Chris Pappan: Ghost Images

CHRIS PAPPAN

Ghost Images Tales From the Sky People, 21st Century Ledger Drawing #106, pencil/graphite, map collage, gold leaf on US Cavalry recruitment ledger, 16 x 10.5 inches.

The Hero Twins Return To Indian Territory, Pencil/graphite, acrylic and map collage on 1906 ledger, 13 x 22 inches.

GHOST IMAGES

MAM is excited to present Ghost Images by Chicago-based artist Chris Pappan, generously funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation. The foundation’s support of our contemporary American Indian art programming has amplified our ability to present artists who are making significant contributions to the field, inviting our audience to engage directly with these artists, and bolstering the number of works by American Indian artists in the collection. The funds broadly increase scholarship and awareness of these artists throughout the region and, in Pappan’s case, enable MAM to bring a nationally renowned artist back to Montana.

Pappan grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona, and studied first at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), then at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Pappan didn’t grow up on a reservation, but when he moved to Chicago, he found himself in the midst of one of the largest urban Indian communities in the country. More than 30,000 members from 150 different tribes reside in the greater Chicago area as an outgrowth of a 1950s federal program to relocate American Indians from reservations to urban centers in a contested effort to improve access to healthcare, education, and economic opportunities. In

the midst of this cultural plethora, Pappan investigated his own background, which he describes as Kaw, Osage, Cheyenne River Sioux, and mixed European.

While Pappan was working as an art handler he came across an unused accounting book that he employed as a way to contemporize and re-imagine historical ledger drawings. The ledger drawings, when coupled with his use of 19th century photographs, result in astounding statements that resonate so contemporaneously using historic material. However, Pappan’s portraits are not exact translations of the photograph. They reveal how mutable—and how concerned with gaze—portraiture is. He uses post-colonial strategies of depiction—such as mirroring or doubling his subjects, distorting features and proportions, faceting portraits, and reversing values like a photographic negative—to reimagine what otherwise would be a straight-forward rendering of a subject. In doing so, Pappan challenges the Euro-American traditions that preference individual likeness and rely upon linear perspective, reminding his viewers unambiguously that there are other ways to see and to depict.

-Brandon Reintjes, Senior Curator

Chris Pappan’s Ghost Images

BY MAX C A RO CC I, P H D

Heralded as one of contemporary Native America’s most talented artists, Kaw/Osage/Lakota Sioux painter Chris Pappan captures his audiences through the intensity of his imagery and his exceptional ability to tell stories through commanding pictures.

His use of archival paper, maps, old registers, and documents as backdrop for his characters has warranted him the title of ‘ledger artist,’ a definition that squarely puts him in direct relationship with 19th century Plains Indian antecedents of this painting genre. Pappan has been frequently associated with prestigious artists of the past, such as Black Hawk (1832-1890), Howling Wolf (1849-1927), Silver Horn (18601940), and Amos Bad Heart Bull (1869-1913), alongside many other anonymous painters from the same period. Like him, they were recording their personal experiences, and the fast-changing social predicaments evolving around American Indian nations at the onset of the reservation period (beginning circa 1890).

As a follower of this tradition, he can be seen as a commentator and narrator of modern-day indigenous concerns. He manages to condense complex social issues in arresting tableaux that at once attract and surprise the viewer by way of a highly identifiable visual idiom.

In the series Ghost Images, distortions, multiplications, doubling, mirroring, negative imagery, and oppositions of old-time photographs, now the recognizable signature of his aesthetics, emphasize the common thread that unites them in metaphysical unison: a sense of anticipation. The emphatic characters that emerge from the pages of Pappan’s indigenous past, like spirits conjured up by incantations, await to utter their proclamations, sentences of foreboding, admonition, and warning. Like ancient ghosts, Pappan’s figures are able to haunt the viewers with their powerful presence, announcing with unflinching tenacity verdicts and pronouncements that only a careful scrutiny of their pictures can disclose. Perhaps it is this looming sense of expectation that renders Pappan’s imagery so irredeemably captivating.

He makes his protagonists resurface from historical oblivion with clear intentions, but nothing they convey can be clearly understood if we

don’t listen to their ethereal voices disguised in the folds of their mantles, the barbs of their feathers, or the waves of their carefully styled hair. If initially we are not able to interpret their messages, it is because they ask us to tune in with their subtle whispers and broken murmurs, because they speak to him, and they speak to all of us. Indeed, Pappan’s art must be apprehended not just through sight, but, like in a visionary state, it must be experienced art is not simply about “ Pappan’s what the eyes see, but it is rather

about what it enables us to perceive beyond its enticing forms.”

and heard. In much the same way as his predecessors, who gave voice to their spiritual encounters through pastels and paper, Pappan chooses to communicate his visions in a pictorial mode.

Although obvious references to historic American Indian masters grant him a place among them for the vibrancy and immediacy of his use of pencils and brushes, Pappan’s

art stretches the confines of American Indian art histories.

Indeed, it spills into the work of European academic painting.

His notable adoption of distortions, for example, evokes Old World art’s anamorphic projections, the most famous of which is Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), a double portrait with a blurred passage across the painting’s bottom that, when viewed at an oblique angle, resolves into a skull.

Anamorphosis was employed since the Renaissance to create views of landscapes and objects purposely distorted to conform to a single viewer’s vantage point. While the historical function of this projection was to create visual illusions, Pappan’s objective is to go beyond amazing the viewer with a refined technique. His work encourages observers to acknowledge the fallacy and the limits of their optical perspective. In more than one way, Pappan’s art is not simply what we may call virtuous realism. It is conceptual art, for it puts technique and expressive media to work on both intellectual and spiritual planes.

The richness and poignancy of his inventory of images can be appreciated on many different levels: technically, historically, spiritually, and intellectually.

The layering of his paintings reminds us of palimpsests in which erasures, overlaps, and superimpositions create a sense of historical layering, which

simultaneously blurs different planes of experience and makes the viewer aware of the incompleteness and partiality of his vision.

Truly, there are multiple ways of reading Pappan’s art depending on the layer one choses to examine and the perspective one prefers to adopt. On the one hand, his œuvre can be understood in a

literal sense for what it shows: images of forebears distorted in visual games that entertain, puzzle, titillate, and attract us.

If one wants to go deeper, his compositions can be perceived from an historical perspective as an ingenious reframing of old forms of indigenous communication such as picture writing and ledger art. In its skillful mastery of technique,

Step into the World, pencil/graphite, map collage, inkjet on found ledger, 11 x 9 inches.

Listening to Visions:

instead, it resonates with familiar art historical idioms of naturalism and photo-realism derived from a Euro-American tradition that goes from Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) to Chuck Close (born 1940).

While each of these aspects can be taken as a legitimate interpretation of the extent of his art historical erudition and outstanding technical abilities, taken together they reveal a depth of meaning that awaits to be peeled off layer upon layer, for Pappan’s art is not simply about what the eyes see, but it is rather about what it enables us to perceive beyond its enticing forms. It almost asks us to listen to his visions.

The convergence of these equally useful avenues of interpretation is not only testimony to the richness of Pappan’s repertoire, but it is also sign of a reconciliation between culturally divergent and frequently incommensurable artistic languages. The distance historically established by the differences between American Indian and European worldviews is in his work laid bare for observers to examine. Pappan wants the viewer to move past looking at his art. He inspires us to identify the points of conjunction between these contiguous, and yet opposite, experiences of the world rendered dissonant by the experience of colonization.

His figures outlined with expert confidence speak

Mind The Gap, 21st Century Ledger Drawing #108, pencil/graphite, map collage, inkjet, acrylic in 1906 ledger book, 12 x 15 inches.

to the viewers through the texts against which they rest and through the multiple points of encounter one can establish between figures and writing that form his complex iconography. The juxtaposition of images and texts too, like anamorphic distortions, is common to many European traditions: from Roman inscriptions on sarcophagi to Renaissance portraits’ explicatory texts, from Dada surreal compositions to Pop art’s succinct utterances.

But this is not simply Pappan’s tribute to European artistic traditions. It is a way of bringing the observer closer to Native American expressive forms because, in fact, historical ledger art and picture writing performed several functions at once. They were both texts and representations of historical

facts, documents of spiritual encounters, and expressions of lived experiences. These old images could be read and understood as scripts in what is essentially an indigenous form of literacy, with its codes, grammars, syntax, and lexicons.

Pappan’s tactical employment of this approach reveals how his art is proficient in both Euro-American and American Indian artistic vernaculars. It is an aesthetic choice that brings these two distant traditions in close proximity to engage in a dialogue that is facilitated by the artist’s experienced draughtsmanship. Pappan gives his audience all the components necessary to unpack each image and make sense of the abundance of references and juxtapositions that, at first sight, may make the elements forming each picture seem incongruous:

A digger may appear on the depicted with indefatigable elements that mark a personally background of a Navajo textile care, work together to map tailored constellation of design filled in with a map out the multiple trajectories meaning that ought to be that hovers over the head of a of interpretations the artist understood in its entirety and girl doubled up in a specular invites us to pursue. Similarly, across artistic registers. reflection. Or, an imposing the appropriately selected Pappan’s art is crafted through man may be flanked by a vigilant and measured film-like sequences of control of the artist’s tools. running bison, with a His technical expertise trailer lurking from behind is not aimed at simple intense-looking historical representation, however. figures arising from Through a distinctly bureaucratic papers’ dull figurative style he is able backdrops. These are not to rescue past figures from random and incoherent their spectral existence to associations. They are convey with compelling phrases of sentences urgency complex messages that communicate, with that require the viewer’s pathos and heartfelt attention and a firm respect, Pappan’s concerns dedication to interpretation. with indigenous peoples’ All the elements that fill cultural loss, historical each frame are equally erasure, and the lingering important in decoding the legacies of colonialism. content hidden in individual All these compositions compositions. Chris Pappan need careful deciphering, asks observers to listen to the but they can be fully ethereal voices of his ghostly Atom Heart Mother, pencil/graphite, ink, gold understood if put in characters as a way to leaf, map collage, color pencil on 1871 Chicago Jewelers ledger, 16 x 11 inches. the context of Pappan’s uncovering the subtle details concerns with indigenous backgrounds and the type that, like words in a phrase, rights to language, land, culture, of paper chosen for the complete the sentences that and self-determination. Each presentation of his characters each art piece carries with selftitle, composition, and figure jointly function as distinct assurance and solemn resolution.

Carocci is a London-based anthropologist and curator whose interest in Native North American arts spans more than 30 years. He began his career in the 1970s at the only Native American art gallery in Rome. He has curated exhibitions for international museums and galleries, such as the British Museum in London, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, and the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, The Netherlands.

He has also collaborated on a variety of curatorial projects in the United Kingdom, Europe, and

the United States. He has edited, authored, and contributed numerous articles and essays to publications. Carocci has taught Native North American arts and has given lectures, public talks, and seminars on the subject since 2000. He is an associate lecturer in museum studies and curating at the Chelsea College of Art at the University of the Arts in London. Current projects include working with contemporary American Indian artists on ways of reconciling anthropological and art historical discourses about indigenous expressive cultures.