Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1985
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter 1985, pp. 5-23.
Abstract
To consider the influence of Europe upon the visual arts of the Great Plains is to engender not only a new body of information but also some complex methodological questions of concern not only to the specialist but to the student of the region more generally. How does a regional perspective focus one's investigation? How does "influence" work within a culture and how, specifically, that of Europe upon American and western culture? Finally, how do the visual arts function to shed light on these broader questions? It is the last of these questions that I will address here, not as an expert on the Great Plains, for my experience as a student of regionalism as a phenomenon, of European influence· on American culture, and of art history as a disciplinary approach, has lain elsewhere.1 I am convinced, however, that the problems of method and approach that the historian of the art of the Great Plains faces are part of a larger picture, and thus· we will move from questions of method toward their application to the Great Plains in particular.
THE REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Our premises need to be clear at the outset. The visual art of the Great Plains should not be considered as an inert body of disconnected pieces of information about the region, nor are pictures a series of windows, passive illustrations, or "reflections" of the "reality" of the region. Works of art-indeed, all facts and artifacts- come to us already packaged by our questions and framed by our perspectives. Charts of rainfall in the Great Plains presume that there is a question about the influence of precipitation upon vegetation and through that upon the life of the region. A computergenerated map of Democratic and Republican voting in the state of North Dakota presumes that such a spatial understanding of political choices tells us something significant about the relationship between location and political behavior. To look at a Willa Cather novel from the perspective of Red Cloud presumes that in some ways Cather carried her Nebraska childhood and youth with her during her adult years as a creator of fiction in New York and the East. Furthermore, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of the physicist applies as well to the art historian: the observer's questions necessarily color the results of our data-gathering. The inductive process is shaped by our hypotheses, the questions that seem presently meaningful to us.
These elementary but often overlooked principles are essential to an appreciation of the role of the visual arts in the understanding of a regional culture. Simply put, a regional art is an attempt to be space- and perhaps time-specific about a particular area, to report to the world the contours and character of a limited geographical district. Both the artists who create these images and the critic-historians of this process posit the value of the local above or at least on a par with the national or the universal. The seeming obviousness of this formulation masks the fact that it is a relatively new one. As a mode of social interpretation, regionalism is a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century phenomenon. The presumption that the Great Plains and other "sections" haye influenced our national development as distinctive geographical and cultural spaces, the fractionalization of a monolithic "American" experience into regional components, and a concomitant redefinition of our relation to a parent Europe by relocating "American" qualities in terms of western or midwestern experience-these are processes that we associate especially with the writings of Frederick Jackson Turner and his intellectual followers from the 1890s on.2
Comments
Copyright 1985 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln