Books
Beauty and PowerGlobal Design, 1840-1914
New Renaissance Press, 2022
Beauty and Power serves as an accessible general introduction to the origins of modern design and an original contribution to understanding the role that cross-cultural processes have played in design’s history. How did modern design in its origins begin to transform lives globally? This is the first history of the origins of modern design intended for general readers to discuss examples from Africa, Asia, and the Islamic World. Beauty and Power not only accounts for cross-cultural sources and effects, it supports their centrality to the growth of modern design. National competitiveness in this age of empire forms the basis of emerging global design.
Throughout the period and in all of its cultural contexts, a focus on the display of wealth and power through ornament helped distinguish social classes. Increasingly, citizens in the West borrowed ornamental motifs from non-Western cultures and the reverse was also true. While this book presents these visual aspects of design, it also seeks the meanings associated with the visual traits. Increasingly, those meanings emerged out of the economic interaction between members of different nations.
The book considers how design was historically interwoven with the social dimensions of 19th-century life, from industrial production and the rise of consumerism to national identity and competitiveness. Beauty and Power covers several design disciplines, including architecture, fashion, furniture, graphic, industrial, and transportation design.
Cross-Cultural Issues in Art: Frames for Understanding
Routledge, 2010
Cross-Cultural Issues in Art provides an engaging introduction to aesthetic concepts, expanding the discussion beyond the usual Western theorists and Western examples.
Includes discussion of both contemporary and historical issues and examples, incorporating a range of detailed case studies from African, Asian, European, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Native American art. Individual chapters address broad intercultural issues in art, including Art and Culture, Primitivism and Otherness, Colonialism, Nationalism, Art and Religion, Symbolism and Interpretation, Style and Ethnicity, A Sense of Place, Art and Social Order, Gender, and the Self, considering these themes as constructs that frame our understanding of art.
Cross-Cultural Issues in Art draws upon ideas and case studies from cultural and critical studies, art history, ethno-aesthetics and area studies, visual anthropology, and philosophy, and will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in these fields.
Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media and Identity
University of Texas, 1998
What happens when a Native or indigenous person turns a video camera on his or her own culture? Are the resulting images different from what a Westernized filmmaker would create, and, if so, in what ways? How does the use of a non-Native art-making medium, specifically video or film, affect the aesthetics of the Native culture?
These are some of the questions that underlie this rich study of Native American aesthetics, art, media, and identity. Includes a theoretically informed discussion of the core concepts of aesthetics and indigenous culture and then turns to detailed examination of the work of American Indian documentary filmmakers, including George Burdeau and Victor Masayesva, Jr. Explains how Native filmmaking incorporates traditional concepts such as the connection to place, to the sacred, and to the cycles of nature. While these concepts now find expression through Westernized media, they also maintain continuity with earlier aesthetic productions. In this way, Native filmmaking serves to create and preserve a sense of identity for indigenous people.
Articles
Leuthold, Steven. “Native American art and artists in visual arts documentaries from 1973 to 1991.” In On the margins of art worlds, pp. 265-281. Routledge, 2019.
This chapter examines a selection of films and videos that represent nearly twenty years of documentation of Native American visual arts and artists by both natives and nonnatives. Traditional art forms, with their conventional stylistic elements, provided highly visual markers of identity in times of cultural contact and change. Visions, produced by Indian News Media of the Blood Reserve in Alberta, Canada, reveals a diversity of opinions about the role of Indian artists, although the video makers emphasize the role of tradition and culture in the visual arts. The filmmakers rely heavily on other visual traditions: paintings of traditional weddings and other ceremonies by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie; wonderful historical stills, especially portraits; and short interview sequences with various visual artists. Films and videos documenting contemporary and traditional Native American visual art point out differences in the expression of Indianness by native artists.
In 1968, when Larry Gross first joined the faculty of the Annenberg School, he met the filmmaker and scholar Sol Worth, who had recently engaged in field work with the Navajo. This fortuitous meeting sparked the collaborative development of the fields of visual communication studies and visual anthropology by Worth, Gross, Jay Ruby, Paul Messaris and other important scholars. As a doctoral student at Annenberg in the early 1990s, I was eager to delve into back issues of Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication (later renamed Studies in Visual Communication), a journal that Larry took over editing after Sol’s death. When choosing a dissertation topic, this exciting strain of research, which Larry had helped so much to develop, influenced me to consider the expanding world of indigenous media (Leuthold, 1998). In this essay that celebrates Larry’s career as a scholar, I return to the emphasis on film and Native culture that had a formative impact in visual communication studies.
Leuthold, Steven. Art of the Plains People. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Plains Indian art is a varied subject with a long history of scholarship and collecting both by private individuals and institutions. As such, the literature on the subject is rich and, especially recently, is strong in its visual presentation. Newer publications include large, crisp, colorful photographs that draw the viewer into the aesthetic splendor of the art created on the Plains. Earlier publications, by contrast, focus on the contextual interpretation of artworks (more specifically understood as ethno-historical artifacts at the time), mostly from an anthropological perspective. These anthropological approaches to Plains Indian art began in the early 20th century, and they remained the dominant perspective in the discipline at least until the late 1960s. During the 1980s and 1990s a tension arose between more “aesthetic” and anthropological frameworks of understanding art created by Native Americans. In the present, the tendency is toward an attempt at a balanced approach and, sometimes, an attempt at synthesis between the two.
Since the advent of more affordable video technology in the late seventies and early eighties, various indigenous groups have recognized the potential of video for intragroup communication and as a means of gaining cultural and political recognition in the wider society. Video and film productions are used to “rethink history,” even to address “the ignorance of the dominant culture” about past history and contemporary culture. In the United States, Native Americans have been actively making videos based on an initial focus of “helping to enhance the survival of their own communities,” in their own production facilities and through coproduction arrangements with non-Native videographers and filmmakers.
At various moments in the history of art, painters have represented interior places and scenes as metaphors for the interiors of selves: representations of architectural interiors and their inhabitants signify interiority. An interior is often an enclave for privacy, so the tie between represented interiors and conceptions of the self is not necessarily surprising. Yet few scholars have focused comparatively on representations of interiors as expressive of self and consciousness. How do representations of interior spaces metaphorically stand for the interiors of selves? This paper in aesthetics and art history analyzes the dialectic of self and interior space in art.
Educational goals are central to the emerging genre of indigenous documentary: Native Americans hope that through film and video they can present role models to the young and expose non-Indians to cultures they might not encounter otherwise. One attraction of documentary media for Native American producers and directors is that they enable a portrait of Native American views of history in contrast to the distortions and stereotypes found in the mass media. A major reason for Native American producers’ emphasis on documentary is the genre’s role in the telling of histories, an important role considering the centrality of “oral history” in Native American cultures. In plain terms, documentary is seen as a means of telling the “way it was” in contrast to inaccurate or incomplete non-Native American histories. The usefulness of documentaries in education, the relationship of media documentaries to traditionally oral cultures, and the desire to document Native American views of history have influenced the adoption of the documentary genre.
In a recent presentation to one of my classes in art theory, a visiting artist referred to her work as “conceptual” rather than medium based in a discipline-specific way to help explain her movement from photography, to installation, and now to multimedia computing as her current artistic focus. In my own introductory studio classes, I have occasionally urged students to be more conceptual in their approach to design. When I say this, I am urging them to work out ideas more fully in advance of their final designs and to engage more deeply in research. Were we using the term ‘conceptual’ in the same way? Since the emergence of conceptual art as a movement in the 1960s, educators and artists have emphasized the role of the “conceptual” in art education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. This emphasis on the “idea” as the most important element in artistic development in some cases replaces or deemphasizes formal, representational, and expression-based aspects of art education, especially at advanced levels of artistic training. Does this heightened importance of “the concept” reflect a fundamentally new philosophical conceptualization of art and art education, or, more narrowly, does it reflect the historical influence of an art movement and a generation of art educators who came of age in the late sixties and seventies?
Leuthold, S. (1996). Is there art in Indigenous Aesthetics?. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 25(4), 320-338.
Having taken a course in aesthetic anthropology as a student, I have often since wondered about the appropriateness of applying the concept art to the expression of many indigenous cultures. Within this subdiscipline, aesthetics refers to aspects of daily life, from habits of greeting to food preparation, the communal organization of space, and religious rituals that are much broader than the term art can encompass.’ It would be very difficult to separate art from craft, religious ritual, material culture, or entertainment in these contexts; therefore, art as a distinct concept seems to be inapplicable to many non-Westem cultures, Later, in researching Native American media, art, and aesthetics, I was often told anecdotally that there is no term for art in native languages, which would again seem to suggest that indigenous aesthetics refers to expression that is not “artistic” in nature. Is there art in indigenous aesthetics?
This essay addresses the question of whether Native American media documentaries constitute a unique documentary genre distinct from non-native documentary film and video. The question arises from the scholarly thesis that distinct indigenous identities will be expressed through styles and themes different from those found in documentaries by non-natives. Because there is no single set of formal characteristics that comprises an Indian ‘way of seeing,’ however, formal qualities alone may not help us distinguish a genre of indigenous documentary. Instead, I attempt to locate this genre in systems of beliefs, values, and actions that are distinct from non-native cultures. Native American documentary constitutes an emerging genre because of the concerns of contemporary native documentarians: a shared understanding and valuation of nature; a concern for communicating the indigenous understanding of history; legal and moral issues related to land; ideas about native spirituality; and an attempt to create a strong sense of collective identity within native communities. Indigenous media also convey the political experiences of native peoples, having developed in economic and institutional contexts specific to Native American communities.
As I look around my home, I see artworks and reproductions representative of several indigenous cultures: Native American blankets, mass-produced goods that have ‘Navajo’ patterns, prints and carvings by contemporary Native American artists, African carvings, a reproduction after an old Japanese print, and so on. The reception of indigenous arts and imitations of them is relevant for me personally; it is part of my everyday experience. Artists from Gauguin, Nolde, Newman and Picasso to contemporary artists such as Lothar Baumgarten and David Hammons have found inspiration in indigenous cultures and causes. Many Westerners have purchased indigenous souvenirs and artworks when travelling, seen documentaries about art in non-Western cultures, decorated their houses and varied their wardrobes with so-called “ethnic’ prints, or created art based upon a fascination with the ‘other”. This paper identifies some of the broader issues affecting the reception of indigenous art. I focus on overarching organizational frameworks, including nation, tribe, Fourth World and even the micro-organization “self”, as in self-representation. Dynamic inter-organizational relationships affect the reception of indigenous representation: colonialism and internal colonization, nation-building, and pan-tribal identification.
As video technology becomes more accessible to individuals and communities, people are exploiting its communication potential. Native Americans, for instance, are pursuing the cultural, informational, political, economic, and entertainment potentials of video and film through a new subgenre of documentary: indigenous documentary. An indigenous documentary is made by members of an indigenous community or in close interaction with the community; it is a video produced or co-produced by members of the group that it is about. Communities can document, preserve, or even revitalize local practices through media. Showing the programs outside of the local area communicates cultural beliefs seen as important by community members; practices shown in the videos identify the group for the wider public. But indigenous films and videos also communicate within a group and increase group affiliation. They both preserve knowledge for future generations and communicate the group’s identity to the wider public.
Explores multiculturalism in art and design education, considering whether the tenets of design education are biased in favor of Western cultural traditions. Moving beyond traditional teaching to the reflexive study of non-Western design asks students not to assume that principles of design exist unless they can prove such principles to themselves.
Leuthold, Steven. “Historical representation in Native American documentary.” (1997): 727-739.
Why has documentary emerged as the most common genre of indigenous media? Though it is financially accessible, the documentary medium has attractions far beyond the shaping factor of economics.’ The place of documentaries in historical education, their relation to traditionally oral cultures, and the desire to document disappearing cultural practices have influenced the adoption of the genre by Native Americans.
Why has documentary emerged as the most common genre of indigenous media? Though one attraction of documentary to native directors is its financial accessibility, the attraction of the documentary medium extends far beyond the shaping factor of economics. The place of documentaries in education, the relation of electronic media documentaries to traditionally oral cultures, and the desire to document disappearing cultural practices have influenced the adoption of the documentary genre by Native Americans. Natives hope that through electronic media they can present role models to young Indians and expose non-Indians to cultures they might not encounter otherwise.
Efforts by Native Americans to control their own public image result, in part, from a desire to counteract five hundred years of white people’s imagery of Indians, including consistent misrepresentation in Hollywood Westerns. This paper, which focuses on Native American responses to Westerns, relates to a larger research project that examines the re-presentation of Indians by natives themselves in film and video documentaries. Although I present native responses to portrayals of Indians in recent Westerns, I do not pretend to “speak for” Native Americans in this paper. Rather, I have researched the topic in order to discover some of the potentials and pitfalls of the role of visual communication in intercultural relations. Because the paper concerns general issues of representation, I often refer to Native Americans (and whites) in general terms. Both of these populations are, of course, quite diverse. Therefore, exceptions exist for each of the general statements that I make, but the issue of cross-cultural representation is so important in native media and scholarship that a general discussion seems warranted.
This paper addresses the difficult question of whether Native American media documentaries constitute a unique aesthetic expression. The question arises from the expectation that a distinct indigenous identity will be expressed through visual and narrative styles different from those found in documentaries by non-natives. To address this question, the paper focuses on the work and stated goals of two noted native videographers, George Burdeau and Victor Masayesva, Jr.
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation
Leuthold, Steven Michael. “” Telling our own story”: The aesthetic expression of collective identity in Native American documentary.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992.
Abstract
This study investigates the role of Native American aesthetic practices, as documented and expressed through film and video, in expressing collective identity. The central theoretical problem concerns the relationship between aesthetic systems, new communication media, and processes of collective identification: specifically, the manner by which traditional and contemporary forms of aesthetic expression are incorporated and documented in indigenous documentary. The primary visual medium examined was videotape documentaries made by Native Americans over the last fifteen years. White Americans’ images of Indians were analyzed in the context of Native American responses to mainstream media imagery. This analysis drew from two research traditions. A genre analysis of recurring formal properties and thematic elements in native art and media provided a comparative and historical framework for analyzing the documentaries. An ethnographic component of the research focused on the motives, goals, and concerns of Native American producers, directors, and artists. The principle ethnographic setting was the media center of the Salish-Kootenia College on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. Formal properties of the videos, especially documentaries by George Burdeau and Victor Masayesva, Jr., were analyzed to determine the possibility of a documentary style unique to Native Americans. Though no single set of formal characteristics defines native media, the documentaries express an Indian sensibility that includes a concern for craftmanship seen in other forms of native expression, a desire to integrate human and natural activity, a personal rather than abstract approach to issues, a heightened awareness of the impact of the past upon the present, and a readiness to adopt new technologies. This research has shown that local and traditional expressive forms need not be undermined by the adoption of new media technologies. Native documentarians tell the stories that constitute the collective memory of their people and document those participatory practices that express commitment to the community. Native media is at the forefront of the struggle for Native American cultural self-determination.
Thesis