Postcommodity

Interdisciplinary art collective with a shared Indigenous voice offers art not as commodity but as “a great prayer.”

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As I stood in front of Postcommodity’s wall-text work Dreams, Blessings and Memories, my lips and tongue shaped the unfamiliar Náhautl syllables, bringing these words into being through the portal of my mouth. Despite stretching several dozen feet, the text sits lightly, like dust, rendered not in the usual laser-cut vinyl, but in powdered charcoal, a gesture suggesting rituals of purification and mourning. 

The words, from the language of the peoples of central Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest – a language still spoken today – were massaged by gallery workers into the very structure of the Remai Modern in Saskatoon using a series of “performance protocols for installing the poem in good faith.” The text, as much a prayer as a poem, is part of the exhibition Time Holds All the Answers, on view until Jan. 23. 

Although an English translation is available at the musuem’s reception desk, I avoided it. As Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist, current members of Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary arts collective with a shared Indigenous lens and voice, cautioned in a recent public talk, colonial languages, such as English, frame and contain thoughts within structures reflecting European ideas and cultural traditions. 

They characterize working with the Remai’s adjunct curator, Gerald McMaster, as “a great prayer,” and credit local artist Floyd Favel with the term “medicine thinking,” using it to describe their transformational interventions at the Remai. The most evocative and affecting of their eight works, sited throughout the Remai’s galleries and liminal spaces, are the ones that, like Dreams, Blessings and Memories, act on and with the institution. What better cure for the museum’s fame-grasping Eurocentrism than a ritual cleansing of the very wall emblazoned in 2018 with American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner’s antiseptic vinyl text work?

Framing their work as prayer, medicine-thinking and reimagined ceremony, rather than sculpture, installation and intervention, undercuts foundational concepts that emerged in the early modern period in Western Europe – and persist in popular notions today – that art has no practical, ceremonial or religious use. Postcommodity dares to imagine an art institution that is useful, transformed into a site for tools, action and change. 

Facing the Wall, an intervention in the Picasso Gallery, is a gleeful take-down of appropriation and exoticism. Here, the artists shroud Picasso’s sculptures and turn his framed prints to the wall, removing the modernist thrust of the Remai’s exhibition, A Formative Encounter, and directing attention to the show’s objects from Oceania and Africa, the sort of masks and sculptures that inspired Picasso and other modernist artists. Postcommodity thus invites viewers to remove objects from art’s commodified realms and instead consider them as living things with a role to play in the societies that created them. 

The collective’s name, as the artists outlined in their talk, emphasizes the goal is not to chase expectations of Indigenous aesthetics, but to expose how capitalism severs relationships and enables exploitation. For instance, in the installation Elders First, television monitors laid out like so much litter vibrate with advertising targeted at seniors, demonstrating how older people are not valued as repositories of knowledge but dehumanized as potential consumers. 

Although Postcommodity is motivated by pan-American Indigenous solidarity, some works are challenging for Canadian viewers to parse. Truck Hunting Out Near Agua Caliente Reservation and Going to Water, for example, draw on specific histories and symbols of the artists’ shared roots in the California desert to speak of exploitation of people, land and resources, especially repackaging and selling the genocidal power of the atomic bomb as clean energy. South By North Is Also North By South, a mammoth stepped pyramid of steel drums for holding toxic waste, takes such pains to refer to Indigenous building, beading and weaving practices across the Americas that it becomes an unreadable muddle.

kinaypikowiyâs, on the other hand, is simultaneously obvious and obscure. Cylindrical foam floats, used to contain water-borne toxic spills, in the instantly recognizable colours of the medicine wheel – yellow, red, white and black – hang from the ceiling like animal carcasses. The nêhiyawêwin (Cree) title, meaning “snake meat,” was provided by McMaster, an artist, author and professor at OCAD University in Toronto. The title evokes the chopped-up body of a snake to represent how colonizers carved up the Western hemisphere, dividing Indigenous people. 

The most accessible and profound works in Time Holds All the Answers are the ones outside the exhibition galleries that create meaning in concert with the Remai’s architecture and the land where it is situated. With Let Us Pray For the Water Between Us, a 2,200-gallon chemical storage tank has been altered with a mallet that beats the empty container like a drum. The sound echoes through the building. 

The hulking black cylinder of uneven and pitted plastic is suspended from the ceiling, obstructing the view of the South Saskatchewan River and nearly blocking the way to coveted viewpoint seats – a cogent commentary on access to water. The regular thudding from this tank-turned-drum ritualizes the relationship to the water beyond the window and becomes a call to action, a means to disrupt complacency and encourage adoption of an Indigenous model of resource stewardship. 

Time Holds All the Answers requires viewers to entangle themselves in reimagined ceremony, stepping outside the usual social roles and the rules governing art institutions. It’s a process that requires time to think and feel. When Postcommodity strikes a balance between anti-capitalist activism, mourning rite and reframing within Indigenous language and worldviews, it creates space – simultaneously within and outside time – to repair fractured bonds, both to the land and to each other.

Postcommodity: Time Holds All the Answers, at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon from Sept. 18, 2021 to Jan. 23, 2022

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