Subverting visual discourses of gender and geography: Kent Monkman's revised iconography of the American West.

In interviews, Toronto-based Cree artist Kent Monkman has expressed "a desire to look at history as it was written by Europeans, but to look at it through an Aboriginal lens" ("Contempo Abo" 22). He accomplishes this in a series of playful "scenic" paintings by reconfiguring images and forms from previous Euro-American art movements: landscape painting, American Western art and neoclassicism, in particular. Of course, Monkman is not only toying with established genres by producing these canvases; he is also challenging the visual narratives upon which Western expansion and "settlement" by Europeans is historically based. His work has garnered much recent critical attention, particularly in North American art circles, for its provocative intrusions into dominant-culture aesthetics in ways which subvert the colonizing power of the viewer's gaze and reinsert a Native presence into the very images which colluded in earlier artistic works to erase it. This is, most certainly, a survivance tactic - to use a term borrowed from Gerald Vizenor and other contemporary theorists - an example of the dynamic, ongoing practice of continued indigeneity within supposedly conquered landscapes.1 As Vizenor writes, "Native imagination, experience, and remembrance are the real landscapes of liberty in the literature of this continent" (7). Monkman's canvases suggest that similar landscapes of liberty exist within North American visual culture as well. If the typical rhetorical features of the aforementioned European-derived art movements construct Indianness as a state of disappearance, dependence or savagery, then Monkman's present-day disruptions of the embedded aesthetic and social codes signal a shift in this state: a shift from objectstatus to subject-status, from victimhood to action, from elegiac absence to living presence. These artistic disruptions both powerfully assert indigenous perseverance and playfully reject colonial sexuality. What's more, they also indicate Monkman's ability to creatively engage imperial systems of discourse while simultaneously challenging the stories they continue to convey about indigenous bodies, cultures and nations, enacting the sort of artful "imaginative liberation" that Malea D. Powell points out in the work of earlier intellectuals like Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Charles Alexander Eastman ("Rhetorics of Survivance" 399). The first artistic movement which Monkman mines in his efforts is nineteenth-century landscape painting. It is important to remember that the wide, sweeping vistas popularized in the American frontier paintings we now know, are not the historic reality encountered "[w]hen the English first landed in North America, where they found much of the coastal region heavily populated," write Dinnerstein et al. Estimates of indigenous population across the continent vary, but even in the United States alone, many scholars now accept the figure of three to five million people prior to European colonization (5). (By way of comparison, the population of Britain at the time is estimated at around four million.) If Europeans did not privilege Native cultures, comparatively speaking, these numbers would have at least given some Britons pause before attempting to displace a population as large as their own. Hence a rhetoric which emphasized the emptiness of the North American landscape coupled with a sense of the Indian's inevitable retreat into history - was often employed by those who romanticized the colonialist project in the Americas.2 By promulgating among Europeans the idea of America as a vast wilderness, relatively empty of human occupants, nineteenth-century landscape painting took an active visual role that partnered with the verbal rhetoric of the period, rhetoric imbued with what Lawrence Buell calls "the aesthetic of the not-there" (69). Landscape came to dominate American art in the 1820s. The vistas reinforced a European need to see the wilderness at the edge of (their) civilization as empty; what's more, they borrowed from the aesthetic style of European landscape painting itself, conflating the two territories in a visual sense (Byerly 52). …