KENT MONKMAN at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art (111 Queen’s Park), to January 10, 2016. $15, stu $9, srs $11, half-price Fridays 4-9 pm. 416-586-8080. Rating: NNNN
When land-hungry settlers nearly wiped out the bison on the Great Plains in the 1880s, killing millions in a few years and forcing the starving indigenous people who depended on them onto reservations, the bones were the only part of the animal they actually used – to make bone china and fertilizer.
This genocidal near-extinction provides Kent Monkman with a jumping-off point for his installation at the Gardiner Museum, portentously named The Rise And Fall of Civilization (his question: Whose civilization?). He links the buffalo hunt and its crockery by-product with the flow of culture from prehistory to modernism, offering a critique of the colonialist rip-off of “primitive” art.
The show also has a literal jumping-off point, a natural-history-museum-diorama-style buffalo jump. Atop it, near the ceiling of the museum’s special exhibitions room, a life-sized likeness of Monkman’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, dressed in her customary red disco finery, gestures solemnly toward the room. She’s accompanied by two taxidermy buffalo, 19th century specimens from the artist’s collection. A sculptural cubist bovine covered in a patchwork of hides is frozen in midair as it plummets over the cliff.
The ground below is littered with pottery shards and Monkman’s ceramic riff on Picasso’s bicycle-seat-and-handlebars bull’s head, as well as broken body parts of buffalo made from welded metal rods. The shattered cattle forms, even more disembodied than the cubist jumper, gradually become more whole and upright as they approach the middle of the opposite wall. Completing the cycle, Monkman’s life-sized cattle, painted in cave art style, stampede over the walls in two directions back toward the cliff.
As the bovines journey through the history of artistic representation, the early European hunter-gatherers’ life-giving aurochs morphs into Picasso’s Iberian bull, a symbol of power and virility. Along the way, the animals have a regenerative encounter with North American hunter-gatherers and their artistic descendant, the maker of this installation.
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