instantly become a simple work of terrible cynicism and complaint which, although justified, would be no more than that: a com- plaint at the lack of recognition and public commemoration for the Native (cultural) genocide. When approached in a competitive mode, the bowl becomes an easy and tired way of denouncing the colonizer: not only would it constitute an abuse of Anne Frank’s life and death but also a distortion of the pot- tery tradition into which Beam taps. So what does the bowl accomplish? What


BEAM: AN OVERVIEW


Carl Beam was born in 1943 in what is now M’Chigeeng First Nation, Manitoulin Island, Ont., where he died in July 2005. Beam attended the St. Charles Garnier residential school in Spanish, Ont., studied painting at the Kootenay School of Art and obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Victoria in 1974. His work includes painting, photo-transfer, etching, ceramics, performance, instal- lation and more. Beam was involved in several impor-


tant exhibitions of Indigenous art such as Beyond History in Vancouver in 1989, Indigena at the Canadian Museum of Civilization and Land, Spirit, Power at the National Gallery of Canada, both in 1992. A large retrospective of his work, containing 50 of Beam’s art works, Carl Beam: The Poetics of Being, was organized by the National Gallery of Canada in 2010, and travelled through- out Canada. The exhibition was installed at the


National Museum of the American Indi- an in New York in 2012. That same year the Museum purchased Beam’s mixed- media work on paper titled Burying the Ruler (1992) for its permanent collec- tion; in addition, the Museum holds a watercolor by Beam titled Eagle and the Moon (1982).


32 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2018


is there for the viewer to see and ponder? First of all, Beam’s representation of Anne Frank is not based on an iconic image of her, but departs from a relatively unknown photo- graph of Anne Frank as a young girl. This rejection of iconic representation emphasizes that Anne was multiple and alive; she was a human being with a life outside that of the Holocaust. Beam reconnects us to her; we meet her again as a girl, a five-year-old child, donning a happy smile, a cap on her head and wearing a sturdy jacket (see page 30). Anoth- er striking feature is that Carl has misspelled her name. This defamiliarizing element may likewise serve to resist the violence of repre- sentation which has reduced Anne Frank to a single meaning. But the viewer may also wonder why Anne Frank’s name is there at all, together with the years of her birth and death, and the star of David beneath them. With a shock we realize that these are the conventional Western markers of a grave. The bowl, we realize, is a symbolic burial place that bestows respect on a sweet, smil- ing, strong-looking little girl – a girl whose body was never identified and who never did receive an individual grave. In this context, Beam’s artwork becomes all the more pow- erful when we realize that classic Mimbres bowls were used in burial rituals: the bowl was placed on the cranium of the head, or covered the face. In most cases, these funerary bowls held a so-called “kill-hole,” a hole pre- sumably made with a sharp object to provide a way out for the body’s spirit – an element that Beam chose not to add. The emphasis lies, as so often in Beam’s work, in bringing different worldviews together. Usually, this results in challenge and collision, but in the case of the Anne Frank bowl, the merger of different rituals for the dead impresses the viewer as a force that is meant to engender respect and a profound realization of human loss across human history, and the centrality of the human need for mourning.


If we allow ourselves to follow Beam’s


magic, crossing temporal, spatial, national, cultural and ethnic borders, it becomes pos- sible to imagine the continued presence of the force, spirit and wisdom of the Mimbres of the ancient Southwest. In Beam’s artistic vision, the Mimbres have taken note of the occurrence, in the 20th


century, of another


vast tragedy at the hands of modernity, such as would befall the North American continent which they, by extension of Beam’s hypothe- sis, would likewise have witnessed. To imagine that they would respond to this vast tragedy of the mid-20th


century, and bestow respect on


Anne Frank, making a ceramic bowl for her to honor and assist her in the process towards an afterlife, is a powerful experience. Beam, one could argue, literally places


Anne Frank inside a new realm of historio- graphy and a new realm of commemorative practice: rather than engaging in a competi- tion, it would seem that the bowl is embrac- ing Anne Frank; it has encapsulated her, shields her, accepts her in the lap of an ancient group whose lives predated colonialism, but who – by extension of the same logic that they know Anne Frank’s fate and story – know the history of the Indigenous peoples of North America. It is often argued that the recogni- tion of the Holocaust as a vast and universal tragedy for humankind has been important also because this recognition has enabled the articulation of other instances of human suf- fering and victimization. The funerary bowl that Beam made turns this argument the other way around. The Holocaust can be ap- proached and remembered as part of a larger pattern set in the colonial period. Rather than using (or abusing) the Holocaust to articulate Indigenous suffering and victimization, as de- tractors might argue, Beam actually reverses the situation. He evokes an Indigenous world as way to honor and memorialize Anne Frank, not as the icon carrying the terrible weight of a unique Holocaust memory, but as a human girl who encountered vast forces of unforgiv- able ignominy unleashed in the mid-20th


cen-


tury, a human victim deserving of respect and a proper burial ritual. X


Mathilde Roza is associate professor of American Literature and American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.


This article is based on a presentation at the 39th annual


American Indian Workshop, held at the University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium, in April 2018.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52