REBECCA BELMORE AND JAMES LUNA ON LOCATION AT VENICE: THE ALLEGORICAL INDIAN REDUX

At the Venice Biennale of 2005 Rebecca Belmore's Fountain and James Luna's Emendatio , although presented in different locales, converged for reasons that knowingly complicated the fact that both artists are Native North Americans. Their works were allegories about, as well as for, the location: reliant on Venice as a city of allegorical certainty; reliant on allegories, skewed and traduced, about the Native. Venice as its own allegory was both reiterated and disturbed by them, Venice also the container of countless allegorical tellings – on plinth, roundel and triptych, on wall, floor, ceiling and on roof – of the stories that held the whole operation together, the engines of its power. Many of them were re‐tellings of the moral systems of other great powers – Greece, Rome, Byzantium – conjoined as the allegorical force of Christendom. It is suggested that on location at the Biennale, a hub for cognoscenti with some collective memory for reappraisals of allegory by Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man or James Clifford, Fountain and Emendatio are allegory‐adjusted and in progress: that they are not so much stories as episodes, circular iterations, repeated suggestive disclosures – repeated, but restricted, demanding to know whose allegories, if any, are reliable.