In Indian country - Native American Art; Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, New York, New York

PASSING through the galleries of the Smithsonian's new National Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan is about as pleasant as a fever dream in which we seem to be running constantly toward a goal and never getting there. Thousands of objects are arranged within a cramped and narrow circuit of rooms around the Alexander Hamilton Custom House's central core (which, for various red-tape reasons, has not been leased to the museum) so that every time you think you've come to the end of the exhibition, another display awaits you, and then another and another. Once the busloads of schoolchildren start to pour in, this sclerotic entanglement will certainly become a living Hell.

The tale of the endless legal complications that led to transplanting the George Gustav Heye Center from its uptown mausoleum to its present downtown venue is too complicated and dispiriting to describe in detail. Suffice it to say that early in the century Heye deeded his collection of more than a million objects to the City of New York on condition that the city provide space for their display. Now the Smithsonian has taken it over, anticipating the opening, a decade hence, of a larger museum on the last remaining patch of greensward on the Mall in Washington. In the meantime, as stipulated in Heye's will, it has established this museum in New York, which eventually will become a branch of the one in the capital.

As matters stand now, however, the galleries are in such a state of confusion that it took more than one spin around the supercollider-like circuit before I realized that I was seeing not one exhibition but three. They were so poorly differentiated that I would hardly have been sure even now were it not for the three separate leaflets that accompanied them. For the exhibits' studious nonconformity, their "daring," ever-shifting refusal to look like the old-style objects-in-glass-eases curatorship, causes everything on display to seem more or less of a piece.

To make matters worse, the objects, which tend to be quite small, are utterly overwhelmed by verbiage. Written panels amount to perhaps five hundred pages of text, which no one will ever be able to read all of, not that one would want to do so. But that is the least of the verbiage one has to put up with. For the displays, resolutely "state of the art," are chockablock with electronic gizmos, video games for tots, and above all, recordings of "Native Americans" detailing how they feel about being "Native Americans." It is interesting, by the way, that whereas the personalities involved uniformly speak of "Native Americans," the museum continues to use the name "American Indian." Yet another unpleasantness is the nauseating self-righteousness of this verbiage. The titles of the exhibitions tell the tale. It is a bad start that each title could apply equally well or ill to the other two exhibitions: "All Roads Are Good: Native Voices on Life and Culture," "Creation's Journey: Masterworks of Native American Identity and Belief," and "This Path We Travel: Celebrations of Contemporary Native American Creativity." Why are these Indians always traveling, one wonders. And where are all these roads leading. Nowhere, by the look of things. The dominant curatorial idea can be reduced to something along the lines of, "It's not your father's Olds," whereby a car company lures a new generation of consumers to re-examine an established commodity. The curators are determined that no one will leave this exhibition mistaking it for the dry-as-dust approach to Indian art that characterized the old venue on West 155th Street. As the brochure explains: "Museums have often presented Native American materials from non-native perspectives, describing them in the words of art historians or anthropologists." To counteract that, the museum adds seldom-heard voices to the discussion--those of Native Americans, past and present."

The implicit assumption in all such revisionist museology is that tribal objects were not intended to be displayed in dreary cases with labels--which is true enough--but that they were intended to be set in toney, airless, tracklighted mood chambers. The truth is that most of these objects were created with non-artistic ends in mind, and those that were created as art were not meant to end up in museums. If we accept in the first place the premise of displaying them in the male, pale museum, we should try to display a maximum of objects with a minimum of distraction. Though the display cases in the old venue were surely uninviting, at least they brought you in contact with a goodly assortment of objects, which you could look at as you pleased. The new display has far fewer objects, but forces upon the viewer a single perspective. In this regard, the present trend in "multivocal" installations is far more illiberal than what it has supplanted, since it will not accept that the humble visitor, not being a complete idiot, might just be able make up his own mind.

The pity is that there are some very fine objects in this museum--Navajo rugs, Mohawk beaded caps, Osage cradleboards--presented in so distracting a fashion that few will find pleasure in them. The first thing to do is to talk the municipal authorities into leasing the inner core of the rotunda, thus allowing the objects to be displayed in a more inviting fashion. Then we should pay the curators more--in fact, whatever it takes--to get them to work as little as possible. For the time being, however, the reconstituted George Gustav Heye Center is wrong from the start. And it bodes even worse for the other museum that the Smithsonian plans to open several years down the line.

COPYRIGHT 1994 National Review, Inc.
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