A bison skeleton lurks in City Hall Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
ATTRITION
City Hall Park
Broadway, Park Row, and Chambers St.
June 5 – November 17, free
www.publicartfund.org
online slideshow
We all know about alligators in the New York City sewer system, as honored by Alexander Klingspor’s NYC Legend sculpture on Union Square Park’s Triangle Plaza.
But Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Attrition, a site-specific Public Art Fund project at the south end entrance to City Hall Park, is not only more real but arrives with an important message.
“I live because my ancestors survived a war of attrition carried out by extractive colonizers in order to subjugate tribal nations of the Great Plains for American progress,” Luger, who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota and is currently based in New Mexico, explains in his artist statement. “By the year 1895, across North America, bison herds had been systematically eradicated from numbers in the tens of millions to a mere 1500 — this was genocide. The public artwork Attrition is an effort to transform industrial processes and materials into a symbol of these buried histories reemerging in the twenty-first century.”
The ten-foot-long bison skeleton, made of steel with an ash black patina, peers out of a bed of wild grass that covers the park’s large historical medallion, which contains this 1855 quote from civil engineer and Confederate army officer Henry Brevard Davidson: “It must not be forgotten that the park is still the refuge of the people, the cradle of liberty.”
The mandible is hidden under the grass, but you can get an up-close view of the cranium, scapula, ribs, thoracic vertebrae, and horns. Just as if it were a living bison, gnats hover around it amid the sounds of chirping birds. The skeleton is covered with circular engraved star-shaped symbols that reference the interconnectedness of land, life, and the cosmos as well as the devastation wrought by human intervention in natural ecosystems.
In a statement, Luger, who descends from buffalo people and is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold from the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota cultures, talks about how men would build pyramids of bison skulls in the 1800s.
“These were testaments to settler force and monuments of conquest. They communicated a warning to Native Americans, asserting a haunting commitment to our destruction — and yet, we have survived,” he says. “My ongoing exploration of bison aims to bring awareness to the importance of their impact as an apex species in the environment. Over the course of my life, I’ve developed a personal relationship with this animal — one that is on the verge of survivor’s guilt — because I know their eradication was put in place to create dominance in the Central Plains. We’ve oversimplified our kinship with nature, and you can’t have a whole, complete relationship without complexity.”
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Attrition will be celebrated with a special program on June 4 at 6:00 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
On June 4 at 6:00, there will be a public celebration, with remarks from the artist and American Indian Community House executive director Patricia Tarrant, along with readings as part of a brief program; the work officially opens on Wednesday, World Environment Day. On the horizon is a Bison Bead Making Workshop in City Hall Park and the Museum of Arts and Design in August and a Public Art Fund Talk with Luger at the Cooper Union in October.
In addition, Luger is represented in the Whitney Biennial with Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (a Lakota phrase that translates as “the fat-taker’s world is upside down”) from the ongoing series “Future Ancestral Technologies.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]