Live Stillness: Dichotomies of Indigenous Performance in James Luna’s Artifact Piece
Abstract: One day in February, 1987, James Luna lay still in a museum vitrine, his body resting in sand and covered sparingly by a loincloth. Luna had installed himself in a museum exhibit, titled Artifact Piece, at the San Diego Museum of Man. Display cases surrounding Luna's body contained his personal memorabilia, mundane collections, and tokens of the modern Native man. Small markers in the sand pointed to scars on Luna's body, and aided his transformation from man to artifact piece. Jolted by the sudden liveness of Luna's body amid contrasting displays of the past, museumgoers turned to audience and were tasked with resolving the tension between Luna's Indigeneity and his liveness, his objects' relevance and their status as Indigenous artifacts. The project of this paper is to examine James Luna's 1987 performance of "Artifact Piece" as a challenge to dominant representations of Indigenous culture in museums and the consequential reduction of Indigenous personhood to artifact. I will argue that Luna's performance subverts expectations of authentic cultural representation and Indigeneity through the display of his material body among objectified artifacts. Luna’s live performance effectively disrupts the structuring white gaze that guides curatorial practices around cultural representations of Otherness and presents new considerations for audiences in their consumption of "authentic" Indigenous culture.Term paper for Drama L15 507: Topics in Contemporary Theoretical and Historical Research: Authenticity in/and Performance, Fall 2022
Professor Elizabeth Hunter
Washington University in St. Louis