Land Arts of the American West Deborah Stratman 2017

Chicago Works:
Deborah Stratman

This digital brochure was published on the occasion of the exhibition Chicago Works: Deborah Stratman, organized by Jack Schneider, Curatorial Assistant. It is presented in the Dr. Paul and Dorie Sternberg Family Gallery and Ed and Jackie Rabin Gallery on the museum's third floor.

Vox Terra: On Deborah Stratman's The Illinois Parables Suite

Written past Jack Schneider

"Let's confront it. What counts is knowledge. And feeling. You come across, there is such a matter as feeling tone. 1 is friendly and i is hostile. And if you don't have this, infant, you've had information technology. You're dead."

—Nancy Dickerson in Studs Terkel'southward Division Street: America

I

Deborah Stratman, Opening shot of The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm film or DCP; 60 min. Paradigm courtesy of the artist.

Deborah Stratman's The Illinois Parables (2016) opens with a panoramic shot, the camera floating above a great plain. Winding roads and rivers cantankerous rectilinear patches of gray, green, and brown vegetation. This birds'-eye view marks the beginning of Stratman's expansive film, which is the focus of the artist and filmmaker'due south exhibition, Chicago Works: Deborah Stratman, at the Museum of Contemporary Fine art Chicago.

Across 11 capacity (or "parables"), Stratman chronicled the history of the land, guided past an agreement that people are not separate from the environment but are role of it. In making the film Stratman traveled to what she describes as "thin" places, sites where the depth of history is palpable, where the boundary betwixt present and past—likewise as nature and civilization—is indeed thin. The Parables can be understood as a case study of the and then-called Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch wherein humans have become the primary force irresolute the Earth'south landscapelink. Throughout, Stratman's picture show shows how people have marked the landscape of nowadays-24-hour interval Illinois, her habitation land, and how this landscape has in turn marked those who take called it dwelling.

On the occasion of the MCA exhibition, Stratman created an extension of the moving picture—a 12th chapter, annex, or coda—in the form of a sculptural installation and audio program titled Feeling Tone (2020). The installation is a replica of Louis "Studs" Terkel's radio booth from the WFMT headquarters in downtown Chicago and is accompanied by a selection of 143 of the oral historian's interviews. With Feeling Tone, Stratman layered a multitude of voices atop the mural seen in The Illinois Parables, prompting us to consider the land not simply as a physical object but also as a collection of subjectivities. While broad in scope, between the pic and audio plan, Stratman's historical account of the land known as Illinois is all the same necessarily a partial ane—an eclectic and idiosyncratic anthology of stories. In this essay, I will briefly summarize each chapter of The Illinois Parables, analyzing individual shots and unpacking Stratman's historical references, and conclude by considering how Feeling Tone expands upon the topics and themes of the film.

Deborah Stratman, Cahokia Mounds as seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm film or DCP; sixty min. Image courtesy of the creative person.

One of the kickoff images nosotros encounter in affiliate I is a grand earthen mound, shot from an cobblestone lot with the banal outlines of parking spots bisecting the frame. Like a palimpsest, the marks of paved roadways overwrite the marks left on the landscape by some of Illinois' Indigenous inhabitants: the Mississippians. In chapter I, Stratman focused on what remains of the Mississippian's civilization in the mural; namely, the Cahokia Mounds. Estimates place the ancient city's population between 1150 and 1200 AD in the tens of thousands, past some accounts larger than contemporaneous London and Paris linklink. Central Cahokia'south compages consisted of more than i hundred rammed-earth mounds, several of which nosotros see in Stratman'southward pic, laid out over approximately 6 square miles near Horseshoe Lake in what is at present southwestern Illinois. Cahokia served equally an economic, political, and cultural center for Mississippians who lived throughout the region. link Cahokia'southward population began to decrease in the thirteenth century, and while the reason for this alter is unknown, one recent hypothesis suggest that climatic shifts resulted in increased flooding in the region, disrupting Cahokia's agricultural systems. link The site's current name comes from the Cahokia, an Illinois Confederacy (Illiniwek) tribe that lived in the area at the time when French settler-colonial explorers arrived in the seventeenth century. link Across the first iii capacity of her film, Stratman shows how the American landscape is inextricably entangled with its settler-colonial history.

Two

Deborah Stratman, Still from The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16 mm film or DCP; 60 min. Image courtesy of the artist.

Deborah Stratman, Louis Joliet's sketch of the mural and an amateur restoration of the mural in Alton, IL, every bit seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm film or DCP; sixty min. Image courtesy of the artist.

Inasmuch as The Illinois Parables is an examination of a history-laden landscape, information technology is too an exam of historicity—or the actuality of representations of the past. In affiliate Two, Stratman presents a montage of several celebrated documents that ostensibly depict the aforementioned thing but at times contradict 1 another, calling their authenticity into question. At the get-go of this affiliate, nosotros see a sketch fabricated by French settler-colonial explorer Louis Joliet. The sketch documents a mural of a composite, chimera-like animate being painted on a limestone bluff. Joliet and Jacques Marquette encountered the mural on their 1673 expedition down the Mississippi River. In a periodical description, which Stratman included as a voiceover in her flick, Marquette described the sight:

They are every bit large As a calf; they have Horns on their heads Like those of a deer, a horrible expect, cherry eyes, a bristles Like a tiger'due south, a face somewhat like a man's, a body Covered with scales, then Long A tail that information technology winds all around the Trunk, passing higher up the head and going back between the legs, ending in a Fish's tail.

In Stratman'south film, Joliet's sketch is followed by an image of the present-day historical site in Alton, Illinois, which includes a rough re-creation of the original mural. This re-creation differs from Joliet's sketch and Marquette's clarification in numerous ways: nearly notably, the fauna has sprouted wings. In an 1863 publication, Alton resident John Russel popularized the idea that the original mural depicted a Piasa, which co-ordinate to Russel's made business relationship was a "bird that devours men" in Illiniwek folklore. link However, the wingless fauna depicted in Joliet'south sketch of the original mural is in fact far more than consistent with Anishinaabe iconography of the underwater panther, a supernatural being that lives in the deepest parts of lakes and rivers. linklink. Regardless of the historical inaccuracy, today the mural is popularly known as the Piasa Bird. In affiliate 2 of the Parables, we see how multiple layers of historical interpretation—by settler-colonial invaders, fraudulent storytellers, and amateur conservationists—amounts to a misunderstanding of the original mural. This is one specific example of the systemic misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples and their cultures. link

3

Chapter 3 opens at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, where we see dioramas with dusty, plasticky, life-size replicas of plants, animals, and people confronting trompe-fifty'oeil painted backdrops. While intended every bit a tool to brainwash about the state's Ethnic peoples, the exhibit incorrectly suggests that the people and culture on display are gone—every bit evidenced by the exhibit'south title Peoples of the By.link These dioramas, which debuted at the Museum in 1984, follow a familiar format for the display and collecting of sacred Native American materials at museums throughout the United States. link The violence of such exhibits is their symbolic erasure of contemporary Indigenous peoples, descendants of these "peoples of the by," who proceed to alive throughout the land, the country, and the world despite ongoing settler-colonial subjugation. linklinklink Furthermore, these displays—especially when presented in the context of natural history museums—ontologically position Indigenous peoples aslope animals and plants. These groups so are set opposite Western people on the archaic nature vs. culture divide, effectively reifying the racist colonial distinction between "savage" and "civilized" societies. linklink

Deborah Stratman, A diorama at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, IL every bit seen in Deborah Stratman'due south The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm film or DCP; 60 min. Image courtesy of the artist.

This racist worldview served as justification for a broad array of atrocities throughout US history. Ponca scholar Roger Buffalohead discussed the myth of the "savage" in an interview with Studs Terkel—one of the interviews that Stratman included in Feeling Tone (2020). Buffalohead said, "The myth served a function in American society as it developed, it provided a rationale for the dispossession of Indians of their lands." Part of this larger history of dispossession is the The states government's forced removal of Cherokee people from their ancestral homelands, across the Midwest to Indian Territory in nowadays-day Oklahoma. Stratman addressed this United States–sanctioned genocide in chapter 3.

Deborah Stratman still from The Illinois Parables, 2016 16mm film or DCP 60 min. Prototype courtesy of the artist

Driven past ideologies of American exceptionalism and rumors of golden, in the early nineteenth century the state of Georgia sought to extend their rule over Cherokee territory in order to let white miners to settle there. The Cherokee responded with legal activeness against the state link. In a ruling on the Cherokee's second case argued by the Supreme Court, Worcester 5. Georgia (1832), Master Justice John Marshall's conclusion affirmed the legitimacy of existing Cherokee treaties with the Usa and denounced Georgia'southward legislation over the Cherokee every bit unconstitutional. 10 Recounting the consequence in an interview with Studs Terkel—which Stratman includes in Feeling Tone—Dakota scholar and activist Vine Deloria Jr noted, "When John Marshall made the determination that the United States had to guarantee the political existence of the Cherokees, [President] Andrew Jackson just said, 'Well, he's made his conclusion, let him enforce it.'" Empowered by the Indian Removal Act of 1830—a portion of which Stratman includes as an intertitle in her film—Jackson refused Marshall'southward mandate to uphold existing treaties with the Cherokee and proceeded to ratify the Treaty of New Echota in 1836. xi The new treaty gave Cherokee people two years to leave their ancestral homelands, despite the fact that neither Cherokee leadership nor the vast majority of Cherokee people signed or supported information technology. As most Cherokee understood the treaty to be illegitimate, most remained. In 1838 7,000 US troops invaded their land, mark the beginning of what the Cherokee telephone call "Nunna daul Tsuny," which translates to "the trail where they cried," and has become known every bit the Trail of Tears. 12

IIII

Deborah Stratman, Yet from The Illinois Parables, 2016. sixteen mm motion picture or DCP; 60 min. Epitome courtesy of the artist.

Deborah Stratman, Trail of Tears Road equally seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm film or DCP; 60 min. Prototype courtesy of the creative person.

While making the Parables, Stratman visited sites along the westward road United states soldiers forcibly marched Cherokee people on, such every bit Golconda, the town where Cherokee people crossed the Ohio River into Illinois on Dec 3, 1838. In the pic, nosotros see a depiction of this event in a mural painted on a levee in Golconda. Elsewhere in chapter III, nosotros see a road sign that reads "Trade of Tears Rd," marking how portions of the historic road have been inscribed with concrete and asphalt into the landscape. Stratman too includes shots of snow-covered expanses, alluding to the particularly frigid wintertime the Cherokee suffered through 178 years ago on their forced march across the Midwest. Many of the 4,000–viii,000 deaths that occurred forth the Trail of Tears due to exposure, disease, starvation, and wounds inflicted past U.s.a. soldiers happened in the three months Cherokee people spent crossing Illinois.xiii

Stratman uses historical documents and the marked traces of the Trail of Tears in the landscape to tell this story of genocide. That said, she did not consult members of the three gimmicky Cherokee tribes—the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, the Cherokee Nation, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians14—while creating her film. The Trail of Tears is part of the ongoing systemic dispossession of Indigenous peoples perpetuated by the Us government. While Stratman does not include it in her film, the Trail of Death tells some other part of this story, wherein Potawatomi people were violently removed from their lands in nowadays-day Indiana and forced to move hundreds of miles due west, passing through present-day Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas, leading to dozens of deaths.15 Present-day Illinois is situated inside the bequeathed homelands of many Native nations, including the Council of Three Fires (Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa), Ho-Clamper, Menominee, Meskawki, Sauk, Miami, Wea, Piankashaw, Kickapoo, Illinois Confederacy, Peoria, and Shawnee. Members of these nations and more continue to live and thrive throughout Illinois.16

4–Five

Deborah Stratman, Still from The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16 mm pic or DCP; 60 min. Paradigm courtesy of the artist.

Deborah Stratman, Carl Christian Anton Christensen'southward painting Burning of the Temple (c. 1878) and the rebuilt Mormon Temple in Nauvoo as seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm moving picture or DCP; 60 min. Image courtesy of the artist.

Throughout her moving-picture show, Stratman shows how present-day Illinois is contested territory. Affiliate IV of the Parables tells the story of a grouping of white settlers: the Church of Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo, Illinois. Nauvoo was founded by Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. as a refuge following the Mormon War of 1838, which forced the church and its people out of Missouri. By 1845, the population of Nauvoo had ballooned to an estimated 12,000 people, about the size of contemporaneous Chicago. According to local historians Elderberry Everest and Sister Everest, whose business relationship is included as voiceover in the film, around this time the Mormons began voting every bit a bloc which "began to take the accepted political power of the erstwhile settlers of Hancock canton away from them, and that angry more than just curiosity, that aroused anger." Anti-Mormon sentiment flared in neighboring communities and church leaders were jailed in nearby Carthage, Illinois. Shortly thereafter an angry mob stormed the jail, assassinating Smith and his blood brother.

Following the bump-off of Smith, arsonists burned buildings throughout Nauvoo, including the Mormon temple which is illustrated in the Parables with C. C. A. Christensen's (Danish, 1831–1912) painting Called-for of the Temple (c. 1878). Past 1846, the Mormons were forced out of Nauvoo. A century and a half after in 2003, the Mormons rebuilt their temple.

As the Mormons departed, they left a political and spatial vacuum in their wake—chapter V tells the story of those who filled it. Ii years after the Mormons left Nauvoo, a contingent of French colonists led past political theorist Etienne Cabet settled in the boondocks. Cabet renamed information technology Icaria after the fictional utopian society he wrote nigh in his 1840 novel The Voyage to Icaria. Cabet's novel described a guild wherein all things were shared communally, including belongings and food; even children were raised collectively past the community. Icaria was to exist the existent-globe manifestation of Cabet's dream society.

While the Icarians successfully developed a functional society, their population never reached the numbers that their Mormon predecessors had. Despite their unusual ideas and values, they never became a serious political threat to the neighboring communities the mode the Mormons had. Rather than existence forced out, the demise of the Icarians was due to internal discord.

6–8

While many historical accounts might consider country to exist an inert phase upon which struggles between homo actors play out, in the Parables Stratman shows that nonhuman forces are not to be discounted as active agents in shaping history. This is almost evident in affiliate Six, which describes the Tri-Land Tornado, a mile-wide monster that tore through southwestern Missouri, southern Illinois, and southwestern Indiana in 1925. Archival footage of the aftermath included in the Parables shows how the tornado scraped across the mural, destroying near everything in its path. A voiceover of a adult female describes how her pet parrot was found perched upon the ruins of her old home, covered in soot "as black a crow" and singing the hymn "Sweet Hour of Prayer," a version of which Stratman also included in the film. The disaster claimed the lives of over 800 people and left fifteen,000 more homeless. It was a karmic dispossession of life and land past the nonhuman force of the atmospheric condition.

A tornado is a particularly explicit—and particularly Midwestern—example of how nonhuman forces shape history. Merely nonhuman forces govern our lives from the macrocosmic scale of weather and climate to the microcosmic scale of diminutive physics. Chapter VII of the Parables focuses on how the Diminutive Age began with an experiment in Illinois.

Featured images

Deborah Stratman, Archival footage showing the aftermath of the 1925 Tri-Land Tornado as seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm motion picture or DCP; 60 min. Epitome courtesy of the creative person.

Deborah Stratman, Archival footage showing the aftermath of the 1925 Tri-Country Tornado as seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm film or DCP; sixty min. Image courtesy of the artist.

Deborah Stratman, Archival footage showing the aftermath of the 1925 Tri-State Tornado as seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm picture or DCP; 60 min. Paradigm courtesy of the artist.

Seven

In the Parables we meet a series of stone markers from the United States Section of Energy in the Ruddy Gate Woods of southwestern Chicago. Role commemorative plaque and part warning sign, the markers tell the story of Chicago Pile-1, the reactor that created the first sustained artificial nuclear chain reaction. The reaction occurred at the University of Chicago in 1942, under the direction of American-Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Audio included in the Parables from a 1960s educational film describes the experiment in utopian terms: "CP-1: The Day Tomorrow Began." The experiments were a crucial step in the Manhattan Project, the The states government's endeavor to develop nuclear weapons during Earth War II. The markers in Cherry-red Gate Woods note that potentially dangerous radioactive remains from CP-1, also every bit the subsequent CP-2 and CP-3 reactors, are cached at the site.

Tellingly, the words of alarm carved into the stones are only in English, as if their creators couldn't imagine a future where non–English speaking people would encounter the site. But if at that place'south whatever lesson to accept away from Stratman'southward motion picture, information technology's that in a country marred by the ongoing legacy of colonialism, inhabitancy isn't fixed. With the existential threats of climate change and a renewed nuclear arms race, the likelihood of this particular ruin outlasting Western civilization seems more than possible. While zippo is truly permanent, the materials buried at the site are remarkably close—at least from a human perspective. Some of the nuclear waste material buried hither will remain radioactive for at least 24,000 years.

The initial optimism over the and then-called Atomic Age mutated into cynicism and paranoia following the U.s.a.' bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Nippon, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, among other events. In the Parables we run across evidence of ongoing nuclear suspicion in an act of vandalism on one of the rock markers: the give-and-take "no" has been chipped out of the sentence "There is no danger to visitors."

Deborah Stratman, Rock marking in Ruby-red Gate Woods every bit seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm film or DCP; threescore min. Image courtesy of the artist.

VIII

From the burial site of CP-1, Stratman moved to some other military-industrial graveyard. In chapter VIII we run into a series of small-scale hills popping out of the otherwise characteristically flat Midwestern landscape. These mounds are, in fact, ruins from the quondam Joliet Army Ammunition Constitute, a military machine facility that produced explosives during World State of war Two, the Korean State of war, and the Vietnam War. In 1996, the area became the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, the land's largest prairie reserve, named after the Potawatomi give-and-take for "healer." From the cease of the last ice age roughly 13,800 years agone, prairies covered 60% of Illinois and supported a biodiverse ecosystem. The arrival of settler-colonial invaders some four hundred years ago marked the starting time of the rapid transformation of the land, which was thoroughly reorganized under the logic of capitalism to become a patchwork of mostly privately owned lands used for agricultural, industrial, and residential purposes. Considering of this, Illinois has lost 99.999% of its prairieland.17 Midewin is an essential project as a refuge for numerous rare and endangered nonhuman animal and plant species, such as Upland sandpipers, Eastern Prairie Fringed Orchids, and Blanding's turtles.18 Midewin tin can also exist understood in the larger historical context of the racist conservation movement, which privileges the being and livelihood of animals and plants while disregarding the many Ethnic peoples who take and will continue to call this land abode.19

Deborah Stratman, However from The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm pic or DCP; 60 min. Image courtesy of the artist.

Ix

Deborah Stratman, Reenactment of the mysterious fires at the Willey Farm in Macomb, IL as seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm film or DCP; lx min. Image courtesy of the creative person.

Deborah Stratman, All the same from The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16 mm moving-picture show or DCP; 60 min. Image courtesy of the artist.

While things across what nosotros might consider "natural" are addressed throughout Stratman's movie, chapter IX takes a distinctively supernatural plough. In the summer of 1946, a series of mysterious fires bankrupt out on a subcontract in Macomb, Illinois. The blazes started out pocket-size: little brown spots on the farmhouse walls that smoldered for several minutes before bursting into flames. In the following weeks, hundreds of small fires inexplicably bankrupt out around the property—ane of which burnt out of control, destroying the farmhouse before burn trucks arrived. By this signal, the mystery fires were big news; fifty-fifty the United States Air Forcefulness was brought in to investigate, but they left just as baffled equally anybody else. One theory claimed concentrated radioactivity caused the fires—more evidence of America'south Atomic Age paranoia.

Another popular theory centered on a thirteen-year-sometime girl named Wanet MacNeill who lived on the farm, Stratman dramatizes this theory in the film. It was suggested that MacNeill was pyrokinetic, causing the fires solely with the power of her listen. The actual cause turned out to exist far more banal. MacNeill eventually confessed under pressure level to starting the fires with kitchen matches while no one was looking, stating dissatisfaction with her life on the farm as reason for the arson. The caption satisfied authorities and reporters; however, to this day paranormal investigators remain unconvinced. In the Parables Stratman seemed to side with the skeptics.

Stratman'south inclusion of MacNeill's story in the Parables speaks to the multitude of smaller, personal-scale stories that cumulatively shape landscapes everywhere.

X

Deborah Stratman, Still from The Illinois Parables, 2016. sixteen mm film or DCP; 60 min. Epitome courtesy of the artist

In chapter X we run into how life in America is especially precarious when one's worldview or way of life challenges those in power. The film's penultimate chapter recounts the case of the police raid of the Chicago Black Panther Headquarters in 1969. The event was a culminating moment in a decade of tension betwixt insurgent political movements and the United States government.

In the early morning time of December 4, 1969, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) entered the Panther headquarters at 2337 Due west. Monroe Street, killing 2 people and wounding several others. In the Parables a voiceover describes the CPD'south version of events: they engaged in a "gun battle," initiated past the Panthers, while executing a search warrant on the property. Still, out of nearly i hundred bullets fired that morning, only ane was ultimately determined to take come from inside the edifice. Over the course of the ensuing thirteen-yr legal battle, it was revealed that the police worked with the FBI to orchestrate the raid, specifically with an agent provocateur and informant named William O'Neal who had infiltrated the Panthers. 20

FBI memos included as intertitles in the Parables reveal the Bureau considered the Panthers to be a "black nationalist hate grouping," which the FBI sought to neutralize by launching the operation known internally every bit COINTELPRO. Of particular business organisation to the agency was the rise of a "messiah" that would catalyze people around the growing political movement. The December four raid was designed to neutralize one such messianic figure: Fred Hampton, the young charismatic Chairman of the Chicago Panthers who was killed in his sleep during the raid. Hampton, who was 21 years old at the time of his decease, was a ascension leader and revolutionary socialist who helped form the Rainbow Coalition, a multicultural organization that brought together Black, Latino, Ethnic, and white working-grade people across Chicago to fight law brutality, gentrification, and systemic racism. Hampton'southward bump-off by the Us regime is a potent reminder of the lengths those in ability will go to suppress philosophies contrary to their own. In closing the chapter, we see a mural of Hampton at 2746 W. Madison Street, a physical marker in the urban landscape of his lasting influence and the ongoing legacy of Black radical politics.

Xi

Deborah Stratman, Michael Heizer's Effigy Tumuli every bit seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm film or DCP; sixty min. Image courtesy of the artist.

Deborah Stratman, Michael Heizer's Figure Tumuli as seen in The Illinois Parables, 2016. 16mm motion-picture show or DCP; threescore min. Epitome courtesy of the artist.

Following x earthbound chapters, in the final chapter Stratman over again traveled skyward via hot air balloon, mirroring the opening shot of the film's prologue, to picture show Michael Heizer'due south (American, b. 1944) monumental earthwork Effigy Tumuli (1983–85) in Buffalo Rock Country Park. Visually, Effigy Tumuli recalls the earthen mounds of Cahokia pictured in the first chapter of Stratman's movie. By bracketing her picture with the Cahokia mounds in the beginning and Heizer's curious pastiche of Indigenous mound-building cultures in the end, Stratman calls into question the human relationship between the two sites. The championship of Heizer'due south artwork references effigy mounds, raised earth structures shaped into the forms of animals and other figures (perchance the most widely known is the Corking Snake Mound in present-24-hour interval Ohio created by the Adena people). 21Consistent with the basic visual forms of figure mounds, Effigy Tumuli depicts several nonhuman animal and plant species endemic to the surface area, including a catfish, turtle, frog, and ophidian, as well as a h2o strider, which we come across in Stratman'south film. Heizer's championship also references tumuli, which are raised earth structures that, like many effigy mounds, contain sacred burying remains. Effigy Tumuli, though, is a misrepresentation of the form, as it contains no such remains. Heizer solely adopted the aesthetic dimensions of effigy mounds and tumuli to create his artwork, evidencing a misunderstanding of the multiple purposes these structures serve for the people who made them.

Art historically, Heizer is often cited every bit a "pioneer" of and then-called land art, a title which denies the long history of Indigenous digging in order to position him as the progenitor of a "new" kind of art. 2223 Speaking on Effigy Tumuli, Heizer said, "It was my chance to make a statement for the Native Americans." As in that location is a lack of critical scholarship on Heizer'due south involvement in and cribbing of Indigenous visual cultures, what the item statement is remains unclear. 24 Heizer'due south full general interest in earthworks is their ability to carry information through time by embedding it in the mural. In Heizer's words, "[A]rt is a record of culture and its societies [. . .] Every bit fourth dimension goes by what interests usa will interest those who will examine our historical time." 25 Perchance Heizer'south speculative audience of futurity historians will have involvement in Effigy Tumuli as an example of a fourth dimension when American artists were interested in appropriating Indigenous visual cultures while their state continued to subjugate Indigenous peoples.

Heizer seemed to be interested in historicizing his artwork in relation to Indigenous earthworks. However, Heizer's historical context and positionality, equally a gimmicky white not-Native artist working in the lineage of modernism, is entirely disconnected from that of the Indigenous mound-building cultures whose effigy mounds and tumuli he mimics. Beyond simple formal similarities, Heizer'southward artwork has petty relation to Indigenous land-based cultural practices. As with the Illinois State Museum's brandish depicted in chapter III of Stratman's picture, nosotros can sympathize Effigy Tumuli as contributing to the ongoing and systemic misrepresentation of Ethnic peoples and cultures.

XII

Stratman described the procedure of winnowing down the stories included in the Parables as "somewhat tortuous." 26 The complex history of whatsoever place simply cannot exist told by a finite number of stories—peculiarly in a one-hr film. Recognizing this, Stratman created Feeling Tone (2020), a sculptural installation and sound program which expands upon the stories included in the film through a multitude of voices. The replica of Studs Terkel's WFMT radio booth is complete with article of furniture, recording equipment, and ephemera, some of which came direct from WFMT'due south archives. The exterior of the structure is left raw: with wood studs, drywall, and electric wiring exposed as if the booth was ripped from the WFMT headquarters and transported to the gallery intact.

Installation view, Chicago Works: Deborah Stratman MCA Chicago

Louis "Studs" Terkel was a renowned broadcaster, oral historian, activist, and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer who made a name for himself with his books such as Partition Street: America and his radio show which ran on WFMT for xl-v years. Terkel conducted interviews with a diverse array of luminaries such as James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Cesar Chavez, to name simply a few, merely too with people he affectionately referred to as "the etceteras": the everyday working people of Chicago, Illinois, and beyond. Information technology was in an interview with 1 such etcetera, a infirmary worker named Nancy Dickerson, that Terkel was introduced the idea of the "feeling tone." 27 For Terkel, feeling tone is raw emotional experience, expressed in the sonic character of a storyteller's voice, found non in facts and figures only in inflection and timbre.

Over the course of his career, Terkel amassed over nine,000 hours of recorded interviews. He christened his archive—the totality of his life's work—Vox Humana: The Human Phonation.28 For her installation, Stratman chose one interview from Terkel'south Voice Humana to play each day of the exhibition. There are 143 interviews in full, a dated listing can exist plant here. Stratman envisions her installation as a spaceship, transporting museum visitors through time and space on the sonic wavelengths of voices.

Installation view, Chicago Works: Deborah Stratman MCA Chicago

Politically Terkel had socialist leanings and advocated for numerous social causes throughout his life, including civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ rights, and environmentalism. The invention of telecommunication immune for the capitalist reorganization of nature to extend beyond the mural and into the airspace, where radio frequencies have been regulated by governmental bodies and sold off to the highest bidders. However, within this privatized airspace, public radio stations like WFMT more often than not remain spaces of costless thought and expression, uninhibited past corporate interests—like public parks in the sky. As with all media, information technology's of import to consider the motives behind the dissemination of information: in Stratman's words, "We need to care about how the world gets delivered to us."

History tin can feel objective, distant, and impersonal. In history textbooks, groups of people are often presented equally abstractions or statistics through the afar voice of historians. With The Illinois Parables and its sculptural extension Feeling Tone, Stratman offered a different kind of history. She shows how the landscape is an earthen record, containing the marks and scars left by its shifting inhabitants and the ongoing legacies of settler-colonialism, racism, militarism, and commercialism—ranging from mounds, roads, and buildings to ruins and radioactive waste. These physical traces, left behind past humans, are the hallmarks of the Anthropocene, merely Stratman also asks united states of america to consider this circuitous, human being-wrought landscape as more just geology. To truly empathise the land, you can't but look. You must also listen. Between the flick and installation, Stratman layered music, archival audio, ambient sounds, and the voices of the land's inhabitants inside the landscape, reflecting not just a history of Illinois simply a detail feeling tone of the land.

Footnotes

1. The political implications of the Anthropocene accept been debated widely in recent years; for case, the universal framing of humanity (anthopos) on a species level has been criticized for overlooking the ways specific groups of people accept subjugated others throughout man history. For an introduction to these debates, see Harraway, Donna, Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Cthulucene. read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/6/ane/159/8110/Anthropocene-Capitalocene-Plantationocene; Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018; Todd, Zoe. "Indigenizing the anthropocene." Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies (2015): 241–54.; and Demos, T. J., Against the Anthropocene: Visual Civilization and Surround Today. Berlin, DE: Sternberg Press, 2017.
2. Kehoe, Alice Brook. "Cahokia, the Great City." OAH Magazine of History 27, no. four (2013): 17–21. Accessed December iii, 2020. jstor.org/stable/43797866.
3. White, A. J., Samuel Eastward. Munoz, Sissel Schroeder, and Lora R. Stevens. "After Cahokia: Indigenous Repopulation and Depopulation of the Horseshoe Lake Watershed Advertizing 1400–1900." American Antiquity 85, no. 2 (2020).
4. Holt, Julie Zimmermann. "Rethinking the Ramey Land: Was Cahokia the Center of a Theater State?" American Artifact 74, no. 2 (2009): 231–54. Accessed Dec 6, 2020. jstor.org/stable/20622425.
5. Munoz, Samuel E., Kristine E. Gruley, Ashtin Massie, David A. Fike, Sissel Schroeder, and John W. Williams. "Cahokia'southward Emergence and Refuse Coincided with Shifts of Flood Frequency on the Mississippi River." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112, no. xx (2015).
6. The Cahokia were part of the Illinois Confederacy (too Illini, Illiniwek), which also included the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Tamaroa, Moingwena, Tapouaro, Coiracoentanon, Chepoussa, Espeminkia, Chinkoa, Maroa, and Michigamea, and Miami. See, Bilodeau, Christopher. "They Award Our Lord among Themselves in Their Own Mode: Colonial Christianity and the Illinois Indians." American Indian Quarterly 25, no. iii (2001): 352–77.
7. Russell, John. "The Legend of the Piasa." Central States Archaeological Journal 33, no. 4 (1986): 304–07. jstor.org/stable/43139666
8. In a presentation for the East Central Illinois Archaeological Social club, Duane Esarey unpacks the history of how and why the landmark was misnamed. He likewise addresses how representations of the original landscape take mutated over fourth dimension and how the actual site of the landmark has shifted due to industrial activity. See Esarey, Duane. January xv, 2015. youtube.com/watch?v=gP2nR_PqIMk
9. Costa, David J., George F. Finley, Elizabeth Vallier, and unknown Shawnee Speaker. "Culture-Hero and Trickster Stories ." In Algonquian Spirit: Contemporary Translations of the Algonquian Literatures of North America, edited past Brian Swann, 292–319. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
10. Edits to this essay were fabricated after information technology was originally published in July, 2020, in response to concerns raised past Indigenous community members over how the genocide known equally the Trail of Tears was represented, amongst other problems. Therefore, this essay is another instance of the systemic misrepresentation of Ethnic peoples and their cultures in Western scholarship. For a critical test of the original version of this text, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago's historic lack of support for Indigenous artists, encounter Andrea Carlson's article Where Are The Native Artists at the MCA?: sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/where-are-the-native-artists-at-the-mca/
11. illinoisstatemuseum.org/content/peoples-by
12. The Field Museum in Chicago is currently renovating their Native North ­­American Hall in collaboration with Native scholars and community members. See fieldmuseum.org/about/press/field-museum-renovate-native-northward-america-hall-open-2021
13. For an extended disquisitional examination of museum exhibitions focusing on Native American histories, see Lonetree, Amy. Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Chapel Loma, N Carolina: University of Due north Carolina Press, 2012.
14. Artists Wendy Ruby-red Star, James Luna, and Chris Pappan take been instrumental in critical discourse on museum exhibitions that focus on Native American histories and Indigenous peoples.
15. Additionally, museums such as the Illinois State Museum that are not tribally controlled or partnered are situated on the ancestral homelands of Native nations they help to dispossess, with their collections serving as repositories for sacred objects and ancestral remains stolen from Ethnic lands.
16. Williams, Robert A. Barbarous Anxieties: the Invention of Western Civilization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
17. In his volume Playing Indian, Dakota scholar Philip J. Deloria traces how misconceptions of Indigenous peoples created and used past white Americans have shifted over time, and how these misconceptions chronicle to racialized social and political systems throughout U.s. history and in the present. See Deloria, Philip Joseph. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press.
18. With Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1828), the Cherokee asserted that the land of Georgia's attempt to strip Cherokee people of their rights and displace them from their land violated existing treaties between the United States and Cherokee Nation. The Supreme Courtroom dismissed the case. See supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/30/1/
19. Ostler, Jeffrey. Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United states of america from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. New Haven; London: Yale Academy Press, 2019.
20. Cave, Alfred A. "Corruption of Power: Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830." The Historian 65, no. vi (2003).
21. Thornton, Russell. "Cherokee Population Losses during the Trail of Tears: A New Perspective and a New Gauge." Ethnohistory 31, no. four (1984): 289–300.
22. Ibid.
23. While the US government forcibly removed some 16,000 Cherokee people from the southeastern United states of america during the Trail of Tears, some Cherokee people remained on their land. The Eastern Ring of Cherokee Indians presently has xiv,000 members, who are in function descended from the hundreds of Cherokee who evaded the Trail of Tears, besides every bit from Cherokee survivors of the Trail of Tears who returned to the southeast later on arriving in Oklahoma. Meet visitcherokeenc.com/eastern-band-of-the-cherokee.
24. John P. Bowes. "American Indian Removal beyond the Removal Act." Native American and Indigenous Studies 1, no. ane (2014): 65–87.
25. Neither this essay nor Stratman'south film includes Native perspectives on the lives of contemporary Native peoples. For an extended examination of survivance, a term coined by literary theorist Gerald Robert Vizenor (member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation) see his book Vizenor, Gerald Robert. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln, Neb. University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Survivance is active Native presence and the continuation of Native stories across and apart from resistance to settler-colonial subjugation, or every bit Vizenor described it, "Native survivance is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion."
26. See dnr.illinois.gov/conservation/IWAP/Pages/FarmlandandPrairie.aspx
27. Greenberg, Joel. A Natural History of the Chicago Region. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
28. For a brief history of the racism within the conservation movement run into newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history
29. Taylor, Flint. The Torture Machine: Racism and Police force Violence in Chicago. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019.
30. Herrmann, Edward Due west., G. William Monaghan, William F. Romain, Timothy Yard. Schilling, Jarrod Burks, Karen Fifty. Leone, Matthew P. Purtill, and Alan C. Tonetti. "A New Multistage Construction Chronology for the Neat Serpent Mound, USA." Periodical of Archaeological Science 50 (2014): 117–25. doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.07.004.
31. For example, run across Casey, Edward S., and Edward Southward. Casey. Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005; newyorker.com/mag/2016/08/29/michael-heizers-metropolis; and tclf.org/pioneer/michael-heizer
32. For a disquisitional give-and-take of State Art in relation to Indigenous land-based practices, run into Emily Eliza Scott's essay "Decentering State Fine art from the Borderlands: A Review of Through the Repellent Debate". artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=9819 33. Heizer, Michael, and Douglas C. MacGill. Figure Tumuli: the Reemergence of Ancient Mound Building. New York, NY: Abrams, 1990.
33. Heizer, Michael, Julia Chocolate-brown, and Barbara Heizer. Sculpture in Reverse. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984.
34. filmcomment.com/blog/interview-deborah-stratman/
35. Terkel, Studs. Division Street: America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1967
36. chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-07-ten-9707100137-story.html

Artist Bio

Deborah Stratman (American, b. 1967) is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker who explores the cycle of influence between people and the state.

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