Critique, Repair, Refusal

The 1976 United States Bicentennial presented a dilemma for the state. In the aftermath of a disastrous overseas war, a political corruption scandal, and economic recession, there was little appetite for a grandiose celebration of national unity. The solution of its organizers was to decentralize commemoration, to downplay the role of the federal state and instead celebrate the nation’s history as an anthology of more intimate ethnic, local, and family stories. Fifty years later, amid yet more disastrous overseas wars, never-ending economic crisis, and a collapse of faith in public institutions, no such fix has arisen for the 250th anniversary of the United States of America. The event is passing by with little fanfare and with no political faction ready to claim it. The anniversary is awkward for the liberal center, who have become habituated in recent years to interpreting the nation’s history through the lens of its original sins: slavery and genocide. (The socialist left, of course, has even less appetite for patriotism.) Meanwhile, the Trumpian right can hardly muster an alternative narrative; despite their conservative fantasies of nationalist return, their politics is one of nihilist negativity. State repression has put museums in a double bind: even the most lukewarm criticism of US history can put the institution’s funding or nonprofit status at risk. It is unsurprising, then, that major institutions like the Smithsonian American Art Museum have chosen simply to abstain from the commemoration.

This lacuna presents an opportunity for institutions outside of the United States to reflect on the origins of our global hegemon. The Museum Ludwig’s HERE AND NOW: De/Collecting Memories from Turtle Island is a timely attempt to reconsider the dominant histories of the United States from the perspective of its Indigenous peoples. It is the latest in a series of projects through which the museum’s curators rethink its collection and reflexively interrogate their own curatorial practices. It is a shame that the museum did not mount a full-scale lending exhibition on the occasion, since its longstanding relationship with US art would make it well placed to do so: formed in 1976 to house a major bequest of twentieth-century art by collectors Peter and Irene Ludwig, the Museum Ludwig has the most comprehensive collection of US Pop art outside of the United States. This exhibition, although modest in scale, develops a compelling curatorial framework that deserves elaboration. As is, it is rather abrupt and unresolved, but its irresolution illuminates the contradictions that face institutions as they seek to reckon with the surging popularity of contemporary Indigenous art and with ongoing calls to decolonize the museum. (The latter buzzword is not referenced directly in the exhibition, although it is invoked implicitly by the titular term “de/collecting,” which remains undefined by the curators.)

De/Collecting Memories from Turtle Island is divided into three sections. The first contains a display of Photochrome prints of US tourist sites published at the turn of the twentieth century by the Detroit Publishing Company. For the curators, these objects serve as an allegory for the constructed character of national histories. Retrospectively colored by studio technicians—many of whom had never visited the documented locations—the photographs are artificial memories, souvenirs of sights never seen by the eye. Lengthy wall texts next to each photograph explain what is not visible in each of these images—the land’s Indigenous inhabitants and their worldviews—and attempt to direct the viewer to reconsider the landscape from Indigenous perspectives by including place names in Indigenous languages and quotations from Indigenous Studies scholars including Ned Blackhawk and Robin Wall Kimmerer. The curators’ engagement with these voices is earnest, and in many cases the juxtaposition of word and image brought out unexpected new readings of the latter. But this strategy also gave the display the dry, didactic style of an academic thesis, with Indigenous perspectives mostly inserted into an existing narrative as scholarly marginalia.

The second section, however, adopted a far more successful approach, seeking to draw the viewer phenomenologically into an Indigenous worldview. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Seneca sculptor Marie Watts’s absorbing installation Thirteen Moons (2025), comprised of large, pendulous clusters of thousands of tin cones suspended from the ceiling. As the visitor passes through the space they are invited to brush these assemblages with their bodies. On doing so, a gentle chime rings out as the metal cones graze against their fellows in turn. These resonant objects are “jingles,” an accessory ordinarily affixed to the regalia of participants in the Jingle Dance, which originated in Anishinaabe communities in the early twentieth century but was subsequently adopted on the intertribal powwow circuit. A nearby screen shows one such dance performed in the gallery space by Watts’s collaborator, the Umatilla dancer Acosia Red Elk. In a voiceover, Red Elk tells visitors a story of the Jingle Dance’s origins. During the influenza pandemic of 1918, an Anishinaabe elder, seeking guidance on how to heal those afflicted by the disease, was taught the dance by spirits in a vision. Their healing gift was the sound of the jingle in motion—or more specifically, Watts reminds us, jingles in the plural, since a jingle remains silent when alone. The jingle therefore serves the artists as a metaphor of collectivity. With Thirteen Moons, Watts generously invites her viewers to participate bodily in the relational networks of human and non-human beings (dancers, spirits, jingles) that make up Indigenous worlds.

From afar, Watts’s clusters of jingles resemble natural phenomena like overgrowing foliage or clouds heavy with rain. Up close, however, their components become visible as mass-produced objects, their surfaces embossed with the logo of McPherson, one of the largest distributors of jingles in North America. In fact, the Jingle Dance has always had a close relationship to the commodity, as the first jingles were repurposed from the lids of tobacco tins and other packaging. In this sense, then, Thirteen Moons, like much of Watts’s work, provides an Indigenous twist on the tradition of the readymade. This gains a particular significance at the Museum Ludwig, with its impressive collection of US and European postwar avant-garde art. For many of those artists, the revival of the readymade registered the seemingly total triumph of the commodity’s alienating powers over subjectivity and social life. On the other side of the building, for example, visitors can see Andy Warhol’s White Brillo Boxes (1964), a sculpture that lays bare the collapse of artwork and commodity, its potentially infinite repetition figuring a world made anonymous, uniform, and fungible by the serial logic of mass-production.

In Watts’s work and the Jingle Dance more broadly, on the other hand, the commodity object is repurposed as a relational instrument of healing rather than alienation, while the serial repetition of mass-produced units serves as a figure of community rather than atomization. The abiding question posed to an artist like Warhol is whether his embrace of alienation was capitulation or critique, and the same could be asked of Watts’s work. On one hand, its insistence on the object’s curative properties risks re-mystifying the commodity, but on the other, it serves as a powerful archive of Indigenous resistance to capitalist social relations. Thirteen Moons declares that capitalism’s disenchantment of the world was never as successful as it seemed. Ways of thinking and being long thought banished from modernity still survive, and even thrive, beneath the seamless surfaces of the commodity world. Ultimately, then, the work aims for neither capitulation nor critique, but a third term entirely.

The passage from the Photochromes to Thirteen Moons rehearses a progressive narrative of inclusion, a movement of Indigeneity from absence to embodiment. Yet the exhibition’s final room casts a more discordant note of doubt. On the wall by the exit hangs an early self-portrait by the Apsáalooke photographer Wendy Red Star, Indian Woman Sitting (2005). The artist, dressed in nineteenth-century Plains garb, poses in a theatrical studio setting. The image recalls the staged ethnographic portraits made by fin-de-siecle photographers like Edward Curtis, which sought to timelessly preserve their Indigenous subjects in advance of their presumed disappearance, like insects in amber. Yet here, in vibrant color, Red Star adopts a slumped, lounging pose, her head resting on her fist, as if to signal utter boredom with the aesthetic conventions in which she finds herself. This is an artwork that declares its own impatience with the hermeneutic frames imposed upon it.

The small photograph hangs alone in the space. There is no attempt on the curators’ part to interpret it for the viewer. In a confessional wall text, they admit to the “uneasiness” and “uncertainty” they felt when confronted with the task of “select[ing] and contextualiz[ing]” the work of Indigenous American artists, given their “Eurocentric view of art.” In response they propose a practice of “dialogic curating” that consists of “listening, asking questions, and unlearning.” In this case, this means handing the reins of interpretation to the artist herself: the only other object in the room is a print-out of “The Foe Manuscript,” a polemic previously written by Red Star and available on her website.1 Not quite a dialogue, then, so much as an abdication of the curatorial prerogative to frame an artist’s work. And so, the exhibition ends on an open note of indecision and inaction.

I do not have the space here to offer a close reading of Red Star’s “Foe Manuscript,” which is an important text that should be read in full. In brief, however, it rails against the curatorial and critical frameworks that have been imposed on the artist throughout her career. That career was launched at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the wake of the success of a generation of artists, including Edgar Heap-of-Birds, James Luna, and Jimmie Durham (whose claims to Cherokee ancestry have since been discredited). Those artists gained mainstream recognition with practices that adopted the reflexive strategies of institutional critique to illuminate the structures that mediate the relationship of Indigenous peoples and the museum. Red Star’s early, ironic self-portraits were easily slotted into this postmodern framework, but she insists that her work has never been primarily a project of criticism. For her, the limitation of critique is that it is always locked into a negative relation with its object or “foe.” It is therefore dependent on, and determined by, that which it opposes.

Rather than “conflict or resistance,” Red Star argues that her own work is defined by “coherence—an internal alignment that cannot be altered by external pressures.” It draws on and reproduces Apsáalooke knowledge, practices, and values that have their own independent existence outside of the normative frameworks of settler-colonial institutions. Against the received wisdom of postmodern theory, Red Star insists that the Indigenous artwork is sovereign: Its meaning is not determined by the external frames imposed upon it. It can therefore “move through institutions without absorbing their narratives,” and can “be in the world without being shaped by the world’s projections.”2 Sovereignty, to be clear, is not the same as modernist autonomy; Red Star emphasizes that her artworks are not separate from the world around them. On the contrary, sovereignty requires connection. The artwork emerges from Apsáalooke social relations, is shaped by them, and remains embedded within them even once it enters the museum’s zone of authority. For Red Star, therefore, the Indigenous artist’s role is not to critique the institution from within, but to use the institution as a tool to cultivate Indigenous sovereignty and relationality beyond its walls. This shift parallels recent transformations in Indigenous studies, where scholars such as Audra Simpson, Glen Coulthard, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson have called for Indigenous peoples to refuse the definitions and terms of the settler-colonial state and instead renew Indigenous forms of governance on their own terms.3

At the Museum Ludwig, the curators incorporate Red Star’s call for a move from deconstructive modes of critique to affirmative enactments of sovereignty in the passage from the exhibition’s first section to its second. In the first room, the curatorial practice of recontextualizing a collection through the strategic juxtaposition of word and image is more or less derived from institutional critique, and is indeed reminiscent of the revisionary archival practices of artists like Luna or Durham. Watts’s work, on the other hand, is a positive affirmation of Indigenous values. Rather than establish oppositional difference, it repairs existing relationships (within Indigenous communities damaged by centuries of settler-colonial violence) and forges new ones (including between those communities and the work’s viewer-participants). It does not seek to critique its own institutional setting but instead to transform that space into the vehicle for an Indigenous worldview or even, perhaps, into an Indigenous world in its own right.

Yet the decision to end the exhibition with an almost empty reading room for Red Star’s dense manifesto suggests that the curators understood their own attempt to reckon with her challenge as incomplete. Indeed, Red Star’s text provokes urgent questions that remain unanswered. If the Indigenous artwork’s meaning is independent of its institutional frame, does this sovereignty preclude the possibility of the institution instrumentalizing that artwork for its own ends? Is the museum that hosts it assisting in the process of repairing Indigenous nations and communities after centuries of settler-colonial genocide? Or are Indigenous artists and artworks being called on to repair the institution itself after decades of criticism? The curatorial framing of Watts’s work suggests that the institution can, in fact, safely absorb Indigenous refusal through the language of reparation. In the guise of repair, refusal can easily be transformed into its opposite: reconciliation. The rhetoric of reconciliation, forgiveness, and healing is popular in settler-colonial states such as Canada or Australia precisely because, as Coulthard has argued, it focuses attention on “overcoming the subsequent legacy of past abuse, not the abusive colonial structure itself.”4 Whatever their artists’ intentions, Indigenous artworks are not immune from being instrumentalized in this way. We need only recall the unfortunate timing of the United States’ pavilion for the Venice Biennale two years ago, which celebrated the Chickasaw/Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson’s art for its ability to heal the wounds of the nation’s genocidal past at the very moment that nation was actively facilitating a new settler-colonial genocide in Gaza.

Here, too, in Germany in 2026, Gaza is the unspoken—in fact, institutionally unspeakable—presence that haunts the curators’ desires to revise and repair the history of the United States on the occasion of its 250th anniversary. For a German institution, reflecting on genocides past is familiar territory. Hosting the work of Indigenous American artists in a moment of far-right cultural repression across the Atlantic allows the Museum Ludwig to take the moral high ground, and perhaps to teach the United States something about how to remember one’s past genocides. This is a role that German institutions are accustomed to playing. Yet it is far more difficult—and also far more urgent—to acknowledge the genocide that both the US and German states are supporting right now. In one of De/Collecting Memories from Turtle Island’s captions, the curators quote Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec to instruct viewers to “listen to the histories that were not told so that we can begin to remember the things buried beneath the histories we were.” It is to the curators’ credit, then, that they make visible the limits of their own authority, and that of the institution they represent, by leaving the conclusion of their exhibition so unresolved. In the gap that results, perhaps, the unspeakable can be spoken.

1 The full text can be read on the artist’s website: https://www.wendyredstar.com/the-foe-manuscript.

2 Wendy Red Star, “The Foe Manuscript,” https://www.wendyredstar.com/the-foe-manuscript

3 Audra Simpson, Audra Simpson: Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014); Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

4 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 109.

Luke Naessens is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. His recent publications include “Mandan Dandies: Trade, Intimacy, and Ornamental Excess in a Destroyed 1832 Portrait by George Catlin” (Art History, November 2024).

Wendy Red Star: © Wendy Red Star

Detroit Publishing images: Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Marie Watt installation view: Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv, Karl Krüger

Jingle-Dress Dance: Filmstill, Courtesy art/beats Berlin