The Brooklyn Rail

It is difficult to duly appraise an exhibition like Marlborough’s Laura Anderson Barbata: Singing Leaf purely through the vantage of aesthetics. A minute hand crowned by an incised pearl, caras vemos (corazones no sabemos) (1997), curiously hides along an easy-to-miss wall. A retinue of eighteen towering indigo-draped totemic sculptures interwoven with police insignia archive a public performance that Anderson Barbata staged in collaboration with the stilt dancing troupe, the Brooklyn Jumbies, to draw attention to the murder of BIPOC people in the US by police. An adjacent wall is fenced by decorated stilts-cum-colonnades, silver leaf insertions threading Oaxacan colonial altars. Nearby, a tortuous orange trail of marigold petals buoy a carved wood canoe, the olfactory waft of saccharine honey redolent and invocative. Wood, its variegated modes, uses, and the synchronous duality of life/mind and matter/body are the show’s guiding motif—appropriately so, given that papermaking prompted Anderson Barbata toward her initial collaborations with Indigenous populations of the Venezuelan Amazon. Yet, despite two floors of visually stimulating photographs, videos, collages, drawings, textiles, mixed-media sculptures, and installations, this show is not just an aesthetic endeavor. Each object is a review of collaborative projects spearheaded by an artist who has spent the better part of her career living with and learning from Indigenous communities, teaching them paper-making in return. Thematically, her work addresses issues ranging from animism and repatriation to the variegated effects of colonialism—especially the effects of Catholic missionaries’ proselytizing projects. Regardless of the rights won from reciprocity or ethnographic anthropology, these are issues that rebound up in Indigenous populations’ local histories and practices. The use of Indigenous techniques and the retelling of their histories presented before a blue-chip artworld risks lapsing into the kind of appropriation that finds the artist and their artistic output commanding narratives. These are issues that Anderson Barbata seems to be aware of and grappling with. Her answer is to veer closer toward interpretation than resuscitation, creating admixtures with multiple sources and complementary documentary images.

At its worst, even the most sensitive of appropriation risks reducing Indigenous populations into feeble victims or hitherto unrecognized victors, all of which belies the complexities concerning the power of artistic presentation independent from interdependent authorship. Thankfully, Anderson Barbata is not presented as a politically exigent mouthpiece who simply celebrates or mourns Indigenous cultures. More often than not, her work functions as an autobiographical record of the works’ making. Yet their making is also imbricated with plausibly unequal power dynamics. For instance, the Ye’Kuana group she lived with taught her canoe construction in exchange for the artist teaching them papermaking. Autorretrato (1994/1998), which translates as “self-portrait,” attests to this process of authorial integration through reciprocity. The photograph presents a skilled canoe builder from the Ye’Kuana community, his cradling muscular arms serving as the sole cue of his prowess, while the shaped vertical tree trunk incised by machete clearings obscures his face from view. As a “self-portrait” the piece unwittingly licenses a dual-function: Anderson Barbata admits she is the final author—as this documentary record figures as her portrait articulated to the artworld public; yet the content of her work is not of her making. By anonymizing faces (viz., “defacializing”), the artist cues us that they are aware of and grappling with this issue, though one cannot be sure that they have ultimately succeeded on the ethical front or that it is even the primary motivation behind the anonymization device. After all, in other works, this technique serves much more poetic ends. For instance, Tlacaxipehualiztli (1988)—a reference to the Aztec festival of flaying and removing sacrificed victims’ hearts—presents an array of portraits painted by an unknown painter that the artist found in her father's home. The subjects are featureless, contrast-stitched veiny orchid leaves posited in relief. Anderson Barbata’s portraiture practice of anonymizing faces and using ecological metonymy in their place indeed challenges singular authorship, but it is unclear whether it makes any ethical advances beyond those proffered by Dadaists wryly presenting found objects. Such works risk merely repeating the postmodern chorus of the “death of the author,” this time in an Indigenous key.

One of the most poignant works in the show recounts Anderson Barbata’s ongoing project, The Repatriation of Julia Pastrana (2005–present), a collaborative undertaking with the University of Oslo and a team of anthropologists, sociologists, and ethicists. For this project, the artist undertook the repatriation and burial of an Indigenous woman, Julia Pastrana, exploited during her lifetime. Pastrana was a Mexican native of Sinaloa born with hypertrichosis terminalis, a condition in which excess hair grows on the body. She was forced to work sideshows that advertised her as “the ugliest woman in the world.” Postmortem, her embalmed body became the object of unrelenting comparative anatomy, public displays, and vandalization. Anderson Barbata has asserted that her effort to bury Pastrana’s body in Culiacán ought not be interpreted as an artwork but as a humanitarian project. Alongside objects memorializing Pastrana, Marlborough has discerningly centered Consuelo (2006), a decapitated Virgin Mary statue from Italy upon which a single-channel video is projected. The transmitted Mary figure floats forward, pouring over cerulean waves before subsuming the statue and the screen. This mantelpiece is framed by archival memorabilia personifying Pastrana, including zines, human hair portraits, tombstone frottages, and a timeline of the artist’s repatriation efforts, underscoring the related colonial history of Jesuit missionaries in the region.

The show’s curation prompts critical queries concerning authorship and social power dynamics that would be prudent for any artist working in social practice to consider. It does not provide clear-cut answers to the ethical issues implicit when Indigenous people and their traditions serve as source material. Marlborough has assiduously used QR codes to link audiences to interviews with Anderson Barbata’s Yanomami, Ye’Kuana and Piaroa collaborators. Although this does not foment a balance between Anderson Barbata’s art practice and the perspective of her collaborators, it leaves viewers pondering important and timely methodological questions about the ethics of relational aesthetics and social art practice.