In 1907, Edward Curtis began work on what would become the labor of his life: The monumental photographic encyclopedia The North American Indian. By documenting dance rituals, studying tipi architecture, and immortalizing some 1500 women and men in head-on portraits, Curtis hoped to preserve the stoic serenity and sense of honor he so admired in the members of these vanishing cultures. But if the Navaho, Apache, or Comanche had ever been anything like the noble savages Curtis imagined them as, any resemblance had long been beaten out of them with the butts and bayonets of US army rifles by the time he arrived. Rather than freely roaming the prairies, the portrayed chiefs, warriors, women, and children were reservation-dwellers, robbed of their land, stripped of their rights, and compensated only with shipments of numbing alcohol. With the nominal division between studio and documentary photography not yet established, Curtis and others like him had no reason not to arrange subjects like fashion mannequins, propped up in stiff, eerie poses and dressed in the lavish ceremonial attire normally reserved for rituals that were now performed only for paying white audiences. Where the tools of today’s fashion photographer — strategic lighting and photoshop retouching — can wipe away wrinkles, pores and other imperfections to approximate an abstract ideal of beauty, Curtis similarly used his state-of-the-art equipment to make the chiseled faces of his subjects evoke a sense of timeless dignity.

Cyrill Lachauer, for his Trickster series, covers the stony, mask-like faces of Curtis’ war-chiefs with another mask, one resembling iconic Looney Tunes rascal Wile E. Coyote. In the way that it can be unsettling to talk to a stage-actor still wearing full make-up, it becomes difficult to focus on either the thin, translucent layer of pigment or on the image underneath. Lachauer works with silkscreen, the same medium Andy Warhol held so dear for its ability to effect “cosmetic surgery” on portraits of wealthy but seasoned clients, but achieves a contrary effect. While, like Warhol, making superficial adjustments to existing images, Lachauers goal is precisely not to eliminate irritations, but to cultivate them. Through the additional face-paint, the wrinkly but dignified visages of warriors are blemished with ridicule. What Curtis had been at pains to rid of any ambiguity begins to vacillate between romantic bon savage fantasies and recollections of shrill, industrial-brand comedy. Where Curtis had set out to present an ahistorical image of the Native American, concentrated in the warrior’s noble face, Lachauer’s incongruous addition obstructs our ability to read the images unequivocally.

It is fitting to position Wile E. Coyote, the Roadrunner’s determined but inescapably luckless adversary, as the agent to carry out this willful blurring of boundaries. Though fixed in the role of the relentlessly aggressive antagonist, the character is nevertheless designed to evoke in the audience an amused sympathy with its vain efforts to capture a bird unusual in both speed of movement and dullness of expression. By virtue of its awkward existence between the good/bad stereotypes so essential to the mechanics of most children’s cartoons, it becomes easy to identify the character with the anthropological archetype named in Lachauer’s title: the trickster. In addition to being modeled after an animal of immense mythological importance to many Native Americans tribes, Wile E. Coyote also embodies many characteristics commonly attributed to those mythological characters ethnologists have described as tricksters. Presented as charmingly mischievous rapscallions, these characters were as incompatible with missionaries’ beliefs about heaven/hell dualism as a smiling warrior would have been with Curtis’s Wild-West shmaltz. In nearly all early written records, trickster figures were thus either categorized as good or evil or just omitted from the stories altogether.

With just three bold strokes of the screenpress squeegee, Lachauer not only introduces into the photograph a trickster-esque confusion about the various cosmetic changes made to the Native American reality, but also positions his own artistic act uneasily between two historically diametrical motives for painting over already existing images. Lachauer is certainly not out to apply finishing touches in the manner of William Turner (1789-1862), who famously made a habit of surprising his competition by applying the defining few brushstrokes only minutes before exhibitions opened. He is also, however, far from being motivated by the iconoclastic fervor that has driven both artists and religious fanatics throughout history. With his semitransparent addition neither beautifying nor disfiguring the original and his own role neither fully productive nor damaging, it might, in fact, be appropriate to understand Lachauer’s own role as that of, well, a trickster.