here & now

There’s a new neon sign that has gone up on Alexanderplatz – alas, it’s not advertising for any fashion brand or technical gadgets, but stands on its own. The laughing Indian is the latest artwork by Cyprien Gaillard, as part of the nearly finished Based in Berlin group ehibition, and uses the icon of the Cleveland baseball team that has been appearing again and again in Gaillard’s work.

Here is what he had to say about it in our issue #24:

What is your interest in this logo?

I use this logo of the Cleveland Indian in my work all the time. It’s a grimace with a feather, a caricature. I think this logo, when it came out, was extremely disrespectful of Native Americans. It’s making fun of Indians, showing them as drunks or junkies. It’s depicting them as ruined. Cleveland is a bit like Detroit: a lot of steel industry and they are also producing different parts for cars they then send to Detroit for the automobile industry. So they were really rich and they started building a team for the baseball league at the beginning of the 20th century and needed a logo, of course. They came up with an Indian. The legend is that one of the players was an Indian and that it was a tribute to him. But I think the real story is that Indians had almost disappeared from the face of America at that time, so it was this kind of empty gimmick ready to be recycled…

Exotic!

…exotic, exactly. And the first logo was extremely racist, really horrible. The guy had no teeth and a really huge nose. Imagine: It would be like the soccer team from Nuremberg calling themselves ‘the Nuremberg Jews’. They exterminated all the Indians and then they revived them for the sake of a mascot.

But for me the important story about it is that you have a city, a very big, industrial city where one of the main figures to represent it is an Indian. And then there isn’t a single Indian for miles. This collapsed meeting of two worlds: on the one hand the Indians that became archaeology and on the other hand a very strong American industrial city that I like. After the Second World War, Cleveland started becoming a shrinking city, with the phenomenon of suburbanisation. People were starting to move out; it was the beginning of relocation of different car industries. The population shrank to almost a third. A big part of the city is now abandoned and so it became l’ironie du sort. They were making fun of the Indian with this caricature but they became that Indian in a sense; they became that ruin that they where depicting with this logo. He’s smiling back at the whole city and laughing. Just think of all these efforts of urban renewal that they try to inject into cities by building new shopping malls, demolishing entire neighbourhoods, trying to regenerate industrial sites… But this is not fixing anything. Urban renewal to me is the same process as changing the first logo of the Indian into a less racist version; it’s like going out all night drinking then going for a healthy breakfast in the morning. It just doesn’t work. And this Indian, who knows all about drinking, is still standing, asking a simple question, ‘Who’s laughing now?’