Even though we have become accustomed to outrageous news coming from the US these days, reports about a new monument erected in downtown Boston in honour of an early settler in America are still newsworthy. Among the contributions to the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial that opened last month is exactly that: a spectacular monument to the British coloniser Thomas Morton (1579–1647). What is more, the over four-metre-tall, exuberant sculpture was created by the collective New Red Order facilitated by Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit), which uses its art to examine desires for indigeneity and promote Indigenous futures.
New Red Order, a self-styled “public secret society,” is known for operating in quite its own manner. Over the last decade, it has been invested in the idea of the monument, in terms of both how to make them and what to do with problematic monuments in, for instance, New York City. The Morton monument can be said to work along the lines of a Trojan horse, not least because Morton wasn’t your usual kind of coloniser. He came to “the New World” trying to make money. But after a few months, he went off to start the colony of Merrymount. Morton greatly admired the forms of Native government he encountered, and was interested in embracing Indigenous forms of self-governance. Merrymount became a place where he could implement these ideas. When the other Puritans and Pilgrims found out about this, they raided the colony, burnt his house to the ground, and killed everyone – except Morton, who was exiled and sent back to England.
Material Monument to Thomas Morton (Playing Indian) is an exuberant and carnivalesque sculpture combining 3D-modelled and printed mimicry, the readymade, and the handmade. Apart from Morton’s legacy, aspects of pop culture and Bostonian folklore are also embedded in the sculpture, which furthermore draws on the Tlingit tradition of shame poles.
While Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys are still based in New York City, Adam Khalil moved to Copenhagen in 2020. We met at his studio near Nørrebro Station in a building owned by a Christian free church congregation to talk about making a monument to a coloniser in a place like Boston – a place known as the colonial wellspring of North America. We also discussed how the members of New Red Order navigate the expectations associated with performing indigeneity for a non-Indigenous audience – and why the Nike Shox heel makes the perfect seventeenth-century settler shoe.
Even though I have only studied the sculpture in images, I’m really fascinated by it. The motif is so multi-layered; there are so many details and references, and so many threads we could address. But perhaps we could start with an aspect that’s always important for a public artwork, namely the site. When we first spoke, you said that Boston is a weird place. How so?
Boston is an interesting town because it’s very liberal and progressive, but can also be very culturally conservative. A lot of downtown Boston is privately owned and there are lots of restrictions. And then, of course, Boston is one of the oldest parts of America, and that’s one of the interests we had. New Red Order emerges out of a secret society called The Improved Order of Red Men that dates back to the Boston Tea Party [1773], where a bunch of revolting British colonists were throwing tea into the Atlantic dressed up as Haudenosaunee or Mohawk people to protest British rule.
Originally, our monument was supposed to be placed right across from the Boston Tea Party Museum, famous for re-enactments of throwing tea in the harbour. Unfortunately, the owners got cold feet shortly after Inauguration Day, which might be telling. So we ended up at Faneuil Hall, at Quincy Market, which is one of the most touristy areas in all of Boston, and originally one of the first slave markets, which adds a disturbing and creepy edge, considering it’s now a place that’s kind of a tourist area for things like Revolutionary War re-enactments. It’s like a Disney World for American Revolutionary War history. Which is great; we want it to be there for all the tourists to see. All the shops sell stuff about the Boston Tea Party and 1776, the Declaration of Independence. And then there’s the marketplace, which is like Torvehallerne in Copenhagen, only there they sell lobsters, oysters, and all kinds of Boston stuff.
One of Boston’s biggest exports is the nostalgia of the founding of the country. All the national myths of America sort of originate within Massachusetts and Boston – it’s like the ground zero, tabula rasa, of the colonisation of North America. So being able to interject into that space was super exciting for us. Also, it’s a city filled with monuments to white guys: Puritans and Pilgrims and everything else after that. But what comes before is not addressed meaningfully in any public monuments at all. So trying to figure out how to slip into the vernacular of that place, while also trying to destabilise or question that place, were high priorities.
You refer to your artwork as a monument, or rather: ‘Material Monument to …’ The monument has been a hot topic in the art world in the last decade, and certainly since Black Lives Matter. It is also something New Red Order has been examining. What is your position now? Where do you stand on the concept of the monument?
The conversation around monuments is interesting. It migrates from city to city and nation to nation, and, yes, it’s something that we’ve been deeply invested in. But, at one point, we got fed up with monuments as a kind of discourse. It seemed like the same discussions were just happening over and over again, and often based on ideas of erasure or removal.
For Indigenous people, it can be a little complicated and scary to think about erasure and removal, especially concerning racist monuments which might also be some of the only representations of Native people in America. In some instances, to remove those things also removes a kind of history or connection to what has happened. Instead, we posit this idea of “additive defacement,” inspired by the work of anthropologist Michael Taussig, who, instead of iconoclasm or defacement in terms of removal or erasure, suggests an additive approach. Instead of getting rid of the thing, you add on to it until it transforms into something else. That formed the basis of a series of our Culture Capture works from 2017 to 2020. With the Thomas Morton monument, it’s a whole different approach; we’re kind of drinking the Kool Aid now and wondering about the utility of just making a monument.
For the Morton monument, you even have a proper information plaque next to the sculpture, which seems to be a crucial part of the work. It includes a quote by Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880–1942) saying: “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.” What does that mean in this context?
Well, I guess we feel like most people don’t give two thoughts about a monument. Only when they pass by, and even when they pass by they don’t even acknowledge it because it’s just part of the architecture of everyday life, or it’s just assumed to have been there for so long. Also, a lot of times the political content or the historical content isn’t even noticed.
Around the time when we were doing all this stuff about monuments in New York, a commission came up, prompted by politicians, activists, and some art administrators as well, trying to figure out what to do with problematic monuments in the city. One of the main ones was the Teddy Roosevelt monument in front of the American Museum of Natural History featuring an African and a Native person on each side of Teddy on a horse. It had been a lightning rod of controversy and protest for a long time. We made a large body of work around the sculptor James Earle Fraser [1876–1953] who made that monument and other monuments like The End of the Trail [1894] and the Buffalo Nickel [in circulation from 1913 to 1938]. Then there was this New York City Planning Committee working to figure out what to do, and their solution, after years of research and negotiation, was to add a plaque talking about how it was problematic.
So our joke is that there’s nothing more invisible than a monument, except for the plaque next to it that provides context about the problematic nature of the monument. Only, for the Morton monument, the historical plaque is kind of the critical part. It features a text that we authored explaining the history of Morton with our own kind of twist on it, in order to hopefully allow people to take it seriously, while also questioning what they’re taking in. And without that historical plaque, the whole thing could just devolve into art for art’s sake. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we had a slightly different aim with this. So accompanying the sculpture is another sculpture, a faux-historical plaque that’s done in the same graphic design and finish that other Boston Historical Society plaques are done in. Again, slipping into the vernacular or appropriating the voice of historical authority is something we’re really interested in doing, especially in public spaces.
Nothing in the sign says “this is contemporary art” or that it’s made by New Red Order. How does this connect to the idea of New Red Order as a public secret society?
The only hint is the QR code taking you to the Triennial site. But it’s also like, when someone realises something is art, they can dismiss it, whereas it’s different if they’re not sure, and that’s why we identify as a public secret society instead of an art collective. We could be a political think tank, we could be a religious cult, all these other things. The main concept being everybody’s welcome to join, calling-in instead of calling out. It also stems from Michael Taussig’s idea of public secrets, which are things that we all inherently know but never discuss, yet which nevertheless shape our realities. The ongoing settler colonialism of North America is one of the ultimate public secrets from where I’m from. Monuments are a way to reinforce the complacency of that secret, or to keep the secret out in the open, but still have it be suppressed in terms of discussing it.
We were interested in trying to reverse or kind of short-circuit that by actually embracing the form of monuments and appropriating the authority they bestow on a cognitive and sub-cognitive level in terms of how they shape our architecture and understanding of everyday life. And, yeah, part of the idea was also to create a monument to a Puritan, but then someone put a tab of LSD on his tongue, and overnight it transformed into what we have made, slipping into the vernacular of what is already there, but then having it be so tweaked that people hopefully have to kind of second guess or consider the public secret that they’re being confronted with.
The LSD on the tongue is a perfect description of the potent hallucinogenic expression of this sculpture, which is completely impossible to grasp in one take. I guess I first understood it as a contradiction to a kind of Puritan aesthetic?
That’s definitely part of it. But I think there’s a bit of a bait-and-switch where we are trying to valorise Morton as an example, but he’s also a very complicated figure.
Yes, let’s talk about Thomas Morton. I had never heard of him before. Is he someone that you hear about in school?
No, he exists in the margins of American history and literary history. Nathaniel Hawthorne [1804–1864] has a short story about him, and William Carlos Williams [1883–1963] writes about him. And then there’s a film programmer and art critic, Ed Halter, who’s a friend and who grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, which is where Thomas Morton set up the colony. He’s been kind of obsessed with this story for a long time, and wrote this bizarre text for Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, a kind of deep research into every mention of Morton throughout history, and it paints this portrait of this kind of spectre of the past who keeps having the views of others projected onto him for hundreds of years. He was demonised and known as this heathen who needed to be disciplined in order to have the world remain the way it is. But then, later on, other writers revive and retrieve his legacy and try to valorise him in different ways.
We ended up consulting with a lot of historians who specialise in Morton to understand the tricky terrain we were walking on. Because he’s also just a hardcore capitalist merchant who came over trying to make money in the ‘New World’, and then after a few months, he goes to start his anti-colony – or that’s what we’re calling it. He liberated all the indentured servants and started this kind of egalitarian commune, basically. One of the things that made them unique is that they traded alcohol and weapons with the Wampanoag and Massachusett tribes, which was illegal according to the Puritans’ take, a big no-no in the eyes of the Puritans and Pilgrims.
But Morton was so brazen about it that he erected an 80-feet [24.4 metres] Maypole at the top of this mount in Quincy. And then they would have these parties, and they would trade, and there’s all kinds of speculation about what went on at those parties; the “bacchanalian Dionysian free trade zone” is how we describe it. Morton greatly admired the government forms that Native people had and was interested in doing this hybrid form of being, or in adopting and associating different kinds of cultural practices. So Merrymount is also the potential of what America could have been.
For us, it’s this interesting moment in time, like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle [1962] – what if things had played out differently? If we had gone down Morton’s path? And this is also where it gets a little cheeky, because Morton is also representing this kind of laissez-faire, neoliberal capitalist approach, but without subjugation and without removal and genocide. But all in all, this was why we thought of him as an interesting figure to bring to the fore at this point, in a world that’s so fucked up.
Again, it’s a bit of a bait-and-switch because, as much as it’s about him, it’s not really about him. But it’s this idea about presenting back to settlers in America that it didn’t have to be this way, or to remember that there are alternative dynamics to subjugation and domination and control that are viable and could be viable. And that was the other kind of mandate with this project, because a lot of the times we’re asked to kind of perform our indigeneity for a non-Indigenous audience.
And how do you manage to navigate those expectations?
Well, people often expect Native representation in a public space to kind of be a corrective. And, actually, we feel like that’s an empty gesture, or one that has a lot of shortcomings in terms of the ‘one to oneness’ of it, and without any kind of critical engagement or thought. And then it feels like we can move on to the next thing, because now there’s a Native one. Whereas the hope for this work is to really catch an audience off guard and make them wonder what they’re looking at and why it’s here and what it means.
Speaking of what it all means, let’s turn to the actual sculpture. It’s composed of so many elements and so many references that it’s impossible to go through them all. But let’s talk about a few of them just to give an idea of how condensed every element of this sculpture is. Personally, I love the historical settler shoes that are part sneakers. Could you talk about them?
They’re actually based on the shoes of Kyrie Irving, who is an amazing basketball player, and also part Lakota. He used to play for the Boston Celtics, and infamously smudged down the court just before playing when he returned to Boston, but on a different team, because there were bad vibes at the Garden. So the shoes are modelled on those shoes that Irving got made specially for him. So that’s the inspiration, based on a 3D-scan that Jackson did. We then modified them further, added a Nike heel to make it feel more like a pilgrim boot in terms of the silhouette.
What? Why would Nike make it more pilgrim?
Oh, yeah, it gets complicated. Nike made these Shox heels, with shock absorption, that felt perfect to give to a little Pilgrim boot. And then, of course, incorporating the Pilgrim buckle and then a little bit of fringe wrapping around the edge to complete the look. And, obviously, the white fringe around Morton’s ankles refers to the decorative frills for cooked turkey legs on Thanksgiving.
So again, we’re trying to make a sandbox out of stereotypes to kind of construct and merge new ideas or realities. We’re always interested in this idea of the “urge to merge,” and that’s also something that Morton’s failed anti-colony represents to us. Like, what could have happened? We don’t necessarily believe in this kind of isolationist purity politics in terms of some decolonisation discourses. There’s sometimes a kind of anarcho-primitivist desire to go back to something. But I don’t see how that’s possible at all.
How do you work with that sandbox of references and stereotypes? How do you come from this to the final work, which combines handmade elements with a 3D print. What’s the process like?
We’ve been working on this for two years. We have weekly meetings where we keep brainstorming. Jackson worked with two other artists and 3D modellers Harry Kleeman and Coby Kennedy, and we also worked with illustrator Dylan Clancy, constantly reworking his concept drawings. Then Kindall Almond, who’s this amazing costume designer for films, did all the wardrobe for it. So there’s a lot of people behind the scenes exchanging ideas over and over again until it all kind of gets filtered into 3D modelling software.
In the end, it was fabricated at The Factory NYC, run by two artists who specialise in 3D printing, taking it from 3D model to the printed version [made of Dimengel and ABS thermoplastic], which is a super complicated process. There were over two hundred individual printed pieces that then got put together and assembled. In addition, there were components printed, surfaced, moulded, then cast in resin. So it’s actually sort of composed, put together like a collage, and towards the end kind of finished like how a car would be finished, so it’s smooth, and you wouldn’t know that it was made of multiple pieces.
And the handmade parts, such as the beaded flower patches on the vest?
Yeah, where Zack and I are from, there’s a tradition of Anishinaabe floral beadwork. Anishinaabe is like the umbrella of three tribes, the Ojibway, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi, but we all identify as Anishinaabe.
Where is this, geographically speaking?
It’s the Great Lakes region: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and then Ontario on the other side of the border. We grew up in the city Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, on the US-Canada border, so it’s a twin city; there’s a four-minutes bridge that connects the two places. Growing up, we would go to Canada because it had cheaper groceries and a better movie theatre. After 9/11 it got a little different, but still, people traverse it all the time. Part of our tribe is actually on the other side of the border, and we should all be one tribe. The border forced it into two because people on one side have to deal with the Canadian government and our side has to deal with the American government.
The beadwork is part of that tradition. Real beads were put on afterwards, on the front and the back of the vest. The vest is like playing off ideas of punk vests or biker vests, in terms of the patches and how it comes together. We wanted to create these different textures, a mixture of handmade and readymade. The big rope around his waist is also real.
The figure itself is placed on two tea boxes which form a kind of plinth. The whole monument is nearly four-and-a-half-metres tall. You refer to it as a kind of maypole, but also as a shame pole, and even as a shameless pole. How does all this come together?
The tea boxes are ready-made replicas of those on sale at the Boston Tea Party Museum. The statue itself is like 14 feet, which is like 4.3 metres. The hope was that it would be approachable, not to elevate it so high that it couldn’t be interactive. But, yes, New Red Order core contributor Jackson Polys is Tlingit, a tribe in Alaska with a long tradition of these richly decorated shame poles, which are monuments erected to signal a debt or a failure. The shameful thing was erected until the debt had been paid, and you may have had to see it every day. But because Morton’s character is so exuberant and Dionysian, letting the booze flow and everyone mingle and hang out, we thought this could be a shameless pole, and that erecting this is in defiance of the kind of puritanical notion within everyone’s head, at least in the US.
Also, it’s a way to keep appropriating from Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources to combine those things, to come to some kind of hybridity that could be accessible to all, and hopefully leave a kernel or a bread trail towards something more profound or destabilising or unsettling, potentially.
Jackson’s dad is, like, one of the most renowned totem pole carvers in the world. And part of Jackson’s resistance to, like, perform indigeneity is that he was raised learning to carve from his dad, but behind ropes for tourists coming off the cruise ships, being given tours by the Native corporation tour guides – a kind of human cultural zoo, but those were the conditions available for perpetuating and revitalising culture. So for him, I think that’s one of the reasons. Me and my brother have other reasons that come from working in the field of documentary and realising that people wanted some kind of representation without actually engaging with what we were discussing. So, again, that’s also why we’re framing this artwork for a non-Native audience. It’s not about putting representation on the fore, but about actually complicating things.
That’s what’s so stimulating about this piece. Even if the sculpture is both humorous and entertaining, and in that sense easily read, you actually sense the complexity and dubiousness of things. Morton is a cheerful character with a big grin, but also with a satirical edge, a kind of trickster who twists and turns things. In a strange way, criticality seems to seep out from the sculpture in many directions.
We were hoping to land in this uncanny place. Right after we installed it, there was a family of four passing by, and one of the kids was like, “Look, Mom and Dad, it’s a Pilgrim!” And the dad was like, “No, I think it’s an Indian,” and the mom was like, “I don’t know what the hell it is!” And we thought: “Great, it’s working.” It’s still kind of amazing to me that they allowed our sculpture here just by the entrance, because it’s a charged place and the amount of foot traffic is insane. We stuck around for like two hours incognito, just to see how it worked. It felt meaningful for us to try to be like a Trojan horse. Because the sculpture is kind of fun – like, families enjoyed it. You know, it’s a spectacle, but within it, hopefully there are ideas that can creep in and leak out.
