BRIAN JUNGEN: Gaining Momentum With Solo Shows in New York, Vancouver and Montreal
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"Collective unconscious; First Nation, Second Nature; Work to Rule"
Brian Jungen, "Collective unconscious; First Nation, Second Nature; Work to Rule;" 2005, carved baseball bats, artist proofs. Produced woth the support of Province of British Columbia Spirit of BC Arts Fund.
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"Installation view of Prototypes"
Brian Jungen, "Installation view of Prototypes," 1998 - 2005, Nike Air Jordans.
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"Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time"
Brian Jungen, "Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time," 2001, plastic food trays, television monitor, VCR, wood. Collection of Bob Rennie, Vancouver.
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"Cetology"
Brian Jungen, "Cetology," 2002, plastic chairs. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
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"Collective unconscious; First Nation, Second Nature; Work to Rule"
Brian Jungen, "Collective unconscious; First Nation, Second Nature; Work to Rule;" 2005, carved baseball bats, artist proofs. Produced woth the support of Province of British Columbia Spirit of BC Arts Fund.
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"New Understanding #8"
Prototype for "New Understanding #8," 1999, Nike Air Jordans. Collection of Colin Griffiths, Vancouver
BRIAN JUNGEN
Gaining Momentum With Solo Shows in New York, Vancouver and Montreal
By Julia Dault
There are two very sound ways into a subject like art. The first is descriptive, requiring answers to questions about the length, breadth, width, colour, surface, density and weight of a thing. The second is conceptual and is thus less concerned with the physical qualities of the object. Here, the idea is of essence and the goal is to play with it in all of its limitless possibilities, toying with the notion of artist’s intention along the way.
Happily, the one method does not eliminate the other. In fact, understanding the “thingyness” of art and the concepts behind it is one of the most pleasurable activities around, especially when applied to art that can hold up under both forms of scrutiny.
The art of Brian Jungen is a perfect place to apply this parallel approach. The Vancouver-based artist makes work that is as aesthetically rigourous as it is conceptually sound. It is no wonder that he is the focus of a touring solo exhibition now on at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
There are themes that run through much of Jungen’s work. He is interested in subverting the power of objects, in particular commercial objects and what they stand for; he’s also interested in Minimalism, both its physical and conceptual vocabularies. Then, there are his broader investigations into the creation, understanding and uses of cultural identity and therein, the definitions of Aboriginal culture in Canada and the world at large. All this in extremely original objects that are beautiful to look at — no small feat.
NOT JUST ANY SNEAKER
The series that really put Jungen on the art radar was called Prototypes for New Understanding. First shown at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver in 1999, Jungen used the black, white and red leather pieces from Nike Air Jordan sneakers and re-stitched them into semblances of West Coast Aboriginal masks, whales, falcons, ravens and more.
In the ‘masks,’ the original object and the reconfigured object couldn’t be more different. You see, Air Jordans aren’t just sneakers. First designed in 1987, the shoe changed the way Nike marketed their products, grossing them and Michael Jordan millions of dollars and causing near riots in the streets. In April last year, a 17-year-old was shot and found shoeless in a Chicago alleyway. “It was all about the shoes,” the Chicago police reported, the statement sadly echoing Nike’s original campaign that had a gasping Spike Lee exclaim, “It’s gotta be the shoes!” in response to Michael Jordan’s way with the ball. The victim was wearing Air Jordan’s latest generation.
For years now, the shoes have been coveted by youth everywhere, including teens on Aboriginal reserves, where they are a symbol of power, success, money, talent and near untouchability.
As a member of the Doig River band of B.C.’s Dane-Zaa Nation, Jungen knows the influences of commercial products and branding on Aboriginal traditions. The Prototypes conflate the constructed aura surrounding the sneaker and the spirituality contained within the symbol of the mask; the ‘masks’ are hybrid objects from two very oppositional worlds.
The results are dramatic, damning, blasphemous; the tearing up of the consumer product, an act that Jungen himself admits felt odd, is a form of modern-day rebellion. Further, re-stitching the shoe corpses into religious symbols draws immediate parallels between the mass consumption of commercial objects and the mass consumption of cultural difference.
It’s this fascination with difference — dreamcatchers-cum-keychains, tribal chic, that sort of thing — that Jungen is pinpointing. It is also sometimes called “fetishization of the Other,” and denotes the manipulation of difference for the benefit of the dominating authority, to the tastemakers looking for the next big thing. The term itself is a conflation of Marxist notions of the commodity fetish, Freud’s ideas on sexual taste and terms established by Edward Said’s treatise on the romanticization of difference in Orientalism, written back in 1978.
SHAPESHIFTING THE READY-MADE
Jungen’s interest in commercial products also extends beyond shoes. Cetology, 2002, Vienna, 2003, and Shapeshifter, 2000, are enormous whale skeletons, ranging from 21 to 40 feet, made entirely from broken pieces of white plastic lawn furniture. They hang much like any specimen in a natural history museum would, suspended from the ceiling in life-like formation. This exhibit is the first time that the whale pod has been reunited since ‘birth’.
As with the Prototypes, this series references Aboriginal myth. The whale itself is an important symbol, sometimes representing containment, traveling, the womb, guardianship, and a universal deluge; a shapeshifter is a mythical creature that can morph from human to animal and back again, the sphere of rebirth akin to passage through a magical threshold.
Beyond myth, Jungen’s use of petroleum bi-products can be viewed in a couple of different ways. First, there is the significance of oil to Aboriginal culture. Whale oil was the main source of fuel until the mid-19th century when it was replaced by petroleum. Second, the use of plastic bones could be seen as a wry commentary on the role of the museum and its authority on value and worth. By elevating plastic chairs as common as these to coveted museum objects, Jungen is furthering a debate that has long raged in the art of many contemporary artists. Calling attention to the museum’s authority and, by extension, the art market is, in fact, what pushed definitions of art beyond length, breadth, width, colour, surface, density and weight. Examining the place and role of the museum ushered in things as specific as Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture and as general as performance art and the necessary objectlessness of conceptualism.
Talking Sticks, 2005, is another work furthering Jungen’s exploration of ready-made, iconic objects. Made from a clutch of baseball bats leaning against the wall, each bat is engraved with a call to unite the workforce: “heroes of labour,” “thieves of freedom,” “united to crush” are some of the phrases engraved into the smooth wood. Influenced both by Marxist theory and the tradition of the baseball bat in North America, the objects are direct references to Aboriginal engraving and to talking sticks often used to arbitrate talking circles and in meditation, prayer and healing.
Of course, the Prototypes series, his pod and his Talking Sticks are all nods to the great Marcel Duchamp, an artist many consider to be the forefather of modern art. When, in 1917, Duchamp thrust a signed urinal into the space of a gallery, called it a fountain and deemed it to be art, that was that. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction was born and artistic agency was freed from things as limiting as actual hands-on skill.
Though Jungen’s use of commercial materials is inescapably Duchampian, his mode of artmaking inserts the artist’s hand back into the process; Jungen’s masks, bones and bats require absolute artistic talent.
JUNGEN’S MATERIAL WORLD
After the attention he received from the Prototypes, Jungen continued exploring materials and their corresponding conceptual forms in much of his work.Untitled, 2001, carefully reproduces the unremarkable wooden packing pallets used by forklifts to carry goods. Using Western red cedar, Jungen carefully remade the slats of wood, with wooden pegs to secure the pieces, and stacked them together.
As Trevor Smith highlights in Collapsing Utopias: Brian Jungen’s Minimalist Tactics, Jungen’s Untitled could be said to respond to a work called Pyre from Carl Andre’s Element Series, 1960. And in fact, much of Jungen’s style carries a minimalist’s aesthetic sensibility. Like LeWitt, Truitt, Serra, Flavin and Judd, Jungen is interested in simple forms and basic materials. Like them, Jungen calls as much attention to the surrounding walls as to the very physicality of his objects.
Take the very tiny Little Habitat I, 2003, and Little Habitat II, 2004, domes made in homage to the Utopian architecture of Buckminster Fuller at a mere 65 x 65 x 30 centimetres. Jungen used the discarded cardboard from the many Air Jordan sneaker boxes to create the miniature tensegrity designs. In so doing, he is truly committing to Fuller’s philosophy of ephemeralization, the notion of doing more with less that today seems like second nature. Unto themselves, the domes are curious constructions. In the space of the exhibition hall they are dwarfed commentaries on the complexities of Fuller’s innovation and the ultimate failure of his Utopia.
Works like Michael, 2003, extend Jungen’s interest in material-use — of cardboard in particular — and his play with desire and pop cultural icons. Using powder-coated aluminum, he makes exact replicas of the Air Jordan shoe boxes, the same ones that he cut up for his Fuller domes.
By creating these permanent versions of objects whose only use is to carry more permanent items, he is overturning consumption’s pecking order. Jungen’s objects are beautiful, slick, indestructible; re-versioning this refuse is yet another way into the unwritten rules of commercialism. What objects do we value and why? How do rules of exchange and consumption govern behaviour? Michael also speaks to Jungen’s own childhood relationship to objects, where his mother was constantly reusing and recycling objects around the house.
NEW UNDERSTANDINGS, NEW MODES OF ART
So why now? What is it about the art of Brian Jungen that is worthy of all of this attention? Where once art was easily definable into very neat categories: Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Colourfield, for example, each a more-or-less cohesive movement engaged in responding to the preceding aesthetic trends, today art is, well, different.
Some cite post-modernism as the reason for art’s multifarious definitions. As a reaction to modernism — whose goal was to sweep aside anything “traditional” favouring a celebration of progress and improvement — post-modernism’s raison d’être was, and is, the very notion of change. And if change is the status quo, well then eclecticism, collage, pastiche — anything involving compilation and assemblage — is worthy of the ‘pomo’ label. Post-modernism’s affection for meta-narratives has, arguably, announced an end to Art (how can we invent anything more specific than ‘after modernity’ when art is coming from so many different local and sub-cultural ideologies?).
Considering this climate of post-modernism when viewing Jungen’s work helps to understand its relevance. His use of omnipresent consumer products as his dominant medium and their subversion into new objects is, at a very basic level, a literal translation of post-modern sensibilities. By taking recognizable objects — find one person who can’t place Nike’s Michael Jordan silhouette icon — he is speaking to us in product slang, a universal language based on money and manipulation.
The subjects that Jungen addresses with his practice are of top priority and relevance to today’s world. How do we define culture? What are the effects of globalization? How is cultural difference used, by whom, and to what end? Just think of recent international conflicts; the recent institutionalization of sameness in France and the ensuing riots, for example, is only one instance highlighting the relevance of these questions.
That his art is informed by his mixed Aboriginal heritage brings his commentary home. How is Aboriginal culture defined in Canada? How do we view Aboriginal art? What sort of fetishization exists of Aboriginal culture? Jungen is presenting new forms of Aboriginal art that speak to the misconceptions of a culture that he considers to be, “a third world within a first world.” Interestingly, much of the critical discourse surrounding Jungen’s work highlights his own Dane-zaa background; one wonders if this focus isn’t, in part at least, an extension of the very thing that Jungen is critiquing in much of his work.
These are not easy subjects. In the end, Jungen’s interest in such vast themes — commodity and cultural festishism, mass-production, modes of exchange, value, worth, definitions of Aboriginal culture, and more — weave their way through objects that are really engaging to look at. Jungen’s focus on recontextualizing commercial objects lures viewers into the potential dialogue. He’s using a language we all understand and usurping it, in sometimes really witty ways — who ever saw a plastic femur?! — so that his objects uncoil into so much more. Art like this, with layers of meaning and significance, isn’t easy to come by. Thankfully, Jungen’s areas of inquiry are near limitless; it will be interesting to see where they take him next.
Brian Jungen appears January 28 to April 30 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Curated by Daina Augaitus, chief curator at the VAG, the exhibition ran September 29 to December 31, 2005, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and will show May 25 to September 4 at the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal. Brian Jungen is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.
Julia Dault is a visual arts writer and critic; she writes a weekly column for the National Post called “At the Galleries”.