Troubling Settler-Colonial Imaginaries in Contemporary Art

This dissertation focuses on artworks by Andy Warhol, Brian Jungen, Mike Kelley and Rebecca Belmore. These works emerged in the wake of a shift that commenced in the 1960s and 1970s, as Canada and the United States largely changed their state policies towards Indigenous peoples from coercive assimilation to a form of political recognition based on the accommodation of cultural difference. These changes were a response to Indigenous activism across the continent, which altered the terms of engagement between these nation-states and Indigenous peoples with respect to settler colonialism’s characteristic process of dispossession. The artists I study explore the persistence of settler imaginaries, revealing both the seeming exhaustion of old stereotypes and their tenacious emotional and psychological grip on mainstream North American culture. The promises of multiculturalism and equal citizenship held out by the paradigm of political recognition were never suited to mediate relations between citizens from a multitude of Indigenous nations with complex sovereignty claims overlapping with the settler states of Canada and the United States. Yet this new paradigm also faced profound challenges posed by the neoliberal drive, starting in the 1970s, to impose market logics on more and more aspects of life. The struggles of the civil and women’s rights movements to win recognition as equal citizens involved emphasizing the differences of their respective constituencies, a social dynamic to which capitalist consumer markets quickly adapted. The artworks I address here reflect on forms of subjectivity profoundly shaped by the pervasion of consumerism and reveal the increasing demands placed on artists to perform their identities in ways that foreground their difference to gain recognition from the art market, state arts funding bodies, and the dominant organs of art criticism. My first case study, discussing some of Warhol’s final works, ruminates on how his commitment to “business art” figured this kind of subjectivity in relation to a settler-colonial imaginary that he explicitly associated with the commodity par excellence: money. Jungen, Kelley and Belmore each incorporated these new pressures to perform into their work, even as they slyly subverted, or outright refused the imperatives fueling these demands. Each of the projects discussed here calls attention to the economic circuits through which performances of identity are mediated in institutional art contexts. They show that this economy refracts both the desires and expectations of a broader public, but is deeply contingent on the unique emotional incentives that structure art’s consumption in its rarified institutional spaces.

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