Frederick Douglass and Ram Singh II, Maharaja of Jaipur: Introductions to the Art-Historical Trickster Hall of Fame

book cover and text "What’s in a photo? Frederick Douglass and Ram Singh II, Maharaj of Jaipur" on an OU-branded template

Imagine the following scenario – a mysterious invitation to a birthday party exclusively extended to fictitious characters in art history, the gift requested from each invitee: introductions to two previously overlooked trickster figures from the visual arts for the inauguration of the Art-Historical Trickster Hall of Fame.

With such a framing Renate Dohmen’s contribution to The Routledge Companion to Art and Challenges to Empire, edited by Burns, Emily and Price, Alice R. (2025) can but be experimental and it is. The invitation is addressed to Rikki T, the fictional alter ego of the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija imagined by the author, who shared noodles and had art historical adventures in Venice and elsewhere a decade ago. Rikki accepts the challenge that comes with the invitation and knows her trickster propositions: Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), formerly enslaved abolitionist oratorial heavy weight with a keen understanding of the representational potential of photography for the abolitionist message, and Ram Singh II, (1833 -1880), Maharaja of Jaipur from the tender age of sixteen months, who matured into a skillful political operator adept at outsmarting British colonial authorities as well as a keen amateur photographer no less proficient at subverting the rules of photographic convention.

For Rikki what connects the formerly enslaved person and high-born prince is their inventive and strategic use of photography, adopted to debunk the racial stereotypes and representational tropes that were imposed on them. Rikki’s challenge is to present them to the illustrious party guests and the mysterious birthday celebrant whom she suspects to be none other than Miss Chief Eagle Testickle - Miss Chief for short - the glamorous, mischievous, and astute artistic alter ego of Cree artist Kent Monkman renowned for challenging art historical canons and wittily exposing the deep grooves of modernity/coloniality at play in the visual field.

Rikki has decided to present Douglass and Ram Singh II by juxtaposing one of their portrait photographs each. The next step is to frame their introductions so that the method matches the message. For Rikki this means adopting a broadly decolonial perspective in a creative-critical spirit, forestalling what Anishinaabe author, activist and academic Gerald Vizenor calls ‘capture by representation,’ whereby meaning is fixed in an effort ‘to eliminate all of the loose ends and ambiguities, and to explain every doubt and nuance.’

Rikki’s approach is guided by Vizenor’s figure of the postindian, who reclaims the spirit of tribal cultures through storytelling. In doing so, postindians seek in particular to revive the comic and ironic elements that settler-explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists stripped away when recording ancestral narratives of the supposedly soon-to-be-extinct “doomed race.”

Wondering what a postindian approach to art history might be, she turns to Dan Karlholm’s lateral art history and its crab-like ‘sideways operation, always from the entry point of one specific artwork’ offered as ‘alternative to historicist hierarchies.’ Rikki is particularly interested in Karlholm’s notion that the work of art ‘survives itself,’ emphasising that the ways in which it was once conceived and understood change over time, even if it remains in situ and undergoes no physical alteration. Karlholm’s lateral perspective also attends to how ‘artworks interconnect and relate to each other,’ the ‘extended families they create,’ and the ‘time layers they may reveal.’ For Rikki, this aligns with the postindian spirit. She decides her introductions will take the form of sideways conversations between the two chosen portraits of Douglass and Ram Singh II, which will co-story together, generating new meaning for the present as they bring their histories into new relations. Which portraits Rikki chose and what stories they tell is all revealed in the text.