artists. If you haven't reviewed the show yet, I hope you'll take a second to do so and if you leave a comment on your review, you might just hear on the air like this one from the one and only Jon Ippolito: " the art world can be a mysterious place to outsiders, but these conversations illuminate the many paths that can lead to a role in media conservation. They also bring to light the fascinating conundrums faced by a modern conservator as well as the many urgent reasons we need more of them". Thanks, Jon for the kind words now, without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Alan Michelson. 

[00:02:21] Alan: As far back as I can remember, I did some form of art. I was always drawn to it. and I always, drew and painted and, um, was usually recognized for it, you know, in classes and things, in my elementary school, which was a short walk from my house. I was once tasked, and it got me out of class which was amazing, tasked with using a pattern, cutting up silhouettes out of black construction paper silhouettes of Washington and Lincoln, which were then installed in all of the windows of the school. So that was like my first public artwork. And, uh, I was quite proud of that. And, uh, was encouraged by my teachers and family. And at 7 I took my first art lessons at a local museum. And the local museum was. A converted mansion that once belonged to one of the mill owners. So my early life, I grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts which was on the Connecticut river and chosen at that location to be a city because of the Hadley falls, which were a source of water power for mills, originally textile mills. One of the mill owners mansion's was, you know, one of these houses that had a name, it was called Wistariahurst and it was, converted into the local museum. And so I get dropped off there for my art lesson and I'd walk up a driveway that was paved with river stones that had fossilized dinosaur footprints embedded in them. And I'd walk into this cabinet of curiosities, sort of, you know, Adam's Family like mansion where there would be like a room full of arrowheads, a Hudson river school painting and a stuffed Bobcat, you know, it was just like everything, art and you know, what they were calling natural history, and everything else, all combined. And I think that really had an effect on me because I've always been interested in the past and history. and I think as a, young impressionable child, those sorts of experiences really left an impression. I have a sense of time that is really quite active and a lot of my work deals with the past as a real sort of place. I've been concentrating more in the sort of American time, you know, the last 200, 250 years sorta trying to trace it's real history as opposed to the myths that have been um, standing in for it for all that time.

There's an irony in that I went to a very classical, supposedly the oldest public school in America, Boston Latin, which was on Avenue Louis Pasteur right by the Gardner museum. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but a very wealthy Bostonian patroness of the arts built a pretty authentic looking and seeming a Florentine palace around the corner facing this park called the Fens and. Just across from that was the Museum of Fine Arts Boston on the other side and the museum school. So I spent six years at Boston, Latin very classical high school. It was all male at the time. And I had my eyes set on going to Columbia as an undergraduate and possibly becoming a writer. I continued to draw and paint during those years and I think I contributed a few illustrations to the school magazine and things like that, but there wasn't really an established art program and I didn't seek one out. I was just, drawing in charcoal on my own and things like that, you know, I'd copy posters of the Beatles, and you know it was like really primitive stuff, but you know, I could draw and I kept doing it, but I, I had my eyes on a different life and once I was in New York I was just overwhelmed by possibilities and eventually dropped out and needed to sort of figure out things which I eventually did. I moved back to new England, but to Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Southern Maine, where I lived for a few years while I was sort of figuring out what I wanted to do. And I just you know, I did a lot of photography in those days and also drawing and worked for state nonprofit arts organization. I sort of ran their gallery and their art rental program, they used to place members art in corporate offices and things like that. And there was a educational exhibition that went around the state that I would actually literally drive in a van with you know, these portable walls that I would set up. and I'd book local artists members to give artists demonstrations and talks to the local high schools.

So that, that gave me a pretty good overview of the life. And, you know, as it existed in this very provincial setting, and and so I applied to the museum school and got in and and went back to Boston and stayed there. Uh, for about 10 years. So I went to the museum school for studio and Tufts, granted a BFA in conjunction with the Boston Museum School. So my early art training you know, after my seven year old experience was the museum school. I emerged as a painter actually. I tried a bunch of things. I worked in different media when I was an art student and I eventually sort of settled on painting and I was making these, you know, large abstract paintings sort of based on landscapes and rented a studio. My first studio was a couple of blocks away from my apartment in Cambridge. And did that for several years. You know, uh, first exhibitions outside of art school were as a painting. And, um, you know, I got my first NEA visual artists fellowship as a painter and so forth. So I really thought I was a painter at the time, but, um, you know, I felt confined by it. I was initially unsatisfied with sort of romantic aspect of it, even though I was drawn to it, I also was critical of it at the same time and I was starting to feel that the urgency of events in the world required a reorientation away from abstraction away from a sort of relationship to nature that didn't take into account the actual state of nature these days, nature under extreme stress. And so, my being in art school coincided with the move away from abstract painting and abstract art toward art that had more explicit content that more represented, you know, notational art, the picture generation and so forth. And I felt that as very liberating at the time I felt like there was too much that had been excluded and sort of spiritualized by abstract art. And I felt like I needed to try to you know, reckon with some of these issues of the day through more explicit means, and and at the same time I was playing around with collage and construction and ultimately I found installation to be a very attractive proposition. Just getting off of the wall and into the space. And I also found site-specific installation to be even more interesting because it focused itself around something real. And there was a sort of a challenge of that, that I really took to. One of my first jobs out of art school was as a cover designer for a really small book publisher in Harvard square and , the process was I'd be, you know, assigned a book and they were mainly scholarly books who subjects were as, somewhat opaque to me, but in order to try to represent, the book, I would have to read some of it. And I found that to be a very interesting challenge and one that I wanted to keep that I carried over into my art. You know, starting off with something like a site and then so instead of reading the book and coming up with that, visual image mixed with type that would, stand for the book, I was starting to read sites, reading, land, reading landscapes, and coming up with form to try to express what I understood about those sites and try to connect the sites with their own histories which were in contemporary America usually invisible and you know, we exist in this very contemporary world where the history is buried. And a lot of times the history is buried because it's so awful, you know? It's not like I was looking for, let me look for some really awful stuff to dredge up. It was just that when I would look at one of these things the stuff would be there. and I felt like, the responsibility somehow to the real, you know, to try to be as faithful as I could, to I could learn about a site. Both in terms of what I sort of selected to represent it, but also the means that I chose to represent it, which would often suggest themselves, you know, the research with somehow lead to some nuggets that would then sort of suggest a possible form and material for the work. I worked in everything from cast concrete to etched glass, to, super large scale, like a permanent public monument, that's over 5,000 square feet to, much smaller works. But usually my work is pretty, pretty good size. And usually it's, drawing on the power of, recognition, the power of sight. That also probably stems back to my childhood and my fascination with time. I remember being taken on the Boston, they call it the freedom trail, and it's a trail, outlined in brick in the sidewalk where you were directed to Boston's historical monuments things like in this old south meeting house, the old provincial state house. And one of the sites was the site of the Boston massacre. When you know, which occurred, I think in 1770, it was one of the things that set off the Bostonian's against king George and the. And the British empire and the way it was, the way it was commemorated was very minimal, but very powerful. It was just a change of pavement. So deep in the sort of cavernous Boston financial center, which has become only more cavernous and, higher buildings and so forth since I was a kid you know, the tarmac suddenly yields to cobblestone and there's a, decent size, cobblestone circle that's marking the spot where the Boston massacre occurred. And that also really stayed with me. The power of just not there being some sort of, uh, Melodramatic monument with people being shot or anything like that. It was just this very subtle, but very powerful marking of memory. I've tried to you know, relate some of these histories, but in a way that is somewhat minimal, somewhat restrained that allows people space to consider and reflect. And um, that's what I've been doing for the last 30 something years, you know?

[00:14:10] Ben: So far you've been, you know, in talking about your work in these early years, you're talking about concrete, you're talking about installations, glass, fast forward to today a good deal of your work involves media. Of course. So I guess, what was it that eventually drew you to working with this.

[00:14:30] Alan: I like photography for its beauty and its honesty, it's realism and usefulness as a record or a document. You know, when you're challenging myth, that's long past for history. I think it's important to deploy fact and not fiction against it. Deploying fiction against fiction to me, it's not helpful. And photography is a medium of fact, it's a medium of the archive. It's reportorial rather than expressionistic. Certainly it can express things, but it's not expressionistic in the way that a painting would be. Another thing about working in video and photo based work is that it's it's the popular medium of our time. And everyone is versed in its particular language of image and soundtrack of telling a story through edits. And so which makes it at least potentially accessible to a broad public and as a time-based medium, it's a good medium for the contemplation of time and making inform, making connections between the spacial and the temporal, which is pretty much my project.

[00:15:38] Ben: Yeah, so you and I just recently got to know each other through a show at the Aspen art museum, of course, curated by our mutual friend, Chrissie Isles and that show features two pieces of yours. So I thought that that might be a nice place to begin to dig into some of your pieces to give our listeners a sense of your work. So could you give us a little, virtual walking tour of that installation that's up in Aspen right now? What will listeners see if they were to encounter it?

[00:16:07] Alan: Well, if they start on the ground floor they'll actually probably enter through the gallery that my work is in, and they'll see two suspended textiles, one a landscape oriented sewn canvas, and the other, a vertically oriented Hudson's bay blanket, one of those old ones that were this bright scarlet red with the two black stripes, onto which are projected video related to the most famous battle and nearly the last of the so-called Indian wars that the United States waged against native nations from its inception for land. The one in my pieces was the battle of the Greasy Grass, better known as the battle of the Little Big Horn or Custer's Last Stand, which occurred on June 25th, 1876, nearly 150 years ago. Interestingly, it was also a battle in which the US army was defeated in a route in which Custer and his entire battalion were killed. But the battle was the result of the U the treaty of 1868, which guaranteed the Lakota people, their sacred Black Hills, you know, as long as the sky was blue and water flowed, that sort of language. But it, didn't last that long. It lasted like six years. And when Custer was assigned to an expedition in 1874 through the black Hills and discovered gold, that was the end of the treaty. They made the decision to violate the treaty, which then, you know, set up conflict. And so Custer was assigned the job of bringing in the recalcitrant chiefs, like Sitting Bull, who were with their nations and wanting to stay living the way they had always lived, you know, as free in their homelands hunting Buffalo and living in villages. They didn't want to come in and be confined on reserves and be subject to the whims and the corruption that existed in the Indian agencies in those days in terms of food and supplies that were promised them in treaties. So, to me, it was an example since this show is taking place in the west where I hardly ever show, Chrissie thought you know, this would be an appropriate choice. So the blanket piece came first and I did that for a show in, um, early 2021 at the Elizabeth Foundation here in New York that Christopher Green curated called speculations on the infrared. And so I made a new work that is a sort of pendant to that one on the blanket for this exhibition and which is very much the way I've worked over my career is when I've been invited to participate in exhibitions I often have the opportunity to make new work. You know, the curators have had faith in me and have supported, my making a new work for their shows and the works are usually then very contextualized within the theme of the show. And so for Mountain / Time, it's just, you know, looking at the west as a place of conduct station of conflict with its native peoples, you know, and using this, very well-known battle to be the vehicle of considerations of, the dispossession of native people, of literally millions of square miles of territory and, um, you know, in converting healthy, independent people into a dependent unhealthy ones. The myth of American history is that it's all been for the good and that most people prosper here, but, you know, the actual reality is, is that it's been a nightmare for a lot of people, not just native people, but for African-American people and others. So I just think it's important to try to put that out there and the piece is actually silent. It's I think one of the few video pieces that I've done that is silent. It's also very short. Time-based media allows you to sort of tell a story in a certain sequence. and so things unfold in a narrative it can be a very obscure narrative, but there's usually some sort of sense to it, some sort of order to it. And in these it's really just seconds of two clips that I'm presenting. One is seconds of grainy black and white film shot in 1926 of the veterans of the battle, who were only of course native on the 50th anniversary, in 1926 riding in a parade, with the seventh Calvary strangely enough there was some sort of, peacemaking reunion. I only found out recently that that one of the native, he might've been a chief. I'm sorry if I can't remember this person's name, but he presented his counterpart from the army with a blanket. So the blanket had a history as a favored trade item with native people who wore them. And so there's also the sort of body embedded in that history and it just shows these um beautiful, , older veterans on horseback. And I arranged it in the shape of a counter-clockwise spiral that was meant to honor and refer to the Lakota winter count, which was an annual calendar that was painted on a Buffalo hide later on fabric, where the most important event of any particular year was rendered as a pictograph. And the one for 1876 was Pehin Hanska ktepi, which meant they killed long hair, meaning Custer. Who was known, as a flamboyant Western character. He was a civil war hero and he was, you know, Brevet general at age 23, he was quite a military figure, but he was also one who did not question what they used to call Indian fighting or Indian killing. And he was responsible for some very bad depredations. The battle of the Washita, where he attacked a sleeping peaceful village of black kettle's people. He would actually, he had a little, bugler and he'd had little Fife and drums sorta orchestra and, he would have them play this old Irish era called Garryowen. He would have them play that as he was attacking a sleeping village about to kill a bunch of people. Imagine a mindset where people just thought of exterminating other human beings as just being some glorious, patriotic pursuit. So anyways, there's that it's projected onto this red blanket, the black and white. So the red blanket sort of stains it red. So you get a palette of red, black, and white. Of course the red can be symbolic of a lot of things, including native people. And then the other one it's sort of natural canvas colored. It has black and white footage that I appropriated from Raul Walsh's 1941 Hollywood Custer epic called they died with their boots on, a martyr interpretation of that, battle, you know, which is the way it was always interpreted instead of this moment where Errol Flynn as Custer is leading his battalion out of the Fort to go after a village. And in the movie, Garyowen theme is playing. I silenced it and have them retreat instead of move forward and have them sort of reverse and uh, seem to fall from the sky and that was all based on a vision that Sitting Bull had a couple of weeks before the battle of soldiers and horses falling upside down, raining like locusts into the Indian camp. One of those, premonition sort of dreams that was pretty powerful stuff. Anyway, so it's history told from another perspective. And yet again, it's just two things that are very short. That just continue in a loop and move around. So They're somewhere between a typical video and maybe a painting or something or a photograph where it just moves in the same way. It repeats the same directional motion odd infinitum. And I guess that's also what you can do with something like a typical, device like a loop, but this is a loop that is also a loop of colonialism. That seems to be infinite and ongoing. I think a lot about these things and I, try to As much as I can leave room for people to approach these works in a way that gives them a chance to, um, to think about, these subjects without having to be hit over the head with something but at the same time to confront something 

[00:24:55] Ben: One of the things that I love about these two pieces and your work in general, but these two in particular, is you're really kind of mixing the appropriated portrayals, one is moving image footage of an actual physical reenactment. And then the other being this fictitious Hollywood portrayal, from a biased perspective. I love the way that you mix these kinds of like different temporal spaces in your work into these infinite loops that really exist more as some kind of like, moving picture is really truest description of it. 

[00:25:31] Alan: Yeah, yeah it's true. You bring up a good point, is that, a lot of what we don't have film of Hollywood or you know, cinema in general has tried to supply us with those histories. And that's what I mean about the past being real because the past is real as an idea. And it's just a matter of like what idea or ideas you have about it. What gets told? So some of the sort of research I do does not come with any imagery especially like my piece for Greater New York that looks at the Lenape history here which is very poorly documented. The Dutch really couldn't care less, except in terms of the business aspects. And I had an idea that had been kicking around for a long time, which was to do something that related to New York as a site of Lenape, habitation and also certain practices vis-a-vis the environment which included, fishing for oysters. And then the middens, these monuments really these large piles of shells that they left over eons, most of which have been destroyed bulldozed away or burned for lime. That was actually a big thing in New York at one time. The way that I originally found out about all this stuff was a piece I did in 1989-1990 for, the Public Art Fund it was a piece actually that brought me back to New York where I've been ever since. And, I was looking at the disappearance, the erasure, the poisoning and burial of a large freshwater lake that once existed in lower Manhattan. On one of its banks was one of these large shell mounds, these middens. It was large enough that the Dutch actually had a name for it. The Dutch called it Kalck Hoek, which meant sort of shell point our lime shell point. It was something that had built up over time. So I imagine that many people would be eating, you know, it was a very social idea of first of all, fishing a collective pursuit and then the cooking of the shells and consumption, and then just leaving them in this huge pile. So I imagine it was a good, 50 or a hundred feet long, Again, imagine that the Dutch having a name for it and there was a large Promintory actually that wasn't a shell mound. It was just a natural feature that was about a hundred feet. That was also just bulldozed as fill into the pond at the time. And that we're talking like, early, early 18 hundreds, like maybe it was all filled by 1811 or something like that. Anyway, in the spirit of that. I wanted to get out in a boat, which I've done in other works beginning with a work I did in 2001 for a show at the Queens museum where I sailed up a very polluted Creek, Newtown Creek that divides Greenpoint Brooklyn from Long Island City, Queens. And I shot all three and a half miles, of it's Queens shoreline from a boat and a boat, you know, on a calm water makes for the most amazing dolly shot. It just looks so good. I'm interested in some of the early movement from artwork that was easel painting, or murals, to panoramas, which happened in the very late 18th century and extended into the 19th century and panoramas were really the most popular art form of the 19th century in Western European countries and in the United States. There were buildings built to house panoramas. It was a sort of theater and some of them were in the round and some of them were actually there was a form of Panorama that was called a moving Panorama where it was painted on they used to call it miles of canvas. So imagine, a 10 foot high thing of canvas onto a big roll of it. The subjects were things like river journeys you know, a voyage down the Mississippi river or you know, a whaling voyage around the world, were typical subjects and people would come in and sit and you'd get the illusion of moving in a ship, on a train or something like that. And they would have sound effects and they'd have somebody narrating the whole thing, you know, it was sort of like national geographic special, but, done with canvas and paint and shaking a sheet of tin to make the sounds of a storm, or there'd be some sort of drama. So to get back to where I wandered off from, I like getting out in boats. Unfortunately, most New Yorkers don't get to see it's shorelines and there's something like 600 miles of shoreline in and around New York. And you see a lot of stuff that's beautiful and expected, and then you see stuff that isn't and you see this odd mix of, you know, nature trying to survive in this heavily urban environment with all sorts of pressure and pollution and everything. So, I partnered with the billion oyster project this amazing nonprofit on Governors Island. What they do is just amazing. They collect oyster shells from area restaurants. I think they have over 50 that they deal with. And then they deposit them in huge piles, which cure in the sun for a year or so. And once they're clean they essentially bale them in these sort of wire cages and strategically build oyster reefs out of them and the Harbor. Oysters attach themselves to a hard surface. So it becomes habitat not only for oysters, but for, um, other fish, including the fish that eat oysters. And so an oyster apparently can clean up to 50 gallons of water a day. And so their ultimate ambition is to put a billion oysters in the Harbor, they may never again be edible, but the Harbor can sure be cleaner and it's already cleaner because of them. Anyways, I saw a relationship between the Lenape's, environmental sort of practices, I guess you'd call them now, but they're really cultural practices to o where you're in relation with the living non-human world, with non-human life you're in a kinship relationship, not one of domination and exploitation, or extraction per se, and so, I just thought that it would be interesting to, sail back into Newtown Creek, which was once a really good oyster ground and also to the Gowanus, which is now being developed, and was also apparently an amazing oyster ground where they pulled out oysters, even in the 16 hundreds that were like a foot long. It was sort of absurd in a way to sail past these shorelines that no longer supported oystering, or that kind of life that had, you know, long, long been destroyed there, and just to see what's there now and then to project those images, those shorelines onto an actual bed of oyster shells. And in that collision, you know, in that marriage one starts to take on maybe the properties of the other. So the video tends to become in a way more solid in some respects and the oyster shells become more sort of liquid. Ruba Katrib and her amazing team at PS one allowed me to put it in the duplex gallery, which is if you're familiar with it is a two story gallery that actually has almost like a third sub story a sort of sub-basement it stretches from the basement up through the first floor up to the second. And so this piece, which was arranged in a, long linear rectangle of shells that was close to 30 feet long and about, I don't know, seven or eight feet from its edge to the wall and rose, maybe about 18 inches, something like that, maybe below two feet, sort of sloped down from the high of 18 inches or two feet down. Down to the end. So it was a very long rectangle and I like to work again in that panoramic format. And projected the results of two of my sails onto it, and also supplied a very active soundtrack of five Akwesasne Mohawk singers singing the songs, there was probably about a dozen, that make up what we call our stick dance which was a set of songs and a dance that was given to us by the Lenape, the Delaware people. It's also known as the Delaware skin dance. The Lenape people when they were under terrible stress from colonization they didn't think they could preserve that element of their culture, so they gave it to us for safekeeping. I wanted it because it's really the sound of of this area. It's the sound of the indigenous people of this area. So all those elements together made the work and you could see it from the main floor looking down. They have two big openings that you look down. So then it sort of looks like you're looking, at something that's more or less flat, but that has all the texture of oysters. But then when you go to the basement, you see it from a slightly elevated perspective. So it's flatter. And then finally, when you go down the steps into the sub-basement, you can go right up to them and their materiality really takes over, the video just looks like colored water or something flowing over shell. That was a great project to work on. And typical of the way that I've been working not only in my good fortune in working with curators, who commission new work from me, but also collaborating with an institution like PS1 who were, down with this, pretty much from the start, loved the idea of partnering with another, amazing collaborator, the Billion Oyster Project. And even though I am a very small solo operation and have been all the time I've gotten to work with some amazing people over the 30 plus years in my career. I certainly have collaborated a lot over the years and it's been, uh, it's been great.

[00:35:41] Ben: That's great. So I'm curious how you think about variability in terms of your work, because you do a lot of these site specific installations and it seems like maybe there's a spectrum of level of site specificity, for instance the installation at PS1. Is that something you would consider installing elsewhere or do you consider these installations to be uh, fleeting moment?

[00:36:10] Alan: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think some of them can travel and some of them can't. Actually the greater New York one may travel. And the way that that would work is the shelves would be shells locally. So then it would establish a connection between good practices with the environment. It would make a connection between, you know, traditional environmental knowledge and practices of indigenous people here, and then wherever else it would be shown, you know? So in that case site is somewhat mobile. I'm open to a certain amount of variation in the iteration of my work, even with the blanket piece, the one that I am showing in Mountain Time it's the sort of second edition of this piece. The other one being in a show that Wendy Red Star curated for aperture that's currently in Princeton. And so, you know, I'm not so strict, I guess maybe I should be, but I'm not so strict in the edittioning that, you know, I'm going to have, like, three of the same blankets loomed at the same time, 1, 2, 3, I think, there's hopefully enough poetic or whatever license. So that the style blanket is the thing and a slight change in, size or proportion doesn't present a problem. So I think like that if this piece does travel I don't know what sort of options I might have. I'm usually open to finding a way to, preserve the work within a new, set of options and surroundings. But with that, I would think that you would need to really be able to see it, not only from your own height looking down at it, but from some sort of a height and then it would be a question of, well, how do you get that height? And there's all sorts of possibilities. There are atria I suppose, that are all around, that could be utilized. And then another thing would be to build something. Like a bridge that would be, elevated that you'd have to ascend and descent, 

[00:38:15] Ben: Yeah, for sure, like scaffolding. Your work, of course, Alan engages deeply with indigenous identity and history and this kind of excavation and truth-telling of colonial legacy and violence in so many ways. Is there anything in particular about working in time-based media that you find useful in these themes and subjects that you're engaging in?

[00:38:42] Alan: I think it's like, I, said earlier, I like photography for its honesty. People trust it to be a documentary, you know, and there's a documentary aspect of my work. There's a realism aspect of my work. And then in terms of, video, you get that, you don't have to, but you get the ability to make coherent easily llegible images from life that people know how to read. So it's quite accessible. And then as a time-based medium things can unfold you know, as opposed to the frozen time of a painting, and so, I think it's a good medium for the contemplation of time. Even something that's not necessarily used as a divisive expression, like a loop can become one, you know, in certain contexts. So I like what all those things offer me as an artist. I did a work called Hanödaga:yas Town Destroyer where I project a history of the invasion and dispossession of my ancestors, the Haudenosaunee's homelands, which, you know, I think you're from upstate so you're probably familiar that our homelands, comprise over 80% of what is now New York State. But in 1779 George Washington ordered a massive invasion and a scorched earth campaign against us in order to neutralize us, I guess, as a force. Some of us actually, the American revolution split our Confederacy of, six nations along lines that we never wanted to actually deal with. We never wanted to take sides in that conflict, but we were ultimately forced to, so Mohawks, fought with the British and were dispossessed like the Onondaga and the Cayuga and Seneca, and so people were driven from their homes and everything was destroyed. You know, at the time one of Washington's officers Peter Gansevoort for whom Gansevoort street is named took part in that, campaign, which was known as the Sullivan campaign. And he observed that the farms that he was seeing the Mohawk farms, that Mohawk people were living better than their non Mohawk neighbors in quite a dramatic way in those days. So, this wasn't just, you know, oh let's just move primitive savages out of their little tepees or something and take over what's really a land that could be much more productive, you know, it was an invasion. That was pretty much the MO of the United States and its expansion is that, it would make a deal under pressure. You know, it would send a massive army against native people trying to defend their lands from squatters who were violating a treaty more often than not. And instead of preventing the squatters from squatting or disciplining the squatters the government would invariably support them against the natives who would be blamed for the violence. And then a massive army would come in and then there'd be a treaty, which is really a land session. So it was like this game, you know, where, the settlers would come in and violate native homelands. There would be conflict. There would be violence, often not instigated by native people. And then there would be this punishment that would come in the form of massive armies and that was just the way that the whole country was settled pretty much. And you know, something that's not really talked about, but it found it's form certainly in 1779. And it just went all the way across the country that way. And so, my research, turned up amazing things like the battle map and I showed both the sort of before and after of the war and the quick gobbling up of our lands in the wake of the war when we were no longer a military threat. I was able to project not only video, it's almost like an animated tour of the archives that relate to that whole history. You know, you start with maps, I think you end with George Washington's portrait the dollar. But it's all projected onto this neo-classical Houdon the French sculptor you know, very noble white bust of Washington. And yeah, it's really a counter history, it's one that's not accepting the opacity of the white bust, that often is doubling for some sort of white supremacist statement, of um, you know, higher civilization and hierarchy and domination and things like that. My object is not to demonize Washington or anyone else really it's just to, sort of inform and to balance this adulation of certain figures, someone like a Washington could both be for his cause a brilliant general without who's, I don't know what to call it, like wisdom and talent, the United States wouldn't exist. Whether or not that is a good thing or a bad thing is, you know, a different, question. Certainly this tide of Europeans coming here to take land was not going to abate. Even if the United States had failed and great Britain had held onto its colonies here. There probably would have been other European colonies, there might've been like a little Louisiana, French thing and certainly a bigger Spanish presence. But in any case you know, these are histories I think that really are needing to be told. America has very little appetite as we're seeing in these hysterical laws that are being passed in 42 states against history. I don't want to be part of that crowd. I want to be part of the other crowd that's just asking people to open their eyes about the way that this country was founded on the, uh, you know, the genocide and displacement of native people and the kidnapping and the enslavement of African people and also native people were kidnapped and enslaved. So there's a criminal background that somehow it's enobled into, these stories and America has very little appetite for it. And it's, about time that people confronted these things and try to, in some ways, make it right, starting with actually fulfilling these treaties, 

[00:44:44] Ben: Is there more of an awareness of indigenous issues these days than there has been historically? Or is that maybe just my own perception?

[00:44:53] Alan: No, there definitely is. I mean, it's been a long time coming. You know, I've been showing in indigenous and non-indigenous venues for a long time. And in my travels, I've met other indigenous peoples from other countries. And we've been comparing notes. There's an energy in a synergy that's been happening sort of transnational. There is a sort of global indigenous thing happening in the arts. There's a quartet that you know, sort of started with former British colonies of the United States and Canada and Australia and Aotearoa / New Zealand. So we can communicate but we're communicating on all kinds of levels these days and I was seeing that it was not showing up on the radar in New York, you know, in the art world here. I partnered with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School in 2016 and 2017 in a project that we co-founded and co-curated called indigenous New York. This effort brought together a series of closed door colloquia first our indigenous curators meeting with their non-indigenous counterparts from the major museums, in a series of round tables that I curated and culminating in a public panel where the findings were discussed. And we had amazing people, you know, people like Jolene Rickard and Candice Hopkins. And we did the same with indigenous critics writers and their non-indigenous counterparts. And then finally with artists, it was a wonderful project and I do think it opened some doors and some minds, you know, I certainly don't take credit for the attention that is now thankfully finally being given to indigenous subjects. But it was part of it. And another part of course, was Standing Rock. , I'm old enough to remember how the 1973 occupation of wounded knee was covered in the, um, three networks and it wasn't covered that much. Marlon Brando had to call attention to it by having his Oscar picked up by you know, a native woman who made a little speech. It seems like some sort of walls are finally starting to come down and it used to be when my indigenous friends would visit New York and they'd be excited it could be like a Sami person from Norway. So, so where's the indigenous show or, you know, what can we see? And it was like, well, there isn't any, or, well, there's a historical show at the National Museum of the American Indian, you know, at the High Center downtown. Now you can see, you know, at any given moment, it seems in the last, last few years, anyways, even with COVID, there's been um, a real presence in the art world and a presence in news coverage. I think that people are finally starting to take our issues and our politics and our culture and our art seriously. And um, you know, it's about time. 

[00:47:53] Ben: Yeah, in having spent some time with you, Alan, and, and getting to know your work, it's clear that, you know, you are such a scholar of history and, your work is so engaged with this unearthing of forgotten stories. So I'm curious, what are you reading about these days? What is coming next for you? 

[00:48:13] Alan: I've been doing some research into, um, into residential schools and in particular the only one that was in New York state which was called the Thomas Indian school that was on the um, Cattaraugus, Seneca reservation in Western New York. I found some amazing photographs related to that, that I'd like to um, I'm doing a little curating. I curated my first show this year at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia, a show called object relations, indigenous belongings. I was invited to do something with indigenous objects in Columbia's collection and I chose four objects from the four sort of corners of Turtle Island, which is what we call North America and paired the objects with contemporary, tribal descendants and their work. So I'm hoping to be able to do something with this Thomas Indian School, maybe curate something around it. I'm going to be in a group show at the Tate modern that opens next month. And, um, yeah, I'm in something like nine shows this year. I did a new photo series again, I make new work for exhibition. So for the aperture exhibition that's in Princeton right now, I made a new photo series based on stills of the Hanödaga:yas Washington video installation which is being shown in Princeton, but also was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and is being shown in a gallery in their Americas wing with the massive Thomas Sully of Washington and the Delaware, not Washington crossing the Delaware, but Washington, about to cross the Delaware.

[00:49:44] Ben: Talk about full circle. 

[00:49:46] Alan: Exactly, yeah. So I'm looking forward to going to Boston next month. Also the first edition of the piece itself, was acquired by the Peabody Essex museum and they have it in a new show. They've renovated and they've rehung things and I'm eager to get there next month to see that also installed. Yeah, and there's other, work floating around different places. Yeah, and there's some possibilities for be an ally next year. We'll see what happens. So it's been a weird time the last couple of years for everybody right? But I've had a steady amount of work and, uh, invitations nice ones like this one to talk to nice folks. Keeping busy, you know, it's, been good. 

[00:50:30] Ben: That's great. Well, Alan thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate your time and it's just been so great getting to know your work.

[00:50:37] Alan: Well, thanks Ben, thanks for inviting me. I enjoyed it. 

[00:50:40] Ben: And I hope you enjoyed it too, dear listener. Thank you for joining me for this chat with Alan. Just a friendly reminder that we pay each and every artist that comes on this show, a $1,000 speaking fee, and we can only afford this thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. You can join us over on patreon.com/artobsolescence, where you get access to exclusive content. Or if you are interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift, you can do so through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts by going to artandobsolescenece.com/donate. And there, you can also find the show notes and full transcript as well as highlights on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. Have a great week, my friends. My name is Ben Fino-Radin and this has been Art and obsolescence.