James Luna’s “The Artifact Piece” (1987) Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Jan 1 1987

Location: 

The United States

The performance artist James Luna, who died in 2018 at age 68, had a wicked sense of humor, which made his explorations of the way that Indigenous people have long been objectified, especially in museums, painfully piquant. A member of the California Luiseño tribe — and of Puyukitchum, Ipai and Mexican American Indian descent — who lived much of his life on reservation land in San Diego County, Luna staged his most famous work, which came to be known as “The Artifact Piece,” in 1987 at the anthropology-focused Museum of Man (now the Museum of Us) in the nearby Balboa Park. In it, Luna laid for hours at a time in a vitrine, wearing just a loin cloth. Around him, labeled as though for an anthropological exhibit, were such objects as his divorce papers and his college diploma. Even the scars on his body were labeled with deadpan panache. Luna’s occasional yawns and stretches jarred the viewer by disrupting the passive stance the artist was critiquing. “Americans,” Luna once said, “like romance more than they like the truth.” — N.H.

External sources: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/t-magazine/most-influential-protest-art.html
Posted by kas10074 on Apr 18 2023

Staff rating: 

0

Featured in these Galleries

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
This project is a part of Luna's long-term goal of raising awareness for the fetishization and objectification of Indigenous culture in museums and the art world at large. In positioning himself as a living artifact surrounded by his possessions, Luna is able to draw attention to the absurdity of displaying Indigenous bodies and lives as things to be looked at and studied in the larger western narrative of Indigenous cultures.

Notes

This project garnered worldwide attention and is still spoken about today as one of the most influential pieces in artistic activism. Thus, it is likely that this project opened many people's eyes to the injustices against Indigenous peoples in the art world and possibly changed their perspectives on museum culture.