Art and aliveness on the Northwest Coast

In the Native art of the Northwest Coast, figures are everywhere, and figures are very nearly everything. The artistic works from this great region of cultural ferment are engulfed by aliveness. Beings stack and swallow the entirety of a cedar house-pole, or spread decorously across a Chilkat blanket, or combine in chimerical merging wholes and halves on every side of a dancing rattle, or proliferate like vegetation up and down an argillite pipe. Even when a figure is found by itself, it tends to become what it surrounds; it dilates and disassembles until its body parts cover every contour of the bowl or hat on which it lives. The figure is on the object, but the object is fully in the figure. From one point of view, the observation that this is an art of figures, and especially animal figures, may appear banal. The representational art of the Northwest was traditionally the province of men, and men were hunters. They were surrounded by animals, whom they studied, emulated, depended upon, competed with, made offerings to, and killed. These animals (ravens, bears, eagles, dogfish, salmon, killer whales, and also supernatural beings like the sea-wolf and sea-grizzly, or zoomorphic incarnations of the rainbow or moon) were the protagonists of their myths, and the crests in their all-important heraldic system. They made an art, like the art of many hunting peoples, in which these animals took center stage, sometimes interacting with humans, sometimes shifting in and out of a quasi-human form. And yet, though it’s easy enough to say in broad strokes why animal figures dominate this artistic tradition, it’s very difficult to say why they do it in exactly the way they do. How figuration functions in Northwest Coast art is the question at the heart of its charisma, and of its literal mysteriousness. This is an artistic tradition where individual beings are so elaborated and expanded that they often become impossible to identify. In becoming everything, they become no one thing.