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Kent Monkman: History Is Painted by the Victors is the latest large single-artist exhibition to open at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. A mid-career retrospective, it was organized in collaboration with the Denver Art Museum. John Lukavic, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, co‑curated it with Léuli Eshrāghi, Curator of Indigenous Practices at the MMFA. As usual with such exhibitions, the press previews, notably from official broadcasters such as the English and French CBC, were effusive. Eshrāghi told Westmount Magazine that, “The stories Monkman tells offer crucial insights into contemporary realities for Indigenous peoples, while questioning dominant culture and society as a whole.”
““My name is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle and I come from the stars.” [p] Meet Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (a play on the words mischief and egotistical), the fierce, time-traveling character created by artist Kent Monkman. [p] Monkman created Miss Chief as a powerful response to colonial narratives that have long misrepresented Indigenous people in art and history. Draped in red bottom stilettos and subversive glamour, Miss Chief flips the script reclaiming space in classical art scenes, calling out stereotypes, and rewriting history with humor, beauty, and truth.”
The above may be a trivial statement on Instagram, but the institutional, academic, and critical discourse around Monkman does not get much more intelligent than this sort of advertisement. While the statement is as egregious a form of misrepresentation through advertising as a cigarette commercial from the 1980s, it also, surprisingly, insists on a reductive (and historically specious) treatment of art. The “good” being marketed is moral rectification. This, basically “Victorian” notion of art and culture, is quite different from the far more ambiguous notion of art at play in the art he has built a career on appropriating, both in terms of his figures and the landscapes they inhabit.
A little more in-depth, this is how the institution frames the exhibition on their website, which also provides extensive prompts on how any visitor should interpret the work:
Immerse yourself in the captivating world of Kent Monkman through iconic and monumental paintings by this major Canadian artist and member of ocêkwi sîpiy (Fisher River Cree Nation). Through his subversive lens, he revisits history painting to challenge colonial narratives and offer new perspectives on the past and our present. [p] History painting is a term that was introduced by the French Royal Academy in the 17th century to describe large-scale paintings with historical, mythological, or biblical subjects. Representing the peoples and territories that have shaped the Turtle Island (North America) of today, Monkman’s works both draw on and subvert the conventions of this genre to address contemporary societal concerns. [p] Central among these issues are: the climate crisis and environmental protection, the impact of government policies on Indigenous communities, intergenerational trauma, and the affirmation of Two-Spirit, queer and trans Indigenous communities’ identities. [p]…[p] Notice to parents and accompanying adults: This exhibition contains depictions of violence and nudity.
Rather than reviewing the exhibition in the museum itself, I will concentrate on the mediation of it performed by the institution and on Monkman’s general practice. There are a few reasons for this. As with the abysmal Joyce Wieland exhibition reviewed earlier, there is very little of curatorial interest in the show. Besides that, what is significant about Monkman is his performance as an artist, a trait he shares with the more financially successful Academic painters of the nineteenth century. Effectively, the paintings are props for this.
The exhibition consists primarily of large works, some elaborately framed, some not (for no artistically evident reason in either case), against mostly pallid walls with flat light. There are some heavy velvety curtains and the seemingly compulsory “space for reflection.” Curatorial texts dot the walls to impose authorized narratives on the works, supplemented by elegiac texts by Monkman’s alter ego. The overall blandness of presentation seems deliberate so as not to complicate the emotional manipulation the paintings rely on.
I have seen much of the work in various other exhibitions (not least of all at the McCord recently), likely the best of which was a touring show I saw at Museum London in 2019. Even then, it had the assembled and curated feel of a geriatric rocker on their greatest hits tour. It is worth noting that the MBAM exhibition is less overtly sexual than most of his exhibitions have been, and the newer large-scale works are probably the least interesting paintings that he has ever produced with his studio. Part of that is because the composition strategies are too rote, the painting technique too dull, and the presence of more female figures than in the past seems to dissipate the homoerotic energy that is central to his work when it is successful. Like a recognizable strand in recent Indigenously-branded art, the large paintings tend to resemble the clunky spreads of celebrities that appear between ads in magazines like Vanity Fair, a point that may suggest the paintings are less about the genre of History painting than the pastiche of that genre in advertising that has been common since at least the 1950s.
Monkman spent years burlesquing on the theme of the encounter between the Native, Academic, and Modernist art. Around the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, his focus and branding shifted, even if many of the rhetorical games he had established did not necessarily keep in step with them. Public spectacles like the Commission -- in its broadcast, print, and remediated forms -- may tell you something about the fantasies (sexual and otherwise) of the country’s ruling compact and their clients while barely being credible as history (that has never been the function of Royal Commissions). Its function was to shore up a moral mythology which the granting bodies funding the culture industries in the country have been pouring money into propping up. This exhibition, like most of Monkman’s over the past decade or more, is an overt example of this in a way that a far more eclectic instance like the last Biennale d'art contemporain autochtone can not be as convincingly reduced to.
The basic rationale that Monkman offers for his work in the official video below is that history is subjective, that subjectivity is culturally inflected, and the writing of the history of the continent has been dominated by a settler perspective, and that, counter to the European perspective, which he identifies with individualism, the Indigenous perspective is a group perspective rooted in tradition. While all of these statements are both theoretically specious and deeply historically misleading, we will bracket that to note that the purpose of the claim seems to be a way to shore up his “egotism” (whether it is conceived of as psychological or performative) as something that he extends beyond his singular brand name.
Central to Monkman’s practice is not anything substantially derived from traditional tribal practices, but from a strain of European painting. In Europe, Academic art, or what some art historians term bourgeois realism, art pompier, or kitsch, was the product of upper-middle-class tastes and the institutions that fed them. Often highly technical and verist in manner, it aped aspects of Classicism, fusing old mythological subject matter with bits of current reportage and fetishization of details, whether of tones of fauna or decor and textiles. It worked in strict genres like the Nude, the History picture, the landscape, and so on. Mythical subjects were usually filled with nudity, the narratives providing a moral and performatively intellectual excuse for their clearly erotic content. When copies of such works appeared in North America, they were often termed “Saturday night pictures” and adorned the walls of saloons and brothels. The sensuality of Academic art was often accompanied by a strong sentimentality, especially towards women and children, the imagery of which eventually found its way to the decoration of bonbon boxes. Canadian artist Paul Peel’s brief career as the Salon-lauded painter illustrates this range. Awarded for his lush paintings of nude children, his work ended up becoming the popular decoration of barrooms and confectionery boxes.
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A useful point of comparison between his work and the Academic art he is the derivative of is someone like the Prussian-born but largely New York-based artist, Albert Bierstadt, who became the blockbuster painter of the settlement of the American West around the era of the Civil War. Trained in the Düsseldorf school of landscape painting and associated with the Hudson River School during his career in the States, his often bombastic panoramas -- praised by some for not depicting the continent as a space of desolation but of hope, promise, and regeneration -- fell out of favour after the war when his style was overtaken by new trends imported from Europe. His spectacular sense of nature as theatre and encyclopedic use of detail (observed or clearly imported from genre clichés) was deemed outmoded and dead by those more concerned with “sentiment” and a generalized desire for spiritual presence that could be deemed “authentic.”
Like Monkman, Bierstadt was insistent on the painter as performer, and his exhibitions were regarded by contemporaries as performances that highlighted the nature and rhetoric of display, relying on precinematic techniques of spectacle and textual supplementation in the form of luxuriant catalogues. There are significant distinctions: Bierstadt was a much better painter (in terms of technique and scope) and functioned within a far more challenging market. Even in his time of success, he was as much renowned for his savvy exploitation of trends in visual rhetoric, showmanship, and the use of new techniques for reproduction as for painting itself. While popular, Bierstadt was also deeply controversial within the art world and vehemently attacked by critics who tended to regard his work as corrosive and corrupting of human values. Scandalizing the art world’s sanctimonious self-image, he consciously made an exhibition of its financial aspects and seemed to repudiate the intelligentsia’s claims for art as a source of moral betterment. While Bierstadt’s exploitation of the role of painter-as-performer leaves Monkman’s in the shade, the latter’s paintings-as-paintings tend to register as poor knock-offs of Seth Eastman or George Caleb Bingham.
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Compared to Bierstadt, Monkman is very conservative, even sanctimonious, and legitimately reducible to a formulaic regurgitation of normative ruling ideology (culturalist, narrativist, moralist, identitarian, therapeutic). His LARPing as a painter-type that is barely a footnote in the history of Academic art in Canada only stresses his role as this type, and implies far more about careerism than colonialism. While ostensibly a deliberate anachronism that might stress the constructedness of the role of the artist and tradition, it is not. Instead, it is an extension of authorial power, one of the central framing claims he makes in interviews, and which is also made by the institution. In this, it strongly mimics the trope found in both Hollywood and communist Westerns of the white man raised by a tribe who can readily flip between the “two worlds” because they have mastered both of their codes. (The Native who could flip was also part of this tradition.)
What is distinct in Monkman’s case is the formal foregrounding of both sets of code (one as pastiche and the other as referent) and of his authorial voice and persona standing above them as the arbiter of Truth while exploiting them. I had a linguistics professor who wore a lab coat to lectures as a joke about the pretense that there was something scientific about his field. This is not what Monkman is doing. Instead, his ironic humour is what Yve-Alain Bois recognized as the pose of the master.
Monkman’s work is not a critique of institutions but a celebration of them, not an upending of norms, but a reification of them. If it were not for his being an economic and institutional functionary, his work would have remained small, charming, if mediocre, pornographic drawings for collectors. Instead, he has become a state-sponsored illustrator of the pornographic fantasies of the ruling oligarchy. When he once positioned himself as the heir to Jacques-Louis David, it was not a matter of irony. This is not a criticism; this is his achievement. To extend the analogy, Monkman is to David what Justin Trudeau is to Napoleon, and Monkman is to art what Trudeau II is to politics.
The reception of his work over the past few decades has been predictable and boring (I will not rehash it all here) and usually shies away from the one thing that actually does make it subversive; namely, that to the extent it plausibly suggests much in terms of what is essential to it -- Monkman’s performance as an “artist” -- it short-circuits the credibility of both colonial and decolonial narratives. While this is clear in the absurdity of most of the visual art itself and its inherent autonomization from authorial intent and consent, the opposite is predictably integral to the enframing that the work receives, and which is promoted as an essential aspect of his career.
It would be as ludicrous to criticize his works as misrepresentations of history as it is for Monkman to criticize other canonical works as misrepresentations. Historical narratives, like all narratives, are neither true nor false. They have no referents. This is not to say that there is no true and false, only that those are something other than either narrative or colligatory models. There is a significant difference at play in the way that his work is framed, however, and the way Academic “narrative” painting operated. Almost no one in the nineteenth century took the moral claims of academic kitsch all that seriously, and Bouguereau was not claiming his masses of nude nymphs were expressions of serious moral or spiritual “Truth” or pagan renewal. The audience understood it was a ridiculous and lush spectacle. People would admire Bacchante (1894) in terms of technique and charm. Unless they were exceptionally stupid, they would not confuse it with a truth that transcended myth. The same cannot be said of Monkman’s Study for the Beaver Bacchanal (2015), which has been treated as a statement about colonial and ecological destruction. Monkman and his curators tend to make the spectacle even more obvious and absurd and then demand it be treated otherwise.
Institutional advertising does this as well, as when the MBAM employs his work, carefully overcoding it with significance and providing instructions on how it should be emotionally experienced.
Today, September 30th, we honour the many Indigenous victims and survivors of Canada's Residential Schools with a focus on the work “Compositional study for “The Sparrow”,” by Kent Monkman, member of ocêkwi sîpiy (Fisher River Cree Nation). [p] An Indigenous child reaches for a bird perched on a window frame, just out of grasp—as were the freedoms to move, think, speak and be Indigenous. [p] This work is a stark and haunting representation of the cold loneliness of Indigenous children in residential and boarding schools, yet it also honours the hope and resilience of those children, now Elders, who survived and became knowledge keepers. [p] The Sparrow poignantly calls for truth-telling and repair.
Uses such as this ignore the fact that the painting is no less performative in this instance and its sentimentality cornier than anything you would find among nineteenth century Academic art. The work is so mawkish it makes Charles Burton Barber look like Attila Richard Lukacs (who, in certain respects, has a comparable but far more complex and less easily morally-laundered project of making love to tradition).
What does it mean to refer to Monkman, one of the most widely institutionally and privately collected, effusively praised, and excessively paid artists the country has produced, as “subversive,” the term from the official press release that is persistently regurgitated by the media? It is not as though anything his work is branded as doing contradicts what has been the elite ruling consensus for decades. It is not as though any of the techniques and rhetoric he uses have not been established norms of Contemporary Art for decades (or, for the matter, since the nineteenth century), or that the quasi-Third Worldist claims about settlement history were not standard institutional tropes of the past century. (You might be astonished about how ignorant most of this country's art historians and critics are of this.) Are, as in the citation at the top of this article, “glamour” and “subversion” operating in the same register? Is the latter meant to add to the former? Is glamour just the generic luxury brand of the enchantment that the culture industry defines as its purpose, a particularly insipid type of fakeness? If he is glamourizing something, is it not the fantasy of colonialism itself? If he is, as he likes to say, playing on the “power dynamics” of colonial history, what does that mean? The imagery itself, regardless of the way it is framed, clearly suggests something far more ambiguous than the generic oppressor-oppressed dynamic.
Is a painting like The Daddies (2016), in which his alter ego sits nude on the all-purpose cliché of the Hudson’s Bay blanket with legs spread for the fathers of Confederation as much a gangbang fantasy as some sort of protest “scorn[ing] the opulence of colonialism on Indigenous lands” as one curatorial supplement claims? (Presented complete with a “Viewer discretion is advised” notice, no less). Is it not about a desire to be possessed as an object by men who seem completely indifferent to him?
Monkman is not alone in pornographically re-imagining Canadian history. You can find similar scenes in Claude Breeze, Joyce Wieland, John Boyle, Harold Town, and so on. It was practically a sub-genre in the 1960s and 70s, and then echoed in someone like Diana Thorneycroft decades later, a basic art historical point that is glaringly absent in commentary on his work. Which is simply to say that, historically speaking, if not in terms of personal branding and his own acknowledgements, he belongs to a minor tradition of which he is the least complex example.
You can quite legitimately interpret Monkman’s body of work as an exercise in egocentrism, one that exploits and fetishizes various easy tropes in a program of self-mythologization for onanistic and financial rewards. If there is something subversive about Monkman’s work, it is that it articulates the “truth and reconciliation” fantasy as an egoist’s public masturbatory ritual that uses “history” as a form of softcore pornography. The incremental decrease in overt sexual content other than as spectacularized abuse and exhibitionistic parading depicted in the rhetoric of spiritual revelation in recent work, fulfills the earlier logic of the sublimation (repression) of erotic desire into codified and authorized “sexual identity” (Queerness). While this is probably the least implausible interpretation of his work on its own (as a matter of “self-expression”), it is not very interesting, and it does not do much to explain the authoritarian function of his performance of Indigeneity as a state client. In other words, it ignores the historicity of his blatantly histrionic sense of historicism. If the work is idiotic (and I mean that non-pejoratively), it is also clearly a market-tested idiocy that stimulates the appropriate Pavlovian response for maintaining the moral fantasies of the ruling oligarchy. As many post-colonial theorists and historians have correctly pointed out, museums are the churches of state ideology. Monkman is a missionary.
In all respects, and more than any other artist in Canada, his work does function like nineteenth century European Academic art. Opponents of that art tended to chastise it as kitsch, and Modernist art evolved at least in part as a reaction against it. Primitivism was stupid, but it resulted in some interesting art. Its deformed cousin, of which Monkman is an iteration (bougie neo-Lahontanism), is, historically speaking, not stupid, but retarded. Both were reactionary and apocalyptic occult fantasies, but the latter is more fundamentally detached from reality. This is why it fits so snugly in the realm of deliberately gaudy anachronism. It is not that Monkman is artistically equivalent to Trump’s taste in architecture and interior design; it is actually far more kitsch. Unless one takes Monkman to be the cynical manipulator of codes to cash in on (I think it is more earnest), his work is more performatively sophisticated, but actually moronic, than Trumpism’s subversive form of bullshit.
* Imagery taken from MBAM and McCord Museum public accounts