Queer Form, Quiet Frame: A Sense of Alaska Native Aesthetics in Emily Johnson's The Thank-You Bar

Figure 1.

Emily Johnson, The Thank-You Bar, 2009. Photograph by Cameron Wittig. Image courtesy of the artist.

The stage is sparsely lit and musicians JOEL PICKARD and JAMES EVEREST enter, one at a time, taking turns recording a broken apart country-western song. The sounds of the pedal steel guitar roam across the empty stage. Everest plays his guitar with a bow while Pickard runs what looks like a piece of red iron rod along the neck of his own guitar. In a ragged Merle Haggard whisper that sounds like a yell, Pickard bends down into his pedal steel guitar and asks: "Do you have a story to tell? Is there something you need to say?"¹

The ambient music is tinny, distant, and soft. Everest and Pickard's recorded and repeating sounds recall a Western film, a white man walking alone amid a barren landscape with tumbleweed at his ankles. The thick sonic reach of the slide guitar is like the slow lull of a drone. The eerie soundtrack of westward expansionist violence and dispossession collides with the small town comfort of a country-western jukebox. When the music stops and the lights go down, we hear a noise that sounds like a big flat frame drum. Thump. Thump. Thump. Choreographer and dancer Emily Johnson slowly thumps out on stage with short stilts made of wooden two-by-fours with what look like square camping lights affixed on the ends. Thick bluish lines are drawn on her legs; they come apart at the top, like two rivers flowing in reverse, or varicose fish-skin veins. Wearing a short blue sequin onesie, Johnson somersaults between the stilts and lies down flat against the ground. The small square stilt lights face upward, and she sings, "I am so lones-oo-oo-ome" drawing the word out in a descending wail. This is the opening of Johnson's The Thank-You Bar, which premiered in Anchorage in 2009; it is a dance piece Johnson made as a kind of love letter to growing up Yup'ik in Alaska, a desire to re-root herself back into the ground after having been away for fifteen years.

In this essay, I sit with the complex theorizations of quiet, indirectness, and place in Johnson's The Thank-You Bar. I argue that Johnson's work provides a way to imagine Alaska Native aesthetics and histories without fixing them into what Gerald Vizenor has called the "fugitive pose." Vizenor describes the freeze-frame of Native representation, where Indigenous peoples are caught in the pictorial and become simulations of themselves in the "pageantry and portraiture of dominance."² The image of "the rustic reservation indian" in the early twentieth-century anthropological lens of photographers such as Edward Curtis signals the erasure of Indigenous peoples through the overdetermination of the Indian simulation. Thinking with Vizenor, I explore the sensory and epistemological frames that might make it possible to experience Johnson's work outside the "poselock" of Native representation in anthropology or art history.³ Engaging recent work on queer formalism, brown aesthetics, and Black articulations of quiet, I argue that Johnson's work offers a way into imagining contemporary Alaska Native art and performance as a sovereign Indigenous practice. I examine moments of indirectness in Johnson's performance where the body's choreographic vocabulary moves in quiet excess of what David Getsy calls "compulsory self-disclosure."⁴

Writing alongside Johnson's mode of performance, I listen closely to her multi-sensory methodological propositions to risk a descriptive strategy of writing in-step with Alaska Native art. Focusing on description, on the slow roll of detailed visual and sonic observations, I take my methodological cue from the formal structures put forth by Johnson and in conversation with other Indigenous artists, including Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq/Athabascan) and Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax). Examining Johnson's resignifications of skin and secrets, I argue that her work opens up a generative way of reading and...