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Iron Men at Indian Creek

Thomas Mapes

English 1101

October 4, 2013

The iron men crouch, doubled-over, mimicking an animal’s four-footed posture. A herd of iron deer charge them, driven by the iron men’s friends. The men wait, frozen still, their bows outstretched before them. Skins drape their bodies, and a deer skull and antlers adorn each of their heads. Only the bottom of the iron men’s faces, their chin and jawlines, protrude beneath the deer-skull disguise.

The iron men hang on a wall, their bodies welded to square posts anchored in the wall’s whitewashed masonry bricolage. The men themselves are constructed of sheet metal and are perfectly flat, devoid of any expression or depth of figure. They have no eyes or hair, and lack any texture of skin. Entirely blank, smooth, and flat, their profiles signify only a generic human form.

One of the men is painted orange. His orange deerskin hangs over his orange body, and he squints beneath an orange deer skull as he knocks an arrow into his orange bow. His companion is yellow. The yellow companion has not fared as well as the orange, and here and there patches of rust fleck the otherwise smooth surface of the iron hunter.

Westward along the wall, behind the herd of iron deer, the iron men’s friends are in hard pursuit. They yell through opened mouths to frighten their prey toward the hunters crouched in disguise. Some fling spears or shoot arrows, and others merely flap their arms. One red man strides long-legged after the herd, firing arrows and sending a war-whoop after the prey. His mouth is stretched wide mid-call, and two iron feathers are tied into his oddly hairless iron skull. His comrades, red and yellow and white and brown and beige, also sport feathers bound in similarly unapparent hair.

Westward still, a group of slender women fish a river. Their hair and skirts suggest their sex, but they are otherwise featureless apart from their vivid monochrome hue. One teal-green woman races in still frame across the wall, bearing in one hand three chartreuse fish on a string, and in the other a pail or basket of smaller fish. All that can be seen of the smaller fish are their tails above the rim of the basket. The river itself appears symbolically as three curving parallel bars that stretch over forty feet of the wall’s extent. The bars are round and smooth, like water, and trace a waving, meandering course across the wall. Spaced equally apart throughout their length, the bars in their gliding curves create a tranquil contrast with the racing postures of the iron fisherwomen.

Next to the racing teal-green woman, a baby-blue woman flings a line (also baby-blue) into the river. A marigold fawn skulks behind her at the water’s edge, its ears cocked and tail erect. Behind them both, a dark-blue woman arches her back as she lifts a fishing net to cast into the water.

Moving westward once more, another tableau depicts a gaggle of iron men and women farming corn. At the left edge of the tableau, a girl with a water pot (the three parallel bars of the river end just feet away from the girl’s foot) douses a small plant being tended by a young boy. Slightly to the right, a green woman hoes a yellow-orange, chest-high corn plant, while a red woman checks the ear of a red corn plant. She has uprooted the plant, perhaps by mistake, and checks the ear to see if it is ripe enough to be salvaged. At the far right, a green man eats green ears from a full-grown yellow plant. In the chromatic logic of the tableau, color follows figure, and thus the ears of the yellow plant turn green when they are severed from the plant to join the figure of the man.

The final scene occupies the westernmost end of the wall. In it, sheet metal women dance in what is apparently, judging from the tableau previous, a harvest celebration. The women leap off the earth in long curves of leg and body, stretching arms to the sky. Their hair flies about them in concert with the movements of their bodies. Two children dance with the women, yet while the women open their limbs outward in graceful curves, the children draw their legs and arms inward as they leap, creating jagged patterns of crooked elbows and knees that contrast their mothers’ fluid motion.

In the background, a thunderbird dances. The thunderbird bears the head and body of an eagle above, with a strong curved beak and thick outstretched wings, but the body of a man below. He too leaps from the ground, splaying his legs wide apart and crooking his knees. At the same time, he spreads his thick wings upward and outward as if with a downward stroke he will take flight.

The wall with its sheet metal people lines the eastern terminal of Atlanta’s MARTA rail service. The name of the terminal, Indian Creek Station, explains the iron figures’ identity. As stock representations of Native Americans, the sheet metal figures lack individually-distinguishing features and instead reveal the artists’ conception of a Native American. Thus, the flat iron figures lack depth and individual detail, and the prominent features of their composition are shared with and common to the entire group: the feathers stuck in the hairless men’s scalps; the natural or even primitive mode of life of a hunting, gathering, and agricultural society; and the ecstatic dancing and worship of the thunderbird. None of the figures is distinguished or personalized by any of the features that give it form; instead, in their simple, essential characteristics and behavior, each figure signals its participation in a collective Native American identity -- at least as the artist perceives it.

This simplicity of collective identity appears not only in the iron people’s lack of distinguishing feature, but also in the monochrome colors and the group behavior that unite each tableau. Instead of the varied hues of shade and shadow that appear in a realistic portrait of a person, the Indian figures feature solid colors without variation. As simplified types, they lack the range of color and shadow characteristic of an actual human being. And much as the figures lack individual coloration, they also lack individual behavior. Thus, they invariably appear in settings where collective action predominates. All the figures in the hunting tableau hunt. All the figures in the fishing tableau fish. All the figures in the farming tableau farm, and all the figures in the dancing tableau dance. The artist does not depict any individual activity or leave room for personal behavior. In short, the iron people do not represent individual Native Americans, but a collective “Indian” identity as the artist perceives it.

The figures’ context -- a hub of public transit on the east side of Atlanta – suggests additional meaning. In the tableaux, the artist depicts “Indians” as they earn their livelihoods and perform their characteristically “Indian” work. Likewise, the MARTA patrons who pass through the Indian Creek station typically are travelling to their workplaces to earn their livelihoods, albeit through the means available in the 21st century. Just as the Indians in the tableaux work, the viewers who ride MARTA travel to work. The subject of work spans artwork and audience, and invites viewers to compare themselves and their work with Indians and Indian work.

Most likely, given the communal nature of the labor he depicts -- as well as the vibrant hues and the pervasively festive movement with which he depicts it -- the sculptor intends his viewers to perceive Indian labor as nobler and more holistic than the workaday drudgery of post-industrial jobs. Phrased positively, then, the artist depicts Indian life and work as simpler and purer than that of modern society. But this assumption may also be considered negatively. Phrased negatively, the artist represents Indian labor and culture as primitive and uncivilized in comparison to 21st-century American labor and culture.

The arrangement of the tableaux quietly signal the sculptor’s ethnocentrism. The order of the tableaux from East to West recapitulates the stages of the anthropological theory of social evolution. According to this theory, the first human beings, upon successfully evolving from ape-men to homo sapiens, lived as hunter-gatherers. They hunted game and gathered edible plants, living entirely on Nature’s bounty but forced to follow prey and wild crops as the seasons decreed. Thus the early human beings were nomads, and their constant moves and removes never allowed them to develop the finer marks of civilization – literacy, art, religion, technology, and science.

Subsequently, the theory goes, human labor and culture advanced as groups of people began to settle by rivers and streams. There, the abundant water enabled them to fish and farm. Since agrarian production enabled and even required farmers to stay in one place to tend their crops, human society was relieved of the ceaseless wandering of nomadic life. As a result of the stability and leisure of agrarian life, people had time to begin cultivating the luxuries of civilization – namely literacy, the arts, religion, technology, and science.

Conveniently enough, social evolution theory finds modern Western culture to be the zenith of human progress. Thus, from agrarian society humanity progresses to industrial and commercial society, where machines (or at the least, working class people) accomplish the bulk of physical labor, enabling the majority of the human population to enjoy even more leisure and free time to cultivate the flowers of civilization. Post-industrial society, with its computers and electronic conveniences, represents a further step within the secret garden of Civilization, granting human beings greater ease, convenience, and enlightenment.

While the theory of social evolution now seems to be, for most 21st century people, a ludicrous instance of 19th and 20th century elitism, its vestiges remain. The iron men of Indian Creek show that the theory persists even today. Viewed sequentially from East to West, the wall at the Indian Creek station recapitulates the sequence that social evolution theorists describe. As the tableaux progress Westward along the wall, the iron figures first depict wandering hunter-gatherers, then riverside fishers, then farmers and agriculture, and finally a religious ritual.

Moreover, in gazing upon the history of human social evolution enacted by the iron figures, 21st-century viewers themselves enter the history, embodying the final, post-industrial stage in the course of human evolution. Thus, much as the iron figures progress East to West along the station wall, so the members of the audience, as they travel on the Westbound MARTA rail toward their post-industrial jobs, complete the sequence of human evolution projected by social evolutionary theory.

Given the tableaux’s association of Westward movement with progress, and given Indian Creek’s geographic location on the East end of the West-bound rail line, the iron figures make one further claim about the city of Atlanta and the MARTA rail line itself. As an urban hub of post-industrial labor, Atlanta figures in the extended space of the Indian Creek artwork as a center of modernity and the zenith of human social development. Thus, as the passengers on the Westbound MARTA rail travel into the city, they extend the course of the iron people on the wall, moving Westward from the rural, agricultural zone outside the city’s perimeter and closer to the technological and cultural core of the city itself. And in all this, MARTA acts as a conduit of progress and advancement: not only does it transport modern-day workers to their progressive, post-industrial jobs, it is an integral facet of Atlanta’s technologically-advanced infrastructure.

Effectively, the iron men and women of Indian Creek are both propaganda and advertisement. As propaganda, the figures represent the city of Atlanta as the zenith of human culture. As advertisement, they depict MARTA and MARTA patrons as a critical factor of Atlanta’s progress.