Doctoring Divinity: Trickster, Jim Logan and the Classical Canon

Abstract

This paper sets out to establish a Trickster pattern of paradoxical symbol inversions, visible in the iconography of visual artist, Jim Logan. Set against literary selections from various contemporary Native writers, Logan's pictorial lexicon serves to illustrate this dynamic iconographic pattern in First Nations rhetorical imaging. I propose to track Trickster down some uniquely liberating, deconstructive pathways, supported by artistic reproductions from the study of Trickster dynamics in contemporary Native art undertaken by Dr. Allan Ryan in his comprehensive work, Trickster Shift. Targeting the cultural barrage mediated by Colonialism against indigenous religiosity and collective values, my selections from Native art and literature demonstrate a cunning reverse assimilation of cultural meaning. Juggling cultural signifiers into paradoxical relationships, such canny inversions reverse the considerable pay-load of meaning constructed in historical European artistic conventions. In the hands of master artificers, reverse appropriation, radical revisionism and subversive iconographies (among other tools), furnish the bag-of-tricks for these inversions of meaning. Like all creators (Jesters, and Fools), the artist's job is to make these feats look easy. The Trickster task is to make his or her tricks manifest as eternal truths -natural, inalienable, and self-evident. We -the contemporary audience for Native arts and literature -are renewed, transformed and transfigured from our cultural entertainment. If humor is and reforming, then we -as consumers of contemporary art and literature --perfectly fulfill Trickster's mandate for us, as the sacred victims of his or her practical jokes, played through the work of artists like Jim Logan

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