#Resource --- tags: - Project/Notes - Art - Philosophy - Indigenous Knowledge aliases: - indigenous critique of the method reviewed: 2026-05-13 --- > [!NOTE] A sharp, indigenous-informed reading of [[PARA/1-Projects/🖼️ Art/Artists Method|the Artists Method]] — what it might be missing, and what could be taken without slipping into appropriation. # An Indigenous Critique of the Artists Method *Built from voices already in the vault — [[Robin Wall Kimmerer|Kimmerer]], Vine Deloria Jr., Albert Marshall, Dan Wildcat, [[David Abram|Abram]], [[Timothy Morton|Morton]] on agrilogistics, [[The Patterning Instinct|Lent]] — turned back on my own ten frames.* --- ## What an Indigenous Reader Might Notice First The method is unusually self-aware for a Western artist's text — [[Iain McGilchrist|McGilchrist]]'s right-hemisphere caveat, [[Anton Ehrenzweig|Ehrenzweig]]'s depth mind, the explicit refusal of a single technique. And yet the underlying *shape* is still recognisably Western in ways I almost certainly didn't author consciously. The shape is: - **A solitary practitioner** with a studio, a journal-per-project, a "system" with inputs and outputs, a "compass" that orients *the artist* relative to *the subject*. There is one I and one work. - **Time is linear and pendular** — [[3-Resources/📚 Topics/Jo-ha-kyū]] softens this, but the journal is still dated, the project still finishes and ships, the cycle still resets to a fresh blank. - **The eye is mine** — "the irreducible thing," constituted by "everything *you* have read, walked through, lost, and noticed." - **Materials are listened to** — beautifully — but as preferences of a thing, not as kin with agency in their own right. - **The viewer enters through the artist's presence** in the image — the artist is the *interface*. - **The work is named and shipped.** It ends. It separates from the maker and goes into the world. None of this is wrong. But it is *one* available shape — the shape that fell out of Cartesian [[Dualism|dualism]], Romantic individualism, and the gallery-system art market. --- ## The Sharp Critique — Five Voices ### 1. Kimmerer on the grammar of animacy — *"those who take care of us"* The method says materials are "telling you something about what wants to happen physically. Listen first, decide afterwards." Kimmerer would say: 80% there, and then I reach for the switch. *Listen first, decide afterwards* keeps the verb of agency on me. In Potawatomi (and Anishinaabemowin grammar more broadly), the paint, the paper, the light through the studio window are grammatical *persons*, not objects with "preferences." That isn't poetic ornament. It changes who is making the work. > [!WARNING] The challenge > The method has a *listening* posture but a *deciding* metaphysics. The four-axis compass has *me* at its centre on every axis. An indigenous-grammar version would not have the artist at the origin — it would have *the encounter* at the origin. ### 2. Vine Deloria Jr. on "method" itself Deloria was relentless about how Western thought packages indigenous insight into transferable techniques — "tips" you can extract, name, and apply elsewhere. He'd notice that my text opens with "I don't have a method" and then proceeds to name ten frames. He'd also notice that the frames are conceptual (jo-ha-kyū, divided self, generative title) — they travel without place, without lineage, without responsibility. They are *portable*. This is the sharpest one: **a method that can be picked up by anyone, anywhere, with no obligation to a specific land, lineage or community, is *constitutively Western*.** It is not the content of the method but its *transferability* that gives it away. [[Old Ways for New Times|My own note]] already makes this point about TEK ("Indigenous knowledge is often *placed*… It cannot be generically extracted, distilled into 'tips', and transplanted"). I wrote the warning. The method has not yet metabolised it. ### 3. Albert Marshall — Two-Eyed Seeing (*Etuaptmumk*) Marshall's framing asks for one eye on Western strengths, one eye on indigenous strengths, *neither subordinated, neither discarded*. Right now the method has one eye open and a heavy Western prescription on it — McGilchrist + Ehrenzweig + [[Harold Rosenberg|Rosenberg]]/[[Clement Greenberg|Greenberg]] + [[George Lakoff|Lakoff]] + [[Toru Takemitsu|Takemitsu]]. Every named source except jo-ha-kyū itself is a 20th-century Western thinker, and jo-ha-kyū is being deployed as *technique*, not as cosmology. The challenge: where is the other eye? ### 4. Tim Morton — agrilogistics in the studio Morton's *agrilogistics* (already in [[The Violence We Were Told Was Natural]]) draws a line: the human inside, everything else outside; defend the perimeter. In this method, that perimeter is the studio, the work, the "intention," the named title the painting must "justify." The journal-per-project is a *fence*. Cross-pollination is "pollination" — the language of bees, but the bees are *mine* and the gardens are *separate plots*. The challenge: the same boundary-drawing that produces the discrete, named, shippable artwork is also the logic that has produced [[Monoculture of the Mind|monoculture]], [[Dualism|dualism]], [[Enclosures|enclosure]] — things I critique elsewhere. An indigenous-leaning practice would not necessarily abolish the work-object, but it would not let the work-object be the *only* legitimate output of attention. Ceremony, reciprocity, repair, song, gift — these are all valid outputs in cultures where art is not a thing-on-a-wall. ### 5. Abram — the sensuous and the abstracted Abram's whole argument in [[The Spell of The Sensuous]] and [[Becoming Animal]] is that alphabetic literacy and abstract time have severed Western perception from the more-than-human surround. The method is, ironically, an *extremely textual* document — ten numbered frames, citations, a typographic compass, a [[Toru Takemitsu|generative title]] that prefigures the work. The work is bracketed by language at both ends. Abram would say: I am doing surface-mind work to describe a depth-mind practice, and the description has gradually become the practice. The challenge: where in the method is the work that *cannot be written down*? Where is the practice of being-with — sitting with the hedge, watching the river — that doesn't feed into a project journal because it doesn't have a project? --- ## Where the Critique Runs Out of Road Two honest counter-pressures, so this doesn't tip into self-flagellation: **Romantic indigeneity is its own trap.** [[Old Ways for New Times|My own note]] already names appropriation. A British artist trying to "paint like the Anangu" would be precisely the extraction the critique is supposed to refuse. Marshall's two-eyed move is the right one: the question is what changes about *my own* practice when the other eye opens, not what I import. **The method's strongest feature already half-resists the critique.** The insistence on *conditions* over technique, *practice before theory*, freshness, depth mind, the rejection of ten more "tips" — these are postures already aligned with indigenous-leaning epistemologies. The bones are sympathetic. It is the framing scaffolding that is Western-shaped. --- ## What Could Actually Be Taken Concrete, not decorative: > [!TIP] Seven moves > > **1. Replace "what is the work answerable to?" with "who is the work answerable to?"** — and treat the answer as plural. The pencil. The paper. The hedge outside the studio. The person whose face is in the portrait. The river the pigment came out of. This is a real shift in the four-axis compass; it adds a fifth axis — *relation* — that the current compass folds into "subject." > > **2. Add a "place" frame as the ground of the ten.** Not as one of the frames — as their ground. Where does this practice happen? What grows there, what was cleared there, what lineage of making is local to it? My own note calls hedge-laying and coppice cycles "our nearest local TEK." Could the method name the specific Britain it is being practised inside, rather than floating in studio-space? > > **3. Re-read the eye.** Right now "the irreducible thing" is *the artist's eye*. Kimmerer would phrase it: the irreducible thing is the meeting — the eye and the world reciprocally constituting each other. Tiny edit, large consequence. The artist's eye is *given* by attention paid; it is not a possession. > > **4. Demote naming.** Takemitsu's "two-thirds finished by the title" is gorgeous and very Western — language-first, image-after. An [[Aboriginal art|aboriginal-art]] counterpoint: the symbols *are* the story, and they read differently to different audiences. The title doesn't precede the work — the work *is* a stratified text. What would a *plural-titled* work look like, where different viewers receive different readings deliberately authored? > > **5. Add an output that is not a work.** Reciprocity needs somewhere to land. Some sessions should produce a *return* rather than a piece — pigments returned to the earth, time given to a place rather than taken from it, a sketch given away rather than archived. This breaks the input-output ledger that the systems-theory frame quietly imposes. Output ≠ artefact. > > **6. Reframe iteration as ancestry, not cycle.** Frame 10 — iteration as cycle — is beautifully neutral. An indigenous reframe: each project is not a closed loop reset to blank but a *gift to the next one*, with explicit obligations carried forward. The journal-per-project becomes a *lineage* document, not a contained one. Dan Wildcat's *Indigenising the Anthropocene* asks for exactly this kind of method-level change, not aesthetic borrowing. > > **7. Hold a non-utilitarian session.** Once a season, a working day that produces nothing the system can use. No inputs, no processes, no outputs, no feedback. Abram-style attention. This is the bit Morton would say agrilogistics cannot tolerate — the unenclosed time. If the method can host that without immediately metabolising it back into "Jo," it has actually moved. --- ## The One-Line Version > The method is a fine Western instrument that has done much of its own self-critique and stopped one move short: it still has the artist at the centre of every frame, the work as the only legitimate output, and the studio as a perimeter. A sharp indigenous reading would not ask me to abandon the instrument — it would ask me to add a second eye that sees *relation*, *place*, *reciprocity* and *ancestry* as constitutive of the practice rather than as themes the practice might one day paint. --- ## Related Notes - [[PARA/1-Projects/🖼️ Art/Artists Method]] — The text under critique - [[Old Ways for New Times]] — TEK, Two-Eyed Seeing, the appropriation warning - [[The Gift That Keeps Giving]] — Reciprocity, gift economy, Kimmerer & Graeber - [[The Trouble with Exceptionalism]] — Humans inside the web, not above - [[The Violence We Were Told Was Natural]] — Morton's agrilogistics - [[Monoculture of the Mind]] — Shiva on diversity as the default - [[Aboriginal art]] — Symbols as stratified readings, audience-differentiated meaning - [[Aboriginal culture]] — Background - [[The Spell of The Sensuous]] · [[Becoming Animal]] — Abram on sensuous engagement - [[Robin Wall Kimmerer]] · [[David Graeber]] · [[Timothy Morton]] · [[David Abram]] - [[Dualism]] · [[Ecopsychology]] — Underlying Western patterning --- `Concepts:` [[Art]] · [[Philosophy]] · [[Indigenous Knowledge]] `Adjacent practice:` [[PARA/1-Projects/🖼️ Art/Artists Method]] · [[Artist Statement]] · [[An artists eye 🧿]]