T CARL BEAM’S RIBUTE TO ANNE FRANK


“I play a game of dreaming ourselves as each other. In this we find out that we’re all basically human.” – Carl Beam


BY MAT H I LDE ROZ A T


he work of the late Canadian artist Carl Beam (1943–2005), of mixed Objiwe and American descent, presents a confronta- tion and a challenge to limited


thinking of all kinds. Beam’s pioneering art, which was honored with the Governor Gen- eral’s Award for Media and Visual Art in 2005, demands that the viewer look anew at people, objects, events, icons, stories and histories, and explore ways of interrelatedness that they might not have considered or been trained to see before. Simultaneously, Beam’s work suggests and


reveals the violent and brutal results that arise from marginalizing mechanisms and belief systems propelled by intolerance, disrespect, radical simplicity, unquestioned tradition, power and greed. Since the late 1970s, he has furthered intellectual and ethical discussion not just on the ongoing marginalization of In- digenous peoples, worldviews and belief sys- tems, but also on the gap between mainstream and contemporary Indigenous art. When the National Gallery of Canada acquired Beam’s monumental mixed media work The North American Iceberg for its contemporary art sec- tion in 1986, it was instrumental in bringing renewed recognition for the importance of contemporary Native art or, rather, as Beam himself insisted, of contemporary art by art- ists of Native descent. History, as an ideological device at work on a personal and a global level, constitutes


28 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2018


a major theme in Beam’s work. Often, Beam rearranges existing narratives of history, di- vorcing images and events from their “origi- nal” historiographical contexts and opening them up for renewed scrutiny and signifi- cance. The artist himself frequently appears through the insertion of autobiographical remarks or representations of himself into the work; he highlights the individual/artist’s position and role in the world and its systems of representation and signification. If the sim- plifying force of these systems is revealed in this manner, Beam’s work also suggests their great power. The process of meaning-making is a devastating and destructive force when it creates falsehoods and imposes limited and damaging traits on people, but it can also act as a powerfully creative and inspiring force when it brings different worlds of seeing and knowing together. Beam’s demand of viewer-participation in the tasks of interpretation and (re)construc- tion of histories and interhuman connection also implies a questioning of the formation of memory. This question extends from per- sonal memory to the constitution of collective or national memory – a matter which Beam investigates through inquiries into public memorialization and commemoration. It is from this perspective that the art work that is central in this essay, Carl Beam’s Anne Frank, 1929-1945, acquires meaning. In 1980, Beam traveled to the American southwest and began an exploration of the


ancient Mimbres and Anasazi pottery tradi- tion. Greatly energized and inspired by the possibilities that the tradition offered, Beam explained, “the hemispherical quality of a large bowl still excites me like no cup, teapot, plate or other clay shape can do…it is a uni- verse unto itself where anything can happen – the designs are limitless.” The Anne Frank bowl is one of several artworks that came out of Beam’s embrace of Indigenous pottery traditions. It carries a representation of Anne Frank in white and brown, amidst stylized parallel curved lines and zigzag patterns in white, brown and blackish-brown. Beam’s inclusion of the German-Dutch


Jewish girl Anne Frank in his work, one of the most famous icons of the mass murder of the Jewish people during the Holocaust perpe- trated by the Nazis, is no easy citation. Refer- encing the immense pain, trauma and shock inflicted upon so many millions of people, the iconography is inevitably heavily loaded. By bringing the Holocaust into the realm of indigeneity as an artist of Native descent, however, Beam endows his bowl with addi- tional complexities. After all, Beam’s particu- lar commemoration of Anne Frank implies a comparison between the genocidal violence


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