Object of the Week
December 8, 2014
Object of the Week: Taken Without Color
By: Hayden DeBruler ‘17
“Do not ask me who I am, do not expect me to remain the same.”- Foucault
The screenprint by Edgar Heap Of Birds, entitled Telling Many Magpies, Telling Black Wolf, Telling Hachivi, is by far my favorite piece in the Infinite Mirror Exhibition, due to close next week. I’ve gravitated towards it—and been haunted by it—since I helped install the exhibition at the beginning of the semester.
The piece centers around its script, running down the work in a pungent, list-like fashion. NATURAL, it reads, backwards at the top, written for someone on the other side of the piece, a viewer to mirror the viewer I am when I look at it, how a shop window reads to the street. But being the viewer on this side comes with dramatic irony, that is the intention of the word ‘natural’ that the implied “other viewer” gets to see—in all caps it reads, “we don’t want Indians, just their names, mascots, machines, cities, products, buildings, living people.” Edgar Heap Of Birds systematically defines the connotation of ‘Natural,’ no longer usual, normal, accepted, expected, or innate; terribly all of the above, there is brutality in the truth of his statement.
He reveals these words in a cloud of black fanned brushings, beaked, winged blackbirds, their sharp edges adopting a dynamism that both bleeds out from the work, backward from their release. They are caught in a gust; contained by the frame, they loom around the text. In their great cloud, the nursery rhyme comes to mind, “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, and when the pie was opened, the birds began to sing,” chanting natural, Natural, NATURAL. “Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king,” this being the realization of the piece, the clarity of who I become when I view it, not the king, but across the table from him, the giver of the pie, chanting with the crows; horrific, relieved I have spoken.
Heap Of Birds is able to make the most effective argument about the appropriation of his culture in our society through this perspective, the reversal of the words. He ensures that despite whom the viewer is, they are handing this dish to the king, swarmed with the birds they laid within it, crust torn in its pressure, ripped open. I am dominated by the size of the piece, the black words, but the message is not received, all that is revealed to the king is the word natural, a pacifier, a word that means inherently correct; yet he is far from it. The viewer is given this perspective, devastated when not heard, and so Edgar’s message is relayed to the viewer, to anyone who enters this gallery, any background, any race; there is a decided lack of equality, there is no communication between the glass, the passersby seeing only one word, not stopping to see the disparity between natural and each letter it hides, ignores, turns its shoulder to. I don’t think I have ever felt so powerless as I do in front of his piece, as somber, as offered up—given to a definition that does not encompass who I know myself to be, universally ignored, mistaken. I have never encountered a work so powerful, and don’t think I ever will.
Hayden DeBruler is from Greenville, South Carolina. DePauw Class of 2017, Creative Writing and Art History Major. She is a volunteer with the Peeler Art Center Galleries. The traveling exhibition, Infinite Mirror: Images of American Identity, will be on display through Friday, December 12, 2014.