FEBRUARY 2006

Art

Air JungenHow one Vancouver artist is breaking down cultural and consumer stereotypes

by Daniel Baird

n order to reach the permanentdisplay of Northwest Coast Indianartifacts at the American Museum

of Natural History in New York fromWest 81st Street, you have to descenda stairway and walk through a newlyrenovated, glass-enclosed gift shopstocked with kitschy facsimiles of thetools, jewellery, clothing, and headdress-es of the peoples represented in themuseum's vast collection. From thereyou enter the damp, poorly lit bowelsof the nineteenth-century museum.There, bison set behind thick panes ofglass gallop in front of painted sunsets;mangy grizzly bears rear back on theirhind legs, long claws chipped and brit-tle, dark glass eyes off-kilter. And in thenext room, in beautiful old woodencabinets, is what was at one time regard-ed as just another instance of the floraand fauna of North America: crudelysculpted, faceless Tlingit tribesmen infringed robes and beaver-fur hats; danc-ing Nootka shamans in heavy bear cos-tumes; and brightly painted Kwakiutlmasks. What is not on exhibit, but isstill part of the collection, are the thou-sands of skulls and skeletons of nativeAmericans that were exhumed fromgraves by archeologists during thenineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies and even boiled down from freshcorpses strewn on battlefields.

A Tancouver artist Brian Jungen standsV in the doorway of a room at the NewMuseum of Contemporary Art in NewYork near the installation of his Proto-types for New Understanding, a series oftwenty-three masks cunningly fashionedfrom Nike Air Jordan sneakers and hu-man hair that bear a striking resem-

blance to the masks of Northwest CoastIndians. With his stocky build, broadface, and deep, dark eyes, Jungen castsa humble yet formidable presence.

It is just a week after an importantmid-career survey of the thirty-five-year-old artist's work opened at theNew Museum (the show will subse-quently travel to the Vancouver ArtGallery and the Musge d'art contempo-rain de Montr6al). But it is merely thelatest step in Jungen's ascent; over thepast three years, the artist has had soloexhibitions in Montreal, Vancouver,Seattle, San Francisco, New York, andVienna. It's a long way from the interiorof British Columbia, where Jungen, thechild of a Swiss father and an aboriginalmother, was raised on a family farm ontraditional Dane-zaa lands, before mov-ing to Vancouver in 1988 to study at theEmily Carr College of Art and Design.Still, despite the exposure, the reserved,intense Jungen-hands in the pocketsof his jeans, eyes fixed on the floor-isclearly ill at ease speaking in public.When asked about the relationship be-tween his work and the art of his nativeancestors, Jungen looks annoyed andimpatient. "I was sort of pressured tomake work about my identity, but thena lot of my exposure to my ancestry isthrough museums," he says. "And theobjects and artifacts in museums arenot actually ceremonial."

One of the most striking thingsabout Prototypes for New Understand-ing, before the rich irony and cuttinghumour become apparent, is howbeautiful and finely crafted the fierce,confrontational masks are. Clearly thatis part of the reason they were such acatalyst for Jungen's career. In "Proto-

type for New Understanding #4" (i998),for instance, the artist has unstitchedthe padded white leather tops of theshoes and splayed them out into a face,the black sides stretched and stuffedto form a pair of goofy ears, and theplush red interior pulled out to forma thick, curled tongue. Long strandsof coarse black human hair hang fromthe back of the mask; in its otherwiseempty white eyes is the Air Jordan logo,Michael Jordan leaping mid-air for aslam dunk.

"Prototype #9" (1999) has a grotesque,even menacing bent snout and luridred lips; in "Prototype #11" (2oo2),buckled red leather bands strap shoesaround a crinkled mouth hole to looklike outstretched wings from whichhair cascades; and the hooked beak in"Prototype #13" (2003) gives the appear-ance of a prehistoric bird, with a longshiny tail of hair attached to the back.Many of the sculptures in Prototypesfor New Understanding resemble thedistorted, shapeshifting animalforms-now demonic, now obsceneand comic-common in NorthwestCoast masks. But Jungen considers thisseries to be at least partly an explora-tion of material and form, and workssuch as "Prototype for New Under-standing #20" (2004), a mandala-likewheel of shoes, as well as the closelyrelated wall relief Variant I (2oo2), arealmost wholly abstract. "My work isnot about my personal relationship tothese [native] traditions," Jungen toldme, "but about the interface of trad-itions with wider contemporary cul-ture. I am interested in the role of nativeart in culture rather than in an inter-pretation of that culture."

Prototype for New Understanding #21 (2005) Nike Air Jordans. Photograph by Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art GalleryAll images courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

THE WALRUS

Not all ofJungen's work is overtly about the stereotypes with which First Nations peoples havetypically been cast, but these issues have a way of creeping into his work.

In a 1999 exhibition of the Prototypesin Vancouver, Jungen also includedmural-sized wall paintings based onsketches he solicited from passersby,who had been asked to draw what theythought of as "native art." Renderedin cheerful colours, the works reflectcrude stereotypes of both aboriginalpeople and the range of aboriginal art:there are eagle heads, Indian braves inwar paint wearing feathered headbands,teepees, totem poles, and frolickingwhales. These drawings are fantasiesabout what historian Daniel Francis callsthe "Imaginary Indian," a romanticfigure created since the middle of thenineteenth century by the depictionsof First Nations peoples and culture bywriters, painters, anthropologists, film-makers, politicians, and others. Proto-types addresses a similar issue, but froma different and more complicated angle.

Northwest Coast masks have beenfetishized and obsessively collectedas shining instances of authentic ab-original art. Jungen, on the other hand,has taken a popular line of a brand thathas itself become a collector's itemand transformed it into one-of-a-kindworks of "native art" that might in turnbe mass-produced. "Before productsare outsourced for production," Jungentold me, "a design team creates severalprototypes of which one is selected. Iliked this idea of reversing it by using themass-produced object to create a sin-gular handmade prototype. I thoughtthe Jordan trainers were a perfect iconto illustrate the idea of a global prod-uct reworked by the local." Yet Jungen'smasks also suggest a different kind ofprototype--one for a native art, and anative identity, that are not paralyzedby the past, that have the impurity andflexibility to move into the future.

F or another series of sculptural works,which includes Shapeshifter (2ooo),

Cetology (2oo2), and Vienna (2oo3), Jun-gen crafted what look like huge whaleskeletons made out of white plastic lawnchairs. Like Prototypes, Jungen's skele-tons do not initially appear to be con-structed out of familiar, mass-produced

material, a fact that comes as a revela-tion to most viewers, complicating anotherwise pristine illusion. In Shape-shifter, the tail has a long, slow undula-tion, but the central portion of thebody is compacted and the head sharp,a ribbed cartilage at the top like a fin.Vienna, on the other hand, has an intri-cate body composed of curved parts thatseem captured in a whipping, forwardmotion, its head long, elegant, and open.

Jungen's refined formalism and me-ticulous craftsmanship are counterbal-anced by the materials he employs andthe histories his images evoke. Thewhale skeletons are not meant to be an-atomically correct, but they are mod-elled after skeletons typically housedin natural-history museums. Indeed,the giant plastic sculptures are sus-pended from the ceiling and bathed inclinical white light that self-conscious-ly evokes the style of presentation in

museums, and they are closely relatedto the concerns of Prototypes. After all,whalebones are the remnants of a spe-cies driven to the edge of extinction bywhite North America's voracious ap-petite for the fuel oil extracted fromwhales, and they are also part of thecollections of museums whose storagevaults are stocked with the artifacts andbones of aboriginal peoples.

In these works, Jungen is interestedin the way the skeletons evoke the sto-ries and myths of the Northwest Coasttribes. In addition, the petroleum used

in the manufacture of the plastic chairsnods not just to the whaling industrybut more generally to the expansion ofEuropean civilization on the Westernfrontier that irreversibly disrupted thelives of First Nations peoples. These areamong Jungen's most lyrical works.Suspended from barely visible string,the white of the plastic chairs is cooland ghostly, and a sculpture likeCetology looks fragile, held together bya delicate balance. It is a triumph thatsomething eerie and beautiful can besalvaged out of material as mundane asplastic chairs.

N ot all of Jungen's work is overtlyabout the stereotypes with which

First Nations peoples have typicallybeen cast or about questions of identi-ty in a global society, but these issueshave a way of creeping into his work.This may be because Jungen's art subtlyraises the question-without answeringit-of the possibility of a regional cul-ture and identity that moves beyondnostalgia in a world where a kid cangrow up on remote Dane-zaa lands andlearn less about First Nations culturethan about the television programsand pop music and hip-hop fashionsworshipped by kids in Toronto. Jungenhas often insisted that the work hemakes out of Air Jordan trainers is notinspired by a passion for the player orfor basketball but rather by the brand-ing and celebrity-endorsement issuesthat arise from professional sports.

The somewhat cagey Jungen nowadmits there is probably more to it. "Ionly considered this idea of ceremonya few years ago," he said. "It occurredto me that I was making facsimiles ofone kind of ceremonial garment out ofanother and that the role of sport inculture in a way fulfills a kinship ritu-al that ceremonial competitions oncedid in non-western societies."

In a society where religious ceremonyno longer creates a sense of collectiveidentity, sport is the secular ritual thatprovides fantasies of excellence andmoments of transcendence. For Court,which debuted in 2004 at Triple Can-

ILLUSTRATION: TUCKER NICKOLS92

Art

From top left Vienna (2003) plastic chairs. Photo by Matthias Herrmann, Secession. Shapeshifter (2000) detail. Photo by Linda Chinfen.Cetology (2000) installation view. Photo by Trevor Mills

THE WALRUS

die gallery in Harlem, New York, Jun-gen built a basketball court to scale outof 224 wooden tabletops that had beenused in sweatshops, leaving open therectangular holes and notches wherethe industrial sewing machines wouldnormally be set. The three-point arc iscarefully painted in; there are hoopssuspended at either end. The laminat-ed wood of a basketball court, waxedand polished to a mirror shine, has asleek, seamless elegance, but Jungen'scourt is thick and even brutal, and theironies it embodies are equally blunt.The sewing machines that would havebeen screwed into the tabletops couldeasily have been rattling in front ofworkers in the crowded sweatshops ofChina, cranking out the beautiful andheraldic white, black, and red Air Jor-dans that would eventually be on thefeet Of NBA stars or those of native kidsfantasizing about those NBA stars.

Jungen's court is one that the viewerfiguratively trips over. It is more thansimply a statement about the brandsand endorsements of big-money sportsand the hard economic realities that un-derlie them; its metaphors are far moreambiguous and suggestive than that.Perhaps basketball courts stand in forthe ceremonial spaces--religious, pol-itical, social-that have traditionallyserved to bind a people's identity. Per-haps what Jungen's fractured, make-shift court implies is the great extentto which such spaces have becomecompromised.

B rian Jungen's art inevitably hasan ambivalent relationship with

museums, even those devoted to con-temporary art, where curators are sensi-tive to the suspicion with which artistsoften approach institutions. A lot ofJungen's early work is fuelled by an in-terest in the institutional presentationof First Nations culture as an appro-priate object of scrutiny for scientistsrather than students of human history.David Hurst Thomas's seminal historyof anthropology and archeology, SkullWars, was premised on the idea that na-tive culture was essentially extinct. Artworks such as Shapeshifter and Cetologywere in part inspired by visits to Van-couver's aquarium, a different kind ofmuseum, its thick glass windows pro-

viding an underwater view of the resi-dent killer whale. Jungen commented,"I wanted to reference the aquarium andthe captivity of the animals," and thatseems more apt: works of art in muse-ums often feel as though they are be-ing held captive, in a kind of solitaryconfinement, unable to engage with theworld unfolding around them.

In recent years, Jungen has becomeincreasingly oriented toward temporaryworks set in less institutional environ-

ments-what he likes to call "structuresfor habitation." His interest in architec-ture, in the aesthetics and politics ofthe spaces in which we live, is by nomeans new. Isolated Depiction of thePassage of Time (2oo0) is modelled af-ter a hollowed-out stack of blue lunchtrays that were used in a 198o prisonescape from the Millhaven Institutionand which are now part of the collec-tion of the Correctional Service ofCanada Museum in Kingston, Ontario.In Jungen's piece, each of the approxi-mately 1,200 trays represents an aborig-inal male incarcerated in a Canadianprison, the different colours correspondto the length of sentences meted out,and the sounds one hears represent thetelevisions provided in the windowlesscells. For Little Habitat I (2003) and LittleHabitat 11 (2oo4), Jungen meticulouslycut up Air Jordan boxes and assembledthem into compact geodesic domes.Both Isolated Depiction of the Passage ofTime and the Habitat works are aboutalienation and failure -of architec-ture used to isolate and repress, of amode of high-modernist formalism thatJungen is clearly drawn to but that isdisconnected from the character of liv-ing communities.

ILLUSTRATION: TUCKER NICKOLS94

Several of0ungen's recent projects, onthe other hand, propose a more symbioticrelationship between "structures of hab-itation" and the world that surroundsthem. Habitat o4--Cit6 radieuse des chatslCats Radiant City (2004), first shown atthe old Darling Foundry in Montreal,consisted of stacked plywood units cov-ered with carpet that served as tem-porary housing for some of the city'smany stray cats. Jungen and staff at theDarling Foundry worked with the localhumane society in an effort to arrangefor the adoption of the cats.

Echoing the title of Le Corbusi-er's never-realized Radiant City, andalluding to Moshe Safdie's Habitat67 housing project in Montreal, Hab-itat 04 introduces the indetermina-cy of life into modernist forms. ForInside Today's Home (2005), Jungenconstructed a suspended birdhouse fordomesticated finches out of IKEA peri-odical-file boxes and shelving brackets.The exhibit was viewed from the out-side, through peepholes in a plywoodwall or on closed-circuit television.

Compared with Court, Habitat 04and Inside Today's Home are optimis-tic works. They suggest that we needto stop thinking of the divide betweennature and culture as sharp and un-equivocal, that we need to give up theidea that history offers us identities andways of living that have stable bound-aries. Perhaps what it means to be partof a live culture, rather than terminallyrelegated to the storage facilities of mu-seums of natural history and anthro-pology, is to be part of something thatis unstable, ephemeral, and continu-ously transforming.

A t the end of his talk and walking tourof his exhibition at the New Mu-

seum, Jungen glances at Modern Sculp-ture-blobby floor sculptures madefrom silver soccer balls filled with lavarocks he created for a group show inIceland-and moves on to talking stick(2005). Jungen may be drawn to the kindsof site-specific installations that arepopular with critics, but he is at heart asculptor and a consummate craftsman.

Jungen's creation talking stick is aseries of works made from baseballbats carved with what look like the de-signs found on Northwest Coast totem

Art

poles and batons, but are in fact politi-cally charged slogans such as "Unite toCrush" and "Work to Rule." Like Proto-types for New Understanding, talking stickcontains conflicting and irresolvableassociations between batons used byNorthwest Coast medicine men andsports, between healing and violence,between the finely crafted and the mass-produced--between the local and theglobal.

At one point an earnest-looking wom-an raises her hand, introducing herselfas someone from Vancouver living inNew York. She suggests that audiencesoutside Canada are not likely to under-stand how controversial Jungen's useof First Nations culture really is. This is

not an altogether naive comment. Jun-gen's relationship to First Nations cul-ture is never straightforward, and healways insists upon the impure and thehybrid over the "authentic." He is not aWest Coast native craftsman, but an art-ist whose work is rooted in Europeanand North American sculpture of thepast fifty years. Perhaps his art suggeststhat the distinction itself is becomingless and less meaningful. "[Some na-tive people] think it's a cunning way ofaddressing these issues," Jungen says,not missing a beat. "They think it's afunny joke."

Daniel Baird is arts and literature editorat The Walrus.

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TITLE: Air JungenSOURCE: The Walrus 3 no1 F 2006PAGE(S): 91-5

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