“We Are All Indians Now”: An Interview With Artist Steven Leyba
Art by Tanzanian Wojak
In mythology from around the world, the trickster is a rogueish character who defies authority and disrupts staid social conventions with bawdy humor and guile. The trickster is cunning, crude, and, frankly, a huge pain in the ass—but he’s also a liberating figure, responsible for pushing society forward. In an increasingly frigid, puritanical cultural landscape, we need tricksters now more than ever. And that’s what artist Steven Johnson Leyba is here for.
You might not be familiar with Leyba, but that’s alright—he doesn’t care much either way. Besides, a quick glance at the people and groups who have collected his works—David Cronenberg, Clive Barker, the William S. Burroughs Archive—should be enough to clue you in on what he’s all about.
Leyba has been a staple of the underground art world since the late 80s. His mixed media paintings explore the human body in uncompromising, visceral detail, sometimes utilizing his own blood, shit and cum to provide texture. Oh, and there’s also his frequent usage of the swastika.
Leyba employs the symbol in his paintings as an act of reclamation—he is of Native American descent, and the symbol has been used for thousands of years by indigenous groups and other cultures from around the world. His goal is to revive its sacred meaning in Navajo culture as the Whirling Log of life, representing happiness and good luck.
A Navajo textile depicting the Whirling Log.
This pisses people off. A lot.
Throughout his career, numerous venues have censored Leyba’s paintings containing the swastika. This came to a head in 2017, when Artspace, a nonprofit organization that provides living spaces for artists, ordered him to remove an exhibition from its building in Everett, Washington, which he inhabited at the time. Shortly after, he moved to the Navajo Nation, where he spent five years painting, writing, and warding off rattlesnakes from his hogan.
Now, Leyba is living on the outskirts of Denver, working on several projects and fighting the good fight as he’s still dogged by censorship, this time from the faceless leviathan of Big Tech—photos of his art are frequently pulled from Instagram with scant explanation, and his Facebook account was deleted without warning in 2017.
If anyone can reasonably speculate on the future of transgressive art in today’s cultural climate, it’s Leyba. We spoke to the artist and “tribal trickster” about censorship in the digital age, political correctness, and why it’s important for artists to live off the grid.
This conversation has been edited for brevity.
Tell me about what it’s like to make art in today’s cultural landscape.
You’ve got to force the dialogue. Now, it's harder…when I started out early on, I was getting censored mostly from the right, but I was also starting to get censored from the left. And now censorship is an algorithm that just happens all the time. It's mind-boggling. But, you know, that's the online world.
In 2016 I was in Europe for the 100-year anniversary of the Dada movement…that was 1916, and it was a response to World War One. The Dadaists were like, “Okay, your civilization is insane. You say you're moralistic. You say you're right, and that this is the way to go, but you're all killing each other.” So I think we're back at that point—even further down the black hole of authoritarianism, controlled by Google and the internet.
Have there been recent instances where your work was removed from the internet?
Yeah, always. And it seems random…when Instagram will take down an image, they’ll blur it and say “We took down your image because it doesn't follow our community guidelines.” But you don't know which image.
Leyba posing with one of his many artworks.
I'm mostly Native American: I’m part Navajo and Apache. The Navajos call the swastika the Whirling Log. We need to move past that whole World War II thing and realize that people are keeping the swastika a hate symbol. You know, the Navajos in the 1940s burned their blankets because of swastikas. But people in Asia [who also used the swastika in traditional art] didn't do that.
I got right out of Artspace, because they threatened to evict me because I had all these paintings that had controversial symbols. And their defense was, “Yeah, we know why the symbol was used…but in this era of Trump, blah, blah, blah, blah…you’ve gotta take the artwork, or we're gonna kick you out.” I’ve been censored in physical space, and then Facebook, just without warning, completely deleted my account the same year.
I think the machine—I call it the “auto-correct, autopilot online world”—is just going to get worse and worse. It’s frustrating to try to connect with people and I end up getting censored. I'm the most censored person I know.
Tell us what it was like living in the Navajo Nation after leaving Artspace.
Winter was coming; I think it was in November. [The reservation] doesn't get too much snow, but it's a high desert, so I had to figure out how to get electricity to the hogan. I had a 500-foot extension cord, a kangaroo knife, and Clorox to sweep out all the turds. To stay warm, I had this heavy, homemade wood stove, and I put it in the chimney. That got me not thinking about Artspace, but thinking about physical survival…I had to go out and chop wood in a snowstorm or freeze to death.
It’s all down to survival and being in the trenches, which most artists don't want to do. I'm one of the few…nobody else wants to intentionally go into the trenches, and have a real fight and a real debate, rather than name-calling. I was lucky to have that time on the reservation to think about that, and not get caught in my workaholism or trying to justify things online.
“We’re all being controlled and bamboozled by the new church of corporate science and corporations…it’s not about this race against that race. It’s about being human and losing your instincts in this auto-correct, autopilot society.”
Going back to your usage of the swastika, could you elaborate on the reaction it gets from audiences?
Well, there’s the left-wing, authoritarian, liberal censorship, and then the right-wing, “Let's keep this a white power symbol.” And I'm like, “This is crazy”…this symbol was used by almost everyone on almost every continent. You see swastikas on Greek vases. [Nowadays] if I was wearing a beaded vest with a swastika, my life could be threatened. I could get stabbed in the kidneys for having a Whirling Log on my vest. But that just makes me want to continue my work. I'm not going to stop just because people want to hold on to World War II and keep it a white hate symbol. It's ludicrous.
The trickster figure looms large in your body of work. What do you think people today could learn from the trickster?
The trickster stories were very surrealistic way before surrealism. They were told to everybody, children too. It was like, “Look, you have your majestic dancers, and you have your medicine men, your chiefs, and your officials, but they're not people that tell you what to do…they're not middlemen.” And now, we're in a world of middlemen. You know, Google is the middleman—the force that tells everybody what to do. You see a lot of trickster stories in African culture and Chinese culture, and it’s the same thing. It’s anti-authoritarian.
Tricksters say, “Use your instincts.” Your beautiful controlled world—like the Internet and Google—is a facade. And at some point, something will happen. It will be turned upside down. And if you're not in touch with your instincts, you won't survive…the stories are pertinent now.
People still have the middlemen. You need permission from the government. You need to create art that doesn't get censored on Google. We need to look back at these trickster stories, like Eshu, the African trickster. One of my favorite quotes of his is “Causing strife is my greatest joy.”
People need to grow up and evolve, and get past the need to be governed. We're adults, and we don’t need someone to tell us what to do. Say what you want to say, do what you want to do, follow laws if you must, but pay attention to the early trickster stories…we don't need to be constantly validated. And I think that's what social media and the authoritarian Google government likes—for people to just be on autopilot.
“I think ‘political art’ basically doesn’t work. It’s like, okay, ‘Trump bad, Biden good’—that will quickly be dated.”
How do you feel about the politically charged artwork of today? Is it as radical or as challenging as it's cracked up to be?
It’s party politics. You know, painting figureheads, making a papier-mâché Trump and burning it—that's part of the problem. Because if you're a blasphemer, ultimately, you're also a believer…that's not political art. That’s party politics. It’s not subversive. It’s part of the system…when Georges Bataille did Story of The Eye, he wasn’t creating for the market, or against it. He was like, ‘I’m here for human liberation. For my liberation.’
So I think “political art” basically doesn't work. It's like, okay, “Trump bad, Biden good”—that will quickly be dated. That's party politics. That's not political. So I don't think people know what political art is. They haven't studied Picasso's Guernica…Guernica didn't have a picture of Francisco Franco in it.
Do you have hope for the future of transgressive art?
Absolutely…I have hope for [Gen Z]. They’re not like some of the millennial folks, always having to have a trigger warning, or CliffNotes spoonfed to them. They don't need the latest technology. They don’t believe all the hoopla from politicians and celebrities. They’re interested in what they’re interested in, and not what the Google government says. So there's hope, but it's gotten so stupid. I have a saying: “This is a really stupid time to be alive.”
Leyba’s 2021 memoir, We Are All Indians Now.
Tell me about the title of your 2021 book, We Are All Indians Now.
The concept was inspired by Edward Curtis, who was an early photographer that photographed Native Americans as they were being put on reservations and their cultures were dying. He gets a lot of criticism now because he just had a trunk of outfits, headdresses and stuff, and he put it on any Indian if they didn't have traditional attire. But that wasn't the point. He was more of an artist than a documentarian or a historian. He was trying to basically capture these people that were losing their freedom, and it was the last point in human history where people were the freest…everyone now is not as free as we were, say, 20 years ago.
It's not about being Native American. We're all being controlled and bamboozled by the new church of corporate science and corporations…it’s not about this race against that race. It's about being human and losing your instincts in this auto-correct, autopilot society.
The nature writer, Edward Abbey, they called him the Thoreau of the Southwest. In 1968, he released this book called Desert Solitaire. He predicted that cities would basically be mostly like reservations. And that's how I feel about cities. They’re reservations—at least reservations of the mind. If you’re a free spirit, and you really want to be a true artist and speak for your time, you can’t do that if you’re brainwashed into a tight city…New York City is over. It’s definitely not the art capital of the world. So, we’re all Indians now.
“You can’t have art and you can’t have journalism in today’s world without fighting for free speech and fighting censorship.”
Tell me about your current projects.
I’m spending a year in nature now writing my third memoir, From Air to Aether: An Atmosphere of Uncertainty. It’s my twentieth book…it’s about living on forestry land during the pandemic, away from people. I picked aether because I was doing all the elements. I did fire, water, earth, air. So “aether” is like, a perfect word for today's world, because what the hell does aether mean? Scientists use it almost like an abstract, ambiguous word.
I’m working on an album at my friend’s outside of Denver…it’s a spoken word album of classic rock songs called I Speak The Songs, Because The World No Longer Sings. We’re two songs away from finishing the album—Sinatra’s version of “I Sing the Songs” and “Bobby Brown Goes Down,” a Frank Zappa piece that’s very offensive in today’s world. We also recorded Randy Newman’s “Short People,” which is also very offensive in today’s world, but the world needs some offense. You can’t have art and you can’t have journalism in today’s world without fighting for free speech and fighting censorship.
