Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
American, Flathead; 20th-century, 21st-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
68%
I See Red: Migration. 1995. Mixed media on canvas
The symbolic-critical component of this painting — stenciled glyphs and a caricatured Indian visage strung just above the painting’s midriff — is less hokey than Smith can get with her map pieces. There’s some visual bite to her symbols here, too: the fact that they play out in a slash across the painting, rather than busying its whole surface, does much to correlate them (negatively) to the abstract stains and massings that lie a plane beneath. And these stains and massings, more than stereotyped post-war tics, combine to a composition, complete with foreground and back-. A scratched block of red down low, for instance, offsets a row of the same up top; one errant yellow soak provides color for the whole picture. Smith’s drips are mostly horrid, but they’re located and deliberate in Migration. Decolonial critique is less a product than a property of this artwork. (2023)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
44%
State Names Map: Cahokia. 2023. Mixed media on canvas
My sense is that a superficial though academically prevalent reading of midcentury American abstraction as a gestural and therefore spatial and aggressive mode of phenomenal artmaking influenced Smith, when she started painting during the eighties’ nadir of the esteem of modernism, towards the idea that manneristic drips on map-filled canvases plus pastiched Native American iconography would make for a captivating artistic gotcha of both Western colonialism and Western painting. It’s, like, disclosing the fallibility of cartography and abstraction by interpolating the idealized discursive system of each with the representational limitations of the other, right? But actually, no, instead it's sloppy handling with no perceivable resolution into either visual or conceptual effects, and sickly greens sitting near ugly blues, and lines that are too thick, and patchiness, and unconsummated disorder, and words that browbeat you with the very true but not really that complicated notion that America’s land was stolen. (2023)