Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Haida
19th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
75%
Platter. c1885. Argillite
The composition is slightly hodgepodge, which goes against the brusque and self-assured (though not infrequently busy) design of much of the best Northwest Coast art. Maybe it's because this platter was actually a tourist trinket: the carver turned things up to 11 to give the gringos something to see? Regardless, there's something lost and something gained through the bustle of the arrangement. The cosmic directness of traditional carving's lithe and lithic idiom is traded for an astounding degree of dynamic movement. The trademark feature of this style of art — its almost inconspicuous, unwitting asymmetries — has been emphasized and turned into a formal principle: look at the diagonal band moving down and to the left from the belly of the whale to the mouth of the fish, and at the different-sized four-point star-shapes to either side of its base. Even the segments of hatched patterning seem to have been placed according to whim rather than adherence to a sense of prescribed order. In this plate there's both heightened freedom and an absence of given meaning — a groundlessness. It's Haida art adapting itself to modern life. (TFS, 2026)