Call Me in '93: An Interview with James Luna

Performance artist James Luna, of Luiseno Indian ancestry, talks about what it's like to be pigeonholed as an ethnic artist, and called upon only when his ethnicity is timely—as during the Christopher Columbus anniversary in 1992. He also addresses his place as an artist in his own community. —Eds.

James Earle Fraser modeled End of the Trail in the 1890s and enlarged it to monumental size for display at the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco. The exposition marked the completion of the Panama Canal and a watershed in California history, separating the state's pioneer past from its future as a center for Pacific commerce. Fraser's sculpture is, in effect, a bow to the modern world. Body drained of energy, the Indian slumps lifelessly, his spear, once raised in war and the hunt, hangs downward, as if about to slip to the ground. This particular formulation of the ill-fated Indian has projected a powerful stereotype through the 20th century. It can be seen today on belt buckles, in advertisements and commercial prints, and, in perhaps its most ironical manifestation, on signs designating retirement communities.

—Julie Schimmel [1]

End of the Frail, James Luna, mixed media installation, 1990-91, various sites. Photo: Richard Lou

If James Earle Fraser's sculpture End of the Trail was a "bow to the modern world," then James Luna's photographic tableau End of the Frail is a message to the modern world 75 years later. The message is simple: The "ill-fated" Indian, so mythically portrayed on belt-buckles, is not dead. Indians are part of contemporary culture. Only the enemies they struggle against—poverty, alcoholism, identity—have changed.

In his tableau variation on End of the Trail, Luna mimics the same lifeless pose, but the pony has been replaced by a weathered sawhorse, and the spear by a bottle of liquor. Nobility has been replaced by pathos. The exhaustion is no longer that of effort but that of despair.

The piece reflects the range of concerns Luna brings to his body of work. It plays directly on art-historical reference, parodying an American masterpiece. The humor is informed by the conceptually based, art-referential parody typical of so much recent art, but has deeper roots as well. "My appeal for humor in my work comes from Indian culture where humor can be a form of knowledge, critical thought and perhaps used to just ease the pain. I think we Indians live in worlds filled with irony and I want to relate that in my works," he notes. [2]

Luna was born on the La Jolla Indian reservation in 1950 to a Luiseno Indian mother and a Mexican father. He grew up in Orange County and graduated from the University of California Irvine with a degree in art in 1976, a time when the school was a hotbed for the development of conceptual and performance art in southern California. He received a masters in counseling at the San Diego State University in 1983 and currently works as a counselor for Palomar College in San Marcos. He moved back to the La Jolla Reservation in 1976.

Originally a painter, Luna now refers to himself as a conceptual artist and works primarily in installation, performance art and video. He has found a comfortable place to create in the space where contemporary art and its concerns with parody, ritual and autobiography intersect with the traditional attitudes of Indian culture. The forms he uses are familiar to a contemporary gallery/performance audience, yet when he infuses those forms with information from his own culture, it exposes some of the ancestral roots of the forms themselves.

Luna claims his work is not political. "In doing work about social issues I use myself to explore conditions here on the reservation. It is not my place to tell people how to act," he says. [3] Yet, in the hands of an outsider, it would be hard to see his work as not being political. He is challenging our tendency to mythologize and historicize Native American culture. He is breaking taboos by directly addressing his own, and his culture's battle with alcoholism. (It is telling that he discusses his work and the struggles facing contemporary Indians using words like "dysfunction" and "recovery.") It is work that can produce a certain amount of discomfort for non-Indian and Indian alike.

Luna's work has been appearing in shows throughout the country during the past several years, and his installations in the Whitney Museum's "SITEseeing" exhibition and The New Museum's "Decade Show" recently earned him a Bessie Award. He has declined offers to exhibit outside the country, feeling that his audience and the issues he works with are particular to North America.

I did the following interview with Luna in September, 1991.

Steven Durland: When I first approached you to do an interview, you quite pointedly told me your motto was "Call me in '93." How did that develop?

James Luna: I'm quite disillusioned with the multicultural movement. I really feel like education is the key and we still haven't addressed that. For instance, I would be very proud to be in a book of contemporary American Indian artists. But I think in the end what would be most satisfying would be that I would be in the art-history text used in a regular art-history class as James Luna, artist. Period. James Luna, artist who happens to be an Indian. I wouldn't want to be in one and not the other.

This '92 thing is sort of coming on the tail end of that. Curators want a certain kind of Indian and a certain kind of Indian art. They want you to be angry, they want you to be talking it up. It's the same rush to say 'let's have a multicultural show.' Now everyone is saying 'let's have an Indian show' or 'let's have a colonialism show.' So when people call me I have to ask 'Why didn't you call me before? You're calling me now, but are you going to call me in '93?' It's a way to show but it may be a dead end if you don't do that kind of work. This last year has been real good for me. I am showing at different places and I am real happy to be in this Shared Vision show, as much I was really happy to be in the Decade Show with all types of artists. But I don't know if I want to take a step back and be in that kind of titled show. So I have this personal thing that if it's colonial, call me in '93.

SD: You started as a painter. How did you get involved in performance?

JL: When you go to a school like [University of California] Irvine, and you come from a small place and you're not into the names and the movements, you might as well be on Mars. In my paintings I was trying to match colors with designs and do movement, very simple geometric forms going one way and other things going another, that were doing a lot of things on the canvas. I felt I was stymied with the paintings because I couldn't be vocal. I couldn't express feelings.

Then I stumbled into performance with Bas Jan Ader, an instructor from the Netherlands [at Irvine], and Jim Turrell, another instructor there. I found a whole new place to be vocal. I wanted to show transition, like the Drinking Piece. That was a transition from the normal state to the unnormal state. I did a piece about an unwrapping of a bundle where eventually I became the bundle. It was an offshoot of the Lakota ceremony where the guys wrapped themselves in blankets. I did another one about a dancer, where I had the dancer's objects nailed to the walls, and I came in and as I undressed I put something on, till I was a dancer. Then I danced and went back through the transition and put on my street clothes and walked out. It was a real simple thing.

SD: How was your work viewed at the school?

JL: When I introduced some Indian imagery into my geometry paintings, which was real popular at the time, I found I could use my culture in my art and it was OK. People liked the paintings, but because they were "ethnic" it was very hard for them to be critical. With the performance work they were more frightened and put off. We had a critique class and there was one guy there who was accusing me of using my culture. Using it. And I thought, "Well, what the fuck am I going to use?"

SD: Before and even during the time you were there, UC Irvine was really a hotbed of experimentation and performance. Were you influenced by other students like Chris Burden?

JL: Yes and no. I'd heard he was around there. I never saw him or his work. I just felt aloof from the whole school. On the other hand it offered me the opportunity and training to know how to do this. It wasn't until later that I put it all together, that I realized that I'd brushed shoulders with someone who was to be famous later on, or that I was being shown something that a lot of other departments weren't doing. I didn't go to a lot of shows and I didn't hang out with the art crowd. I didn't do all these things these other people did. I feel it's somewhat unfortunate, but at the same time I think I was probably saved. I have a full-time job as a counselor and there's no way I'd ever quit it, because of the security it offers me and even more so because of the connection it gives me to people. I feel like if I were in art full-time, as an artist or an arts administrator, that I would lose touch. Maybe that's not true, but that's what I feel.

SD: What did you do after you finished school?

JL: I went dormant. Then [in 1986] David Avalos, the curator at the Centro [de la Raza in San Diego] and Philip Brookman heard about me and they brought me down from the mountains because they realized that there must be something out there happening other than the typical Indian art. So I brought some ideas and some old stuff and they liked it and turned me loose. It was probably one of the biggest things that happened in my life was to be let loose, to have a budget and to be given these two big rooms. It just felt real good.

SD: You have a vocabulary that incorporates Indian traditions as well as the relatively recent history of process performance. Do both of those things enter in when you create your work?

JL: It was during the creation of the Intar piece, Two Worlds, where it really hit me hard that that was my strength, that I was a man of two worlds. It sounds kind of hokey, but that was really the moment, as I was walking through that doorway, fixing the piece, I realized that this is my strength, not just that I'm a man of two worlds, but that I do it with ease. And every Indian who lives long enough, it comes to them.

SD: How do you relate your performance to traditional Indian rituals?

JL: Well, other people talk to me about rituals, and I don't think I could do that. I couldn't show a ritual. I couldn't get a ritual and tear it up and show it as art. That would go against all of my personal beliefs. But, on the other hand, the performances are rituals, because they're a process, and they involve a lot of things that are in ritual that people don't realize. There's a lot of patience involved. There was a lot patience involved in the WPA piece [Tell Tale Heart,1990]. If people leave in the middle, maybe they'll get part of it. The people who stay the longest have gone through the ritual. When I'm running [in the piece], that's another part of ritual, endurance. It has that strenuous feel of dancing. The feet against the floor, the sweating, the whoosh when I run by.

I presented concepts of ritual without presenting ritual, Indian ritual. It's part of the message I have for my Indian audiences. Here is a medium [performance] where you can do all those things—you can do ceremony, you can do dance, you can do singing, you can do what you do every day—and in the right context it's art.

SD: Do you intend for your work to address both Indian and non-Indian audiences?

JL: I think that what keeps me rooted is that I try to think of my audience as being all Indians. That doesn't mean that I do all my work for approval by the Indian people, but the biggest thing is that they'll get it; whether they like it or not, they'll get it. Being simple is much harder than being complex.

SD: Does the fact that you're an artist give you any particular position in the community?

JL: Well, it's kind of funny. I told you I made my art for Indians. But Indian people, reservation people, don't go to galleries. That's educational. Why should you go to a gallery? So that's been a real dilemma for me. And it's not just my Indian community, it's all Indian communities. So a lot of people haven't seen my work. But the people who have have been blown away by it. It's broken their whole concept of what art is. I showed the video [of Tell Tale Heart] to a few people and they were stunned. They go, "God, it has everything in it. There's watchmacallit's house, there's a picture of my great-grandmother in there, one of the old Indians, there's songs." And it blows people away because there's all this history. There's a sequence, not only in the past, but in the present.

SD: You cross back and forth across cultural borders a lot. Does that produce any antagonism?

JL: I've gotten some criticism. But it's been from people who really haven't seen the work or the body of it. Like the drinking piece—after I did it people came up and patted me on the back and what they were saying was, "I'm glad you talked about it, because we can't keep quiet about it." As a trained counselor and an alcoholic, you know that the first item in recovery is talking about it. I just try to show by example the agony of it, the pain of it, using myself as an example and the reality of it.

SD: You've referred to yourself as a contemporary traditionalist. What does that mean?

JL: You always see these Indian paintings and people refer to them as "traditional Indian paintings." That's bullshit because the only Indian painters we ever had did body painting, and hides, and pottery. That's Indian painting. All this other stuff is contemporary. The traditional part [in my work] is the ritual part. It's traditional thought, traditional process. It has nothing to do with these stoic paintings of Indians. That has something to do with memory, or not even memory but just passed-down visual imagery.

SD: Last year the Los Angeles Festival presented a number of works that were representative of traditional performance and ritual from a variety of cultures. Afterward there was a lot of discussion around questions of authenticity. Can traditional ritual exist in the context of an avant-garde festival? Why were the Matachine Indians wearing tennis shoes? What's your feeling about issues of authenticity?

JL: Aren't we allowed to progress? Yeah, things are handed down, but things change. People die, things are forgotten and you just carry on as best you can. And probably that stuff they think that happened has gone through a process, too.

And there's the issue of what's an Indian? Who's an Indian? If you're part Indian, what's the other part? How does that influence you? Does it make you less, does it make you more? I don't have an answer for that but that's part of my work, questioning that.

Then there's this whole group of people out there who want to be Indians, that want to be the "good" part of the culture. But for me being an Indian from a reservation is more than that. And it really bothers me that there's all these people wanting to take. And what pisses me off is they only want the best. You can't have just the best.

That's why I dislike the movie Dances With Wolves. It did nothing but glorify all the good stuff. It didn't show any Indians mad, or any Indians upset. It didn't show any Indians cry. It didn't show any Indians fucking up. We're still beautiful, stoic and pretty. You see the movie and you go out and see a fat, overweight, acne-covered, poor, uneducated person—is that the real Indian you want to see? Not that we're all either one of those. But it just isn't one way.

Notes

1. "Inventing 'the Indian,'" from The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920, 1991, Smithsonian Institution, p. 173. [return]

2. From artist's statement in Encuentro: Invasion of the Americas and the Making of the Mestizo, a catalog for a show of the same name presented at SPARC (Social and Public Art Resource Center), Los Angeles, 1991. [return]

3. ibid. [return]

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Winter 1991.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002