ALAN MICHELSON
Pehin Hanska ktepi (They Killed Long Hair) , 2021 Video, color, silent, 1:05 min. looped; red trade blanket Courtesy the artist …because they have no ears , 2022 Video, black and white, silent, 47 sec. looped; canvas screen Courtesy the artist
In the work of Alan Michelson, a New York–based Haudenosaunee Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, methodical research is combined with re-interpretations of archival material from an Indigenous perspective to challenge national myths. …because they have no ears (2022) and Pehin Hanska ktepi (They Killed Long Hair) (2021) bring together two moments—before and after the storied Battle of Greasy Grass in 1876, commonly known as Custer’s Last Stand. In the latter installation, a red trade blanket becomes a projective surface for rare black-and-white archival film footage from 1926 of Indigenous veterans on horseback visiting the site of the Battle of Greasy Grass (1876), where the Dakota, Northern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota Nations defeated the 7 th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. Michelson divides the footage into quadrants, the top two staggered and the bottom two flipped upside down, creating a circular loop. The counter-clockwise motion of the warriors’ slow, silent procession references the Winter Count of the Plains tribes, the annual calendar used to record significant events, each one represented by a single pictograph arranged in an ever-growing spiral. Michelson’s transformation of this early example of American documentary cinema and its patriotic, exoticizing gaze into a representation of Indigenous power and culture is underlined by the reddening of the film footage by its projection onto the blanket. Separate surfaces of film and screen merge into a single haptic moving image, whose saturated color and history-inflected objecthood signify Indigeneity. This reversal of the colonial cinematic gaze is echoed in …because they have no ears in which a projection onto natural canvas transforms a short footage from the 1941 Hollywood film They Died with Their Boots On— a hagiographic depiction of the life of Custer. A line of cavalry on horseback retreat silently from the camera underneath a brooding sky, in a reversal of their patriotic procession out of the fort in the original film. They next appear in the clouds, upside down as though falling, evoking Sitting Bull’s vision, before the battle, of soldiers and their horses falling from the sky upside down, “thick as locusts,” as a voice said, “I give you these because they have no ears.”
Top: Installation view: Alan Michelson, Pehin Hanska ktepi (They Killed Long Hair) , 2022, and . ..because they have no ears , 2022, in Mountain / Time , Aspen Art Museum, 2022. Photo: Carter Seddon
Bottom: Lone Dog, winter count. Sioux. NA.702.5 Courtesy the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming; Plains Indian Museum
4
5
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online