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16 | Afterall

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Postcommodity,
Repellent Fence Postmodern Ambush
(Winnipeg), 2011.
Photograph: Scott — Lucy R. Lippard
Benesiinaabandan
Previous spread:
Postcommodity,
Repellent Fence (US/
Mexico Borderlands),
2015. All images
courtesy the artists
Postcommodity are part of a generational
vanguard of Native artists that has refused
to be ghettoised or confined to identity
politics or traditional mediums. Their
refusal to abandon their commitment to
their roots has not limited them to ‘Indian
art’ contexts, though that is unavoidably
where they are best known. For all their
theoretical savvy, Postcommodity and
their cohorts consistently honour Native
traditions, albeit in ways that many
traditionals might not immediately
recognise. The group of four represents no
single tribal viewpoint or tradition, which
has freed them to cross other boundaries
as well. Raven Chacon is Navajo; Kade L.
Twist is Cherokee; Nathan Young is
Pawnee/Delaware/Kiowa; and Cristóbal
Martínez, the newest member, identifies
himself as Mestizo and ‘Alcaldeño’. 1
(Navajo painter Steven Yazzie was a
co-founder but left because of conflicts
Lucy R. Lippard shows Postcommodity
hacking foreign devices and received
wisdom towards a new ‘indigenous
present’.
with the group’s intense travel schedule.)
Working with ‘whatever form, medium
or sensory experience’ best expresses ‘a
participatory set of ideas at a given time’, 2
they have entered the indigenous and
mainstream art worlds (overlapping but
still separate) with less overt baggage than
many of their contemporaries.
Although they also work internationally,
Postcommodity’s focus is on indigenous
lands and cultures, especially in the
Southwestern US — New Mexico, Arizona
and Oklahoma, where the members all
live or have lived. This is where our paths
have crossed. I share their preoccupation
with the indigenous present in a region
where it can be publicly overshadowed
1 Cristóbal Martínez grew up in the community of Alcalde in northern New Mexico.
2 Conversation with the artists, January 2015.
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by the indigenous past. The next ripple
out involves the effects of colonisation and
globalisation both on the Southwestern
natural environment and on Native
sovereignty.
The Southwest, especially New Mexico,
is a region separated from most of the
US by its history. It was settled before
New England and Virginia by the Spanish,
not by the English or the French — a fact
of which the rest of the country remains
blissfully unaware, in part because of
the major presence of Indian lands and
cultures. (The state-sponsored New Mexico
Magazine has, for decades, run a monthly
column called ‘One of Our 50 Is Missing’,
displaying the prevalent misconception
that we are a ‘foreign country’ rather
than the state between Texas and Arizona;
they never run out of first-hand material.)
The region’s history is layered, omnipresent
and contentious. The vast, dry landscape
is alluring and intimidating to the outsiders
who find themselves ‘enchanted’ (New
Mexico’s tourist moniker is ‘The Land of
Enchantment’). Pueblo, Navajo, Apache
and Hispano cultures are unfamiliar.
Over the last three decades, northern
New Mexico — and the state capital,
Santa Fe, in particular — has become
a Mecca for tourism and second homes,
with economically positive and culturally
disruptive ramifications. I have lived
in New Mexico for only 22 years,
but I have seen the subdivisions that
threaten rural villages (like the one where
I live) metastasise across the wide open
landscape, where both modest ‘ranchettes’
and pretentious McMansions (often looking
down from the ridge tops) stand out like
sore thumbs.
Postcommodity took on this situation
in its 2010 show at the Museum of
Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe,
titled ‘It Wasn’t the Dream of Golden
Cities’ (a reference to the initial impetus
Artists: Postcommodity | 17
for the sixteenth-century Spanish intrusions
into Indian lands, what they called
tierra adentro, north of New Spain). 3
The sarcastic title of their two-channel
video It’s My Second Home, But I Have
a Very Spiritual Connection With
This Place (2010) says it all about Anglo
newcomers ‘just off the bus’, as Debbie
Jaramillo, former mayor of Santa Fe,
put it. (She also famously complained
about the city’s officially dictated ‘adobe
Disneyland’, whereby the municipal
government, dominated by Anglos, ‘painted
the downtown brown and kicked all the
brown people out’.4 ) Postcommodity’s
video focuses on ‘the ebb and flow of the
marketplace, real estate, the environment
and its actors’. 5 ‘Marketplace’ in this
context refers not only to increasingly
expensive properties geared to non-locals
but also to the Indian Market, the city’s
major summer tourist event and an
economic mainstay for hundreds of tribal
people. (Last summer, due to internal
conflicts, it split into two separate entities.
This was not Postcommodity’s fault.)
It would be difficult to overemphasise
the integral role of music, sound and noise
in Postcommodity’s work. Their ease with
and expertise in technology is one of their
greatest assets, and they have albums as
well as installations to their credit. Chacon
is a chamber musician and a composer
of ‘new music’ or ‘Navajo noise’, while
Martínez is a computer scientist who serves
as the interactive media systems engineer.
Twist could be identified as a theoretician
focusing on the configuration of space and
immersive environments, while Young’s
focus is video and film. However, the
collective adamantly insists that there is
no division of labour. Each member uses
his area of expertise strategically during
the collaborative process of peer-to-peer
mentoring and problem-solving on each
of the group’s varied projects. Among
their outreach strategies is Spirit Abuse,
a project space for music and performance
in Albuquerque that takes a swipe at fake
shamans and spiritual wannabes while
also showcasing the distinctions between
a Native-directed DIY venue and the
commercial mainstream.
Language, expressed in Navajo as
‘wind in motion’, is another aspect of sound
integrated into Postcommodity’s attempts
to communicate beyond the barriers
of meaning and challenge the West’s
arrogance and righteousness in regard
to indigenous cultures. It comes to the
forefront in With Salvage and Knife
Tongue (2012), a four-channel video made
for the biennial Adelaide International
2012, featuring floor-to-ceiling Cherokee
and Pitjantjatjara ‘talking heads’ reciting
lines of poetry in English. The talk is
‘analysed and synthesised’, producing
a mesmerising amalgam of overlapping
layers that can be interpreted as a comment
on the loss of many Native tongues.
The group’s lengthy and often ironic
titles are another facet of their efforts
to provide additional context, ‘engage
complexity’, ‘avoid didactic binaries’,
‘push and pull metaphor to stretch
meaning’ and offer ‘a trailhead for
Postcommodity and their
cohorts consistently honour
Native traditions, albeit in
ways that many traditionals
might not immediately
recognise.
various explorations’. 6 A salient example
is If History Moves at the Speed of its
Weapons, Then the Shape of the Arrow
Is Changing (2010), an interactive audio
piece set up as an installation of listening
posts based on the physical and cultural
properties of the weapons (bows and
arrows, atlatl, rock slings, war clubs)
used in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. (The most
successful Indian rebellion in the history
of the nation, it banished the Spanish
from New Mexico for twelve years.)
Environmental issues are among
Postcommodity’s most urgent concerns.
The Night Is Filled with the Harmonics
of Suburban Dreams (2011) applies across
the arid West. Consisting of a plastic
splash pool and a marvellous cacophony
of angular pipes, or pipelines, it is accompa-
nied by sound from a hydro-feedback
system — a striking sculptural/auditory

3 ‘It Wasn’t the Dream of Golden Cities: Postcommodity’, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2 August 2010—2 January 2011, curated by Ryan Rice.
4 Debbie Jaramillo, quoted in Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition,
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006, p.165.
5 Unless otherwise stated, all quotes are from Postcommodity’s website, available at
http://postcommodity.com (last accessed on 16 February 2015).
6 Conversation with the artists, January 2015.

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Postcommodity, metaphor for the ways water is bought,
The Night Is Filled sold and transported globally, seen through
With the Harmonics
of Suburban Dreams, the lens of suburban backyards ‘where
2011, sound ubiquitous pool pumps sing through
and mixed media summer nights’. This piece might also serve
installation
(splash pool, pool as a comment on the ways in which crude
pumps, PVC pipe, oil and gas are whisked from one end of
piezo microphones, the nation to another. Or, in the case of the
bass transducers,
instrument insidious Keystone XL Pipeline currently
amplifiers). being projected, from one nation (Canada),
Installation view, through the entire length of another (the
Lawrence Art Center,
Lawrence, KS, 2011 US), to be refined and shipped out to many
others in the global market. At a public
hearing in Santa Fe in January 2015, a large
number of Navajo — mostly women, young
and old — spoke passionately against the
construction of another oil and gas pipeline
through public, private and Navajo lands in
northwestern New Mexico, an area already
identified as a national sacrifice zone for its
plethora of oil wells and fracking stations.
When two younger Native pipefitters spoke
up for the pipeline, Eloise Brown — leader
of the successful DOODA Desert Rock
(‘NO to Desert Rock’) campaign, against the
proposed coal-fuelled Desert Rock power
plant — suggested they ‘go talk to their
grandmas’ in order to understand their
responsibility to the earth and their ancestry.
This responsibility is one of
Postcommodity’s focal points, and one
7 ‘Wet’ water designates the amount of water available, whereas ‘paper’ water is the amount of water
that an individual or group has the legal right to use.
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of the reasons they intend their art to be
interactive, drawing the audience and
broader communities into the issues
confronting the changing West (aka the
New West). Water is at the top of the list,
with fossil fuel extraction not far behind.
The intricate system by which water is
allocated in New Mexico involves ‘wet’
water, ‘paper’ water, 7 ‘found’ and ‘surface’
water, ‘senior’ and ‘junior’ rights. Faced
with a dropping water table as drought
forces more domestic and industrial
pumping, as well as diminishing production
from the San Juan-Chama Project, which
delivers water through a mountain range
to municipal New Mexico from Colorado,
the state finds its water rights fiercely
contested, with Indian nations battling
for their ‘senior’ positions.
All of these issues are inextricably
entwined with tribal sovereignty and
resource control. One of Postcommodity’s
most impressive fusions of ‘traditional’
imagery and political message is P’oe iwe
naví ûnp’oe dînmuu (My Blood Is in the
Water, 2010), commemorating the city of
Santa Fe’s 400th anniversary. A buck mule
deer’s carcass, hung upside down, donates
its dripping blood to create sounds on
an amplified drum below, ‘memorialising
the mule deer as a spiritual mediator of
Artists: Postcommodity | 19
the landscape and [paying] tribute to the
traditional means by which indigenous
people put food on the table’ without
destroying whole species. The striking
image of the deer — simultaneously
beautiful and tragic — is intended to turn
around ‘the dominant culture’s process
of commoditisation, demand/supply and
convenience’.
The same goal may have informed
Gallup Motel Butchering (2011), an
atypically straightforward video celebrating
both female strength and the survival of
tradition despite changed circumstances.
It is a graphic documentation of the
butchering of a sheep in a motel bathtub
by a former candidate for Miss Navajo
who had no previous butchering
experience. Although this necessary chore,
also ‘to put food on the table’, is usually a
requirement of the competition, for some
reason it was omitted the year she ran.
The combination of her inexperience,
the incongruous location and the innocent
animal being led to slaughter intensify
the video’s complex meanings.
Like My Blood Is the Water, the video/
sound/sculptural installation Worldview
Manipulation Therapy (2009) is a
temporally and literally layered vehicle for
comments on past and present. Surrounded
by projected images evoking fire and ice,
a tent-like structure, painted black with
coal dust and emitting a blue light, addresses
20 | Afterall
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the wrenching misuse of sacred sweat Postcommodity,
lodges by New Age gurus and entrepreneurs, Gallup Motel
Butchering, 2011,
while a circular floor piece based on broken multichannel video,
pottery designs refers to the sandpaintings colour, sound, 9min,
in Navajo healing practices. still
Salt, rock and coal are physically and
theoretically central to both the installation
and Postcommodity’s argument for
conserving the indigenous landscapes that
hold so many secrets and mean so much
to their original inhabitants. Salt stands
for migration pathways threatened by
development, as are so many sacred
sites in the West; forbidden disclosure of
their locations, on the one side, and greed,
on the other, create barriers to better
communications or consensual solutions.
In western New Mexico, the Zuni Salt
Lake, home to the legendary Salt Woman,
is sacred to several tribes and integral
to a network of migration and ceremonial
pathways. It is also the site of decades
of litigation against mining companies
seeking to destroy them for profit. The
rock was taken from ‘the dead Gila River’,
which runs from southwestern New
Mexico into Arizona. Already run dry
in some areas by unsustainable population
growth, it is currently the subject of a bid
to dam and divert its last wild stretch in
New Mexico for a prohibitively costly
project to produce more of the same support
for thoughtless growth. (Postcommodity’s
visually dynamic black-and-white video of
Postcommodity, the hair-tossing Indian rock band Existence Pollination, first shown
Worldview AD bears the title Dead River (2009).) at the
Manipulation Therapy,
2009, multichannel Coal stands for the destructive extraction Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary
video, sound processes taking place on tribal lands, often Art in the spring of 2015, is a mixed-media
and mixed-media without popular consent. Decades ago, installation — a ‘peep show’ proffering a
installation,
12h. Installation Hopi and Navajo sacred sites on Black Mesa garden ‘as a surrogate for coveted female
view, The Ice House, in Arizona were invaded by Peabody Coal flesh’. By conflating the female body and
Phoenix, AZ. Company (now known as Peabody Energy), nature, both unattainable (given the politics
Photograph:
Jason Grubb and more recently the Public Service of water in the future Southwest) and
Company of New Mexico (PNM) has come ‘fetishised as powerless objects of desire’,
Overleaf: under attack for its dependence on coal- Postcommodity evokes a dystopic future
Postcommodity,
Do You Remember powered plants in the Four Corners area in which lush natural landscapes provoke
When? (2009/12), where the reservations meet, and its refusal the same illicit response as titillating ‘adult’
site-specific to replace it with more renewable sources. entertainment: ‘Playing with frustration
intervention
and mixed-media Do You Remember When? (2009/12) and desire, the peep show is a pay-to-play
installation takes a more conceptual approach to ritual … an anxious metaphor for specula-
(cut concrete, the theme of sustainability. A square hole tive capitalism with its rewards, liabilities
exposed earth, light,
sound). Installation in a museum interior exposes the earth and consequences.’ A dominant male gaze
view, Arizona State beneath, standing for the indigenous is pitted against the ‘disenfranchisement
University Art world view. Above it hangs a microphone. inside the window’, continuing Postcom-
Museum, Ceramics
Research Center, The soundtrack is a Pee Posh (Maricopa) modity’s interrogation of Western historical
Tempe, 2009. social dance song, emitted from the depths. and economic models, questioning the
Photograph: Jason Nearby, the block of extracted concrete right of corporations to endanger our
Grubb
set on end atop a pedestal represents environment, society and the planet itself. 8
the ‘Western scientific world view’ — Accompanying Pollination is a
Postcommodity’s favourite target. One of video and sound installation, Promoting
their missions is to undermine the neutrality a More Just, Verdant and Harmonious
of art audiences and the museum as site Resolution (2011/15); the title is a play
of apolitical reflection and contemplation, on National Public Radio’s canned
to subvert the expectations and power acknowledgement of its sponsorship by
dynamics between viewer, institution the MacArthur Foundation, as well as a
and artists. comment on the notion of harmony in a

8 Conversation with the artists, January 2015.

Artists: Postcommodity | 21

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22 | Afterall

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 Artists: Postcommodity | 23

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disharmonic world. Here, startling flashes
and blasts are produced by ‘bombs’ of
US pop music activated by a floor sensor.
These lethal ‘cultural sherds’ of nationalist
and corporate propaganda are the
shrapnel, the fallout, aimed by the
West at ‘alien’ (i.e. incomprehensible)
societies.
When the collective addresses the
indigenous spiritual/traditional past, it
usually avoids the clichés rampant (and
also often challenged) in more conventional
‘Indian Art’. In Mother, Teacher, Destroyer
(2011), they confronted received wisdom
with a daring (or dangerous) dose of
something bordering on both feminism
and sexism. The video is simultaneously
alluring and disturbing. Four nude, young
indigenous women playing experimental
instruments concocted from natural
materials sit on a cougar pelt that masks
a synthesiser. Postcommodity claim
that the piece is about ‘women saving
the world’. (But did they have to do it in
the nude?) For the all-male group these
women represent a shrine and memorial
for Mother Earth while ‘hacking foreign
(coloniser) artefacts and technologies for
survivance and resistance’. (‘Survivance’
is a term coined by Anishinaabe writer
Gerald Vizenor, complicating the notions
9 See Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1999.
10 The Trail of Tears refers to a series of forced relocations of Native American nations following
the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
24 | Afterall
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of survival and defiance.) 9 Postcommodity,
Because of their relatively high profile Pollination, 2015.
Installation view,
(they participated in the Sydney Biennale ‘southwestNET:
in 2012, for instance), Postcommodity Postcommodity’,
are well positioned to speak truth to power. Scottsdale Museum
of Contemporary Art,
In Serenity of Your Embrace (2014), they Scottsdale, AZ, 2015
slyly criticised conservative Oklahoma
Governor Mary Fallin’s speeches in view
of her retrograde positions on American
Indian issues. (Oklahoma was created
as Indian Territory in the early nineteenth
century, as a supposed haven for those
tribes evicted from the Southeast, who had
endured the Trail of Tears… until settlers,
or ‘Sooners’, claimed much of it for their
own, ignoring the treaties.10) The Repellent
Eye (US/Mexican Borderlands), a helium
balloon three metres in diameter that
recurs in Postcommodity’s large-scale
installations, is intended as a ‘scare eye’
intervention to repel such endlessly
invasive Western world views. The balloon
could be a device for surveillance, for testing
the weather or for communicating with
birds — messengers between the spiritual
and physical worlds. First sent aloft in
Phoenix in 2008, and then in Winnipeg in
2011, it will reappear in Postcommodity’s
work in progress Repellent Fence, which
has been evolving since 2007 and is
scheduled for completion in the autumn
Postcommodity, of 2015 on the US-Mexico border.
Pollination, 2015, Border issues have been gaining
detail
momentum as a national crisis, and they
are always most pressing in Southwestern
states, where a ludicrous, Israeli-designed
‘fence’ (i.e. wall) cuts across agricultural
land and indigenous homelands, impacting
wildlife corridors and human rights.
The ante has recently been upped by
the miserable treatment, by both South-
western border states and the federal
government, of children crossing alone
from lethal conditions in Central America.
An unprecedented number of deportations
under the Obama administration has
not been forgiven in the wake of his
announcement of temporary immigration
reform, by which some undocumented
workers are allowed to stay for three years
with their US-born children.
Repellent Fence is entirely indepen-
dently produced. Postcommodity raised
the funding and since 2012 has been
community organising and coping with
the challenges of transnational social
practice, working with the cities of
Douglas in Arizona and Agua Prieta
in Sonora, Mexico, as well as with the
US Border Patrol and the Mexican
Consulate. They plan a large-scale temporary
monument and a series of public events
envisioned as ‘sutures’, stitching together
11 Conversation with the artists, January 2015.
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the people north and south of the
border, many of whom are indigenous.
Postcommodity’s goal is to create a network
of dialogues that will ‘re-establish the
relationships (land, environment, culture,
people, communities) that have suffered
tremendously since the militarisation
of the borderlands’. They hope to ‘shift
transborder discourses away from the
polarising constructs of nationalism,
trade and globalisation’, and to replace
them with a ‘network of dialogues respectful
of indigenous peoples, the historical
stewards of these lands, and their ancient
trade routes in search of modern economic
opportunity’. 11
It seems only reasonable that this latest
and most ambitious of Postcommodity’s
projects involves trespassing on their
own lands, ignoring checkpoints,
metaphorically crossing borders they
refuse to respect in aesthetic and political
terms. Although there have been many
transborder artworks in the last three
decades or so (for instance, the Border
Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo),
this is the first to focus on indigenous rights.
None of Postcommodity’s work makes
sense without this global (but most often
local) context. The edgy humour that lies
beneath the striking imagery and layers
of critique confirms their iconoclasm.
Artists: Postcommodity | 25