Postminimalism, Temporality, and the Politics of Indigeneity, 1969–1983

Abstract

This dissertation examines the invocation of Indigenous forms and themes in the work of Postminimalist artists in the United States during the 1970s. In the 1960s, Minimalist artists and critics sought to liberate the artwork from what critic Rosalind Krauss termed “priorness”: the primacy of the past in determining the meaning of the present. Postminimalists extended Minimalism’s critique of historical authority, but departed from its emphasis on the singular present as the primary site of political possibility. In the Postminimalist artwork, Indigeneity functioned as a form of temporal difference, opening phenomenological experience to alternative conceptions of time and history. In the midst of the decade’s imperialist wars, environmental anxieties, and economic crises, fantasies of Indigeneity offered US artists a means of envisioning futures beyond the ruins of the present. These fantasies were contested, exploited, and shaped by the work of activists and intellectuals who participated in the Indigenous sovereignty movement periodized as Red Power. Postminimalism was traversed by the contemporary politics of Indigeneity and settler colonialism. Chapter One identifies a temporal aporia between the politics of Minimalism and Red Power through a close reading of Krauss’s 1973 article “Sense and Sensibility” alongside an account of the aesthetic strategies of Indigenous activism in the same moment. Chapters Two to Four offer analyses of artworks by Nancy Graves, Kay WalkingStick, and Harmony Hammond, each of which stage a structurally different encounter between Indigeneity and the phenomenological present, in service of disparate political projects. Chapter Five places in dialogue the divergent critiques of postwar capitalist development offered by Haudenosaunee soapstone carvers and site-specific Postminimalists working in close proximity at Artpark, a state park for the contemporary arts in western New York. Rather than focusing on the appropriation of Indigenous aesthetics or the representation of Indigenous subjects, the dissertation traces the circulation of the concept of Indigeneity itself as a form of contested politics. As Indigenous political forms passed from the discourse of Red Power through the decade’s various countercultures and liberation movements, they were refracted through settler-colonial grammars and primitivist imaginaries, and unmoored from the historical contexts, material demands, and social relations of contemporary Indigenous politics.