This story is part of DOUBLE TAKES, a Motherboard meditation on the tech-time continuum that reinterprets old art through the lens of modern digital anxieties.
Al MacDonell was cruising the Metropolitan Museum of Art one day a few years ago when he found himself in an out-of-the-way corner of the American Wing, where the lone statue in a room full of paintings and a pair of busts caught his eye. It was a standing, semi-nude woman studying a crucifix held in her right hand. It was the first time MacDonell had ever seen the piece, and it hit him in an instant.
Al MacDonell was cruising the Metropolitan Museum of Art one day a few years ago when he found himself in an out-of-the-way corner of the American Wing, where the lone statue in a room full of paintings and a pair of busts caught his eye. It was a standing, semi-nude woman studying a crucifix held in her right hand. It was the first time MacDonell had ever seen the piece, and it hit him in an instant.
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âI do remember walking into that room and seeing her and immediately laughing,â he said.There in Gallery 759, amid the Thomas Coles and works by other artists of the Hudson River School, the style that dominated the art scene in the United States from roughly 1835 to 1850, MacDonell couldnât help but see something unintended in the topless statueâs original form. The female subject, set on a slight pedestal and depicted in a moment of quiet enchantment, might well be holding a small Christian cross. But it also happens to look like sheâs looking down at her mobile device, MacDonell thought, so much so that he turned to a woman who happened that day to be there in the gallery with him, a total stranger, to see if it wasnât just him.âDoes anything strike you as odd about this?â he asked.âSheâs looking at her cell phone!â the woman said, laughing.He took out his own iPhone and snapped a photo of the statue.It was MacDonell, a retired high school physics and chemistry teacher from Maplewood, New Jersey, who tipped me off to this particular work after reading a column Iâd written last year about a painting from 1860 that depicts a young woman holding what appears to be a smartphone. (Itâs actually a small prayer book.) The statue at the Met of the woman holding the crucifix? Same vibe, MacDonell intimated over email, attaching the photo he'd taken.âI donât remember the artist or the name of the statue,â he added. âBut Iâm sure anyone who works there would know it.â
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*It was a Tuesday afternoon in December and Gallery 759 verged on being mobbed. Iâd come to see about the statue MacDonell spoke of, American artist Erastus Dow Palmerâs âThe Indian Girl, or The Dawn of Christianity,â carved over 160 years ago. And apparently I wasnât the only one.What looked like a pit-stop on an elementary school field trip, with two adult chaperones and a dozen or so kids seated in a half-moon at the foot of the 5-foot-tall marble statue, was wrapping up right as I strode in. There it dawned on me, amid the murmur of the group beginning to file out of the room, that I'd come to look at the same thing, an arguably lesser-known work in the museumâs massive collection. (The American Wing alone comprises 18,377 objects, of which 9,816 are currently on view, according to a Met representative.) But also, near as I could tell, none of the kids were distracted looking at their phones, as so many old-timers would like to believe about the youths these days.Instead, the kids were totally presentâtransfixed, almostâin the presence of a slab of metamorphic rock whittled down by hand long before cell phones were a thing, before even the advent of electricity. For a good century and a half after its completion, it seems, âThe Indian Girlâ solely depicted a Native American woman holding a crucifix, bewitched by an outside and potentially corrupting force. At some point, that changed.
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The statue has been on consistent display here since it was bequeathed to the Met in 1894 by former New York governor, US senator, and Palmerâs patron, Hamilton Fish. âThe Indian Girlâ was Palmerâs first attempt at modeling the full-length female figure, and his intention, as the artist explained in a letter to Fish, was to capture the essence of a young Indigenous woman âwandering listlessly in her native forest gathering bird-plumesâ when suddenly she stumbles on a foreign object.Laying eyes on such an âimpressive emblemâ for the first time, Palmerâs subject holds a downward gaze at the object âwith wonder and compassion.â She is transfixed not by the grip of feathers at her left side but rather by something distinctly non-Indigenous, a curious totem of European origin sheâs just found wandering the woods. As the artist wrote:
Itâs a gesture that is âemblematic of an ongoing concerted effort to convert Native Americans to Christianity,â Thayer Tolles, an American Wing curator who oversees the statue, told me.In the half fallen left hand, which holds the object of her former adoration—the plumes, I wish to convey an idea of the partial abandonment of the wild native pursuit, for the higher and more deeply instructing theme, which the [cross] in the more elevated right hand presents.
“For a number of years people have observed that her pose suggests that she is looking at an iPhone.”
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Before long I found myself alone in the gallery, the field trippers fallen out of earshot. Hardly a crowd. But as I lingered, taking things in by myself up close and from farther points of the room over the next half hour, five passersby did make a point, some more obvious than others, of looking up at Palmer's work. Thatâs when I flagged down a security guard.âDo people ever say it looks like sheâs holding a cell phone?â I asked, gesturing at the statue.I could see in his face that the guard knew he had the answer to my question before Iâd even said a word. âAll the time,â he said.The guard went on to tell me heâs been working at the museum âa long timeâ and that visitors have been noting the crucifix-cell phone comparison âfor years.â Exactly when is tricky to pinpoint, though we know there came a moment in recent memory when at least some museumgoers passing through Gallery 759 began to see, in a statue dating back to a pre-digital era, a certain something, a defining posture, that looks all-too-familiar by todayâs standards.âFor a number of years people have observed that her pose suggests that she is looking at an iPhone,â Tolles said. Each generation and each individual, then again, brings to bear their own contemporary, lived experiences on works of art, effectively altering or obfuscating original meanings, Tolles added. âLooking at art often results in layered viewing experiences.â
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In other words, to certain viewers âThe Indian Girlâ might represent Euro-American domination over Indigenous peoples; others may regard Palmerâs statue on its aesthetic merits, âas a paradigm of American neoclassical sculpture,â Tolles said. Still âothers will see a 21st century cult of technology.âTo that point, exactly who was first to note the uncanny smartphone resemblance is just as tricky to trace back as an official starting point when everyone started noticing the resemblance. Spend a little more time digging around and youâll find nods online, in print, and in real life to the striking visual similarity of Palmerâs statue with someone thumbing through their news feed on any given day over, say, the past half decade. âThe Indian Girl,â recast in the overlapping shape of an offline and internet curiosity, has become something of a meme.Back in 2015, The Civilians, the first theatre-in-residence in Met history, concluded a year-long residency with a selection of works on the American experience that featured Palmerâs âThe Indian Girl,â about which one curator noted, âEverybody says, âOh, sheâs looking at her cell phone,ââ as New York City-based theatre journalist Jonathan Mandell reported at the time.A year later, Steven M. Bellovin, a computer networking and security researcher at Columbia University, made a passing reference to âThe Indian Girlâ in his book Thinking Security: Stopping Next Yearâs Hackers, which includes an image of the statue, captioned: âIs she reading text messages before getting dressed? Taking a selfie? Not really.â
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Bellovin told me over email he happened upon the figure on a visit to the Met around the time he was working on a chapter of that book about passwords and authentication. Specifically, the use of mobile phones as authentication tokens, the problems of which use are twofold, he said: the added costs of tokens, and uncertainty over users being able to realize if theyâve misplaced them.âBut everyone has a phone, and most people check them frequently, often before they get out of bed,â Bellovin added. âSo, my brain was thinking along those lines when I was making my way through the museum to see another exhibit.âWhen out of the blue, âThe Indian Girl.âAs it turns out, Bellovin said he originally included the photo of the statue in the chapter âas a joke.â But he said his editor at the time pushed to keep it in. âGoogling showed that I wasnât the only one who had that reaction to the sculpture,â Bellovin said.Over on Reddit, in a 2017 post about âThe Indian Girlâ on the r/sculptureporn subthread, user dr3adlock commented on the resemblance of the crucifix to modern gadgetry, saying, âIf thatâs not a phone, I donât know what it can be.â User JohnnyConatus joked, in a separate r/sculptureporn post from last year about the statue, that someone should âplease Photoshop in a phoneâ over the cross in the womanâs hand.One of the earliest mentions I came across goes to critic Hrag Vartanian, co-founder of the online arts magazine Hyperallergic, who posted a photo of the statue to his Instagram on September 6, 2012. (âHey miss,â his caption reads, âcan you stop using your smartphone in the galleries please?â) I asked Vartanian over Twitter DM if, to his knowledge, this mightâve been the first such mention.
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âNo idea,â he wrote back. âBut thatâs what occurred to me when I saw it.âThe earliest mention* I could find came by way of Al MacDonell. The iPhone photo he took of the statue that fateful day, the one he shared with me in his initial reach out, is dated August 9, 2012.*Back in Gallery 759, on my recent visit, the guard made a crack about Palmer toiling over the statue for years, including a statement of purpose, only for the artistâs best intentions to later be shattered as easily as, well, an iPhone screen. This despite a detailed description of the work mounted mere feet away, around the statueâs backside, and despite the obvious: what sheâs holding is of course not a 21st century gadget because unless you subscribe to theories of time travel, how could it be anything but a crucifix?And yet people no longer see âThe Indian Girlâ holding that particular religious object, as Palmer wouldâve had it. Nowadays, when people from around the world stand before the finished work, the guard said, they can't help but see someone holding a ubiquitous consumer product. I know I can't.The guard started to shuffle off, shaking his head.âYou know,â he said over his shoulder with a light shrug. âThis is just an image in our world these days.âHis words still ringing in my head, a pair of young French tourists then breezed into the gallery, cutting a diagonal through the room that had them pass the front of âThe Indian Girlâ left to right, from cross in one elevated hand to loose clutch of plumage in the other, held down at her side. Barely seeming to break stride, the visitors paused in unison, eyes about level with the figureâs navel. There they hung, if only for a beat, in a soft filter of skylight that had the statue casting double shadows in opposite directions across the floor.
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The tourists smirked up at the woman, at the crucifix, then at each other. A hushed giggle. And then theyâre gone.Something tells me I know what they saw.*Update: Ella Morton, an editor at Atlas Obscura (and friend of Motherboard), has twice posed with âThe Indian Girl,â in 2009 (that's a Blackberry she's holding!) and again in 2013. Photo credit to Ella's mother, who first told her, âHey, stand there and look at your phone, it'll be funny.â I stand corrected.
Previously:See something strange in an image that predates the internet, digital age, or dawn of electricity? Contact this writer at brian.anderson@vice.com.