Detournement as Pedagogical War Paint: The Unsettling Artwork of Steven Paul Judd

This manuscript focuses on the artwork of Steven Paul Judd, who has described his work as pop with a Native slant, or indigenized pop art, and who has often been compared to Andy Warhol. We discuss Judd's art through the theoretical lens of detournement, which is a critical art form that has the potential to be a strategy for the dismantling of settler consciousness. The praxis of detournement is most closely associated with the Situationist International (SI) and, we argue, can foster a pedagogical strategy of unsettling. In this manuscript, we will analyze Judd's capacity for creating representations for Native people that subtly and subversively use detournement to expose and unsettle the spectacle's settler-colonial agenda of erasure vis-a-vis images.