The Brooklyn Rail

It poured in Brooklyn Bridge Park the morning I visited Nicholas Galanin’s (Lingít and Unangax̂) temporary installation, In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra (2023), the sky almost the same translucent gray as the adjacent East River. Maybe it was the weather that made the monumental capital letters spelling out “LAND” appear particularly foreboding that day. While on sunny days, the sculpture, sponsored by the Public Art Fund, provides a backdrop for cheery revelers and picknickers, that morning I felt a resonance between the thirty-foot-tall, steel-tubed structures—the same height and material as the United States-Mexico border wall—and a prison. It seems appropriate that my experience with the object, whose four letters mimic Robert Indiana’s ubiquitous LOVE sculptures from the 1970s, would be so closely linked to the natural environment. Whereas Indiana’s letters are solid and impregnable, Galanin’s are created from connected planes of steel tubing that allow viewers to inhabit and move through them. The spaces between the tubes ensure that the landscape is always visible, whether the viewer moves within or outside the structure. As Galanin noted when we discussed the piece, “For me language is deeply connected to land.”

The relationship between language and land is a conversation shared among a number of contemporary Native American artists: the way land shapes language, the effects of naming and renaming place, the way loss of land and language go hand in hand. During a recent conversation celebrating the opening of the exhibition The Land Carries Our Ancestors at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the exhibition’s curator, the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), discussed the erasure of Native American languages as a kind of genocide in itself. She argued that Native languages contain encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world and people’s relationship to it, whereas modern English is a language of the “corporate,” which regards the natural world as a collection of resources to be exploited. English is one of the two colonial languages Galanin references in the title In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra—English and Spanish replaced hundreds of Native American languages across the Americas through physical violence and forced assimilation between the 15^th and 20^th centuries. Galanin’s evocation of Indiana’s sculptures, which harkened back to Indiana’s Christian Science upbringing, is in part a reference to the Christian boarding schools that played a key role in the attempt to eradicate Native culture and language.

Until recently, a collaboration between Galanin and his partner, the artist Merritt Johnson, appeared in the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition. If my deadline for this review had been three weeks earlier, I would have drawn on the mixed-media Creation with her Children (2017) to further explore Galanin’s valuable treatment of land and colonialism in his work. A truism of writing about contemporary art, though, is that an artist’s oeuvre and its context can change rapidly. On November 3, 2023, Galanin and Johnson published a message to the museum on Instagram asking for their piece to be removed. The statement, for better or for worse, necessarily bears upon the meaning of both Creation and such thematically similar works as In every language. The most relevant passages: 1) “The work we do as artists does not end in the studio or with our artist statements, it extends into the world,” and 2) “We’re calling on the Federal Government to demand an immediate ceasefire, cut military aid to Israel, and lift the siege on Gaza.”

I am not an expert on Israel/Palestine and would not presume to comment in a professional capacity on the wisdom of these demands. What I would like to focus on is Johnson and Galanin’s argument that their “work as artists” “extends into the world.” In so doing, they are in effect claiming that their request for the removal of Creation with her Children is part of their artistic practice—in other words, that the request itself is a work of art.

Unlike Middle Eastern geopolitics, I can reasonably weigh in on what happens when artists bring their practices beyond the studio, as Galanin and Johnson claim here to do. The critique of “socially engaged” or “social practice” art leveled by such critics as Claire Bishop and Hal Foster also applies, I think, to this kind of “activist art” (the terms have always been fluid): that it risks escaping both aesthetic evaluation (on the grounds that it is activism) and social evaluation (on the grounds that it is art). Let’s not risk it, and first consider the action’s value as activism.

We might begin to assess the quality of activism by asking about its effectiveness; how likely is the action to move the needle in the direction of one’s stated objectives? The National Gallery of Art is funded, according to its website, by a “public-private partnership.” Public funds go toward maintenance, operations, and other line items reasonably described as “keeping the lights on.” Funds for acquisitions and special exhibitions, on the other hand, come entirely from private sources. As the United States government was not in fact materially involved in the exhibition, which was curated not by a federal employee, but by a contracted Native American artist, it seems unlikely that “the Federal Government” has experienced the artists’ action as pressure, if at all. There is a particular irony to self-censoring a work critiquing colonialism in protest of what one views as colonialism. Add to this the fact that many in the art world—the only individuals likely to be aware of the NGA’s quiet removal of Galanin and Johnson’s piece—have already vociferously expressed their opposition to Israel’s military campaign through open letters and boycotts, and it is hard to see how Galanin and Johnson’s action accomplishes anything other than positive reinforcement among very specific circles. Worse, it upstages and puts on the defensive the almost fifty other artists in the exhibition bringing much needed, and long delayed, attention to Native American art.

What of artistic value? Those writing about aesthetics as far back as Immanuel Kant have recognized that the value of evaluating works of art lies in its capacity to help us exercise judgment about the issues that matter. This capacity, however, requires artists to both inspire and trust their audiences. When Lucy Lippard wrote in 1984 of activist artists’ goal of “providing alternative images, metaphors, and information formed with humor, irony, outrage, and compassion,” she was describing the difficult, precise work of making cases of affect before a public that would ultimately reach its own verdict. One of the strengths of In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra is its openness—the way in which its open structure of connected steel tubing gives way to open-ended questions about one’s own relationship to land, borders, and colonial histories. Artists do viewers a disservice when they rescind such invitations to think critically by instrumentalizing their work for causes beyond its scope. And they do their work a disservice when they force it to take on tasks it is not equipped to perform.