A rhetorical contextualization of Brian Jungen’s art within the post-modern paradigm
Shapeshifter (2000) by Brian Jungen
That the city of Vancouver, and the province of British Columbia as a whole, are promoted by our government both domestically and abroad as Canada’s Pacific gateway to corporate prosperity and profit is an unmistaken and unabashed truism in today’s economy of commoditization.
That Vancouver has also been known as a terminal city, as being the last meager hope at the dead end of the line for generations of predominantly European migrant workers and disenfranchised Canadians is an inevitability of its location at the western frontier of the nation.
Notions of perspective and contradiction are especially relevant when viewing the art of Vancouver’s Brian Jungen. Jungen’s art, which erupted onto the scene about a decade ago, makes provocative use of antipodal perspectives while exploring the post-modern idioms of globalism and pluralism, commodity and value, all the while embodying physical manifestations that have led Jungen to spectacular public impact.
In his pivotal 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of the Typographic Man, Herbert Marshall McLuhan described how electronic mass media collapses barriers of space and time in human communication, enabling people to live and interact on a global scale. To the contemporary Canadian such a statement is obvious and self-evident at best, but within the contemporaneous context of nascent post-modernism the idea of a Global Village meshed rather cleverly with the emergent art world trend toward juxtaposing elements from popular culture(s) and electronic technology.
Fast forward forty five years, and in the resultant post-modern global art market it is especially commendable when an artist gains critical notice. The sheer size of this global market makes it a rare and especially meritorious event indeed for an artist to achieve popular acclaim and enduring presence in Western cultural memory. To achieve popular and not critical acclaim, of course, art needs to be accessible and attractive to the public. Andy Warhol, for example, responded to this challenge posed by the modern Western capitalist paradigm with pop art. Warhol succeeded by understanding that the modern person exists in a fiscally-driven shopping jungle and that desirable art is art which, amongst its saleable qualities, exists as portable, possessible objects easily recognized and negotiated as commodities.
One of the reasons Brian Jungen has catapulted to fame is this especial Warhol-esque quality which his art possesses and which makes it attractive to the late 20th and early 21st century consumer. That it is made from the same stuff as (modern) dreams is interesting and relevant to the consumer: the ubiquitous plastic lawn chair is metonymy for a split-level in the burbs. The coveted Nike Air Jordans are synechdoche for African American urban überkooldom. The baseball bat is iconic, a metaphor for family recreation and national good-times. The viewer has personal relationships with these objects. The objects have emotional and historical mass which trace gateways into the Californicated topography of our collective cultural memory. That Jungen’s art is composed of these deconstructed commodities which are reconfigured in surprising and unexpected yet aesthetic juxtapositions is genius of a sort that Warhol would approve.
Brian Jungen’s grand reveal took place in the waning light of the second millennium, a time when the art world was ripe for something new. Indeed, said one curator in 2000 upon first viewing Shapeshifter, his pivotal lawn chair sculpture in the form of a whale skeleton, “He’s the one we’ve been waiting for.” (Watson 19) Jungen had moved to Vancouver in 1988 from a family farm on traditional Dane-zaa lands in British Columbia’s northern interior. After undergraduate studies at Emily Carr, he worked in a small studio in Vancouver’s down and out Downtown Eastside for several obscure years until participating in a group exhibition, Buddy Palace, at the Or Gallery. Jungen achieved moderate success but didn’t make mainstream waves until several years later in 1999 when he exhibited his Prototypes for New Understanding, a series of nine (now twenty-three) masks painstakingly fashioned from Nike Air Jordan sneakers and human hair that bear a marked resemblance to the masks of Northwest Coast peoples. The reaction was explosive and the dust has yet to settle some ten years later.
Prototypes for a new Understanding (1999-2005)
Jungen’s masks were less about his personal relationship with First Nations traditions or interpreting those traditions and more about the interface of traditions with wider contemporary culture (Baird 91); that his mixed heritage of Swiss and Doig River Band has little historical relationship to the fetishized and obsessively collected Northwest Coast masks is irrelevant. Jungen’s masks defined a new paradigm. His prototypes called for Aboriginal art and an Aboriginal identity that are not paralyzed by the past and which have the impurity and flexibility to move into the future (Baird 92). Jungen capitalized on his Aboriginal heritage to comment on the influences of commercial products and branding, recycling and ‘making-do’ on Aboriginal traditions and by extension Western culture as a whole. He investigated the creation, understanding and uses of cultural identity and the definition of (Aboriginal) culture in Canada. Jungen drew a clear parallel between the mass consumption of commercial objects and the mass consumption of cultural differences, overturning consumption’s pecking order and elevating commodities and recontextualized commercial objects to the vitrine-covered plinths of the art gallery. In addressing tribal chic, “fetishization of the Other” and modes of value and worth, Jungen’s result is dramatic and aesthetically rigorous, damning and blasphemous (Dault 52).
Hot on the heels of Jungen’s masks came the stupendous pod of whale sculptures. In keeping with his exploration of commodity and value, and further demonstrating his refined craftsmanship, Jungen created what look like three marvellous whale skeletons, ranging from twenty-one to forty feet long, out of dissected white plastic lawn chairs. Indeed, like Prototypes, it is not readily apparent at all that these sculptures are made out of familiar, mass-produced material (Baird 92); the whales hang suspended from the ceiling in truly breath-taking, life-like formations, not unlike what one would expect in a museum of natural history. Shapeshifter (2000), Cetology (2002) and Vienna (2003) are juxtapositions incarnate. The plastic lawn chair is the paradigmatic mass-produced, inorganic consumer product, and it is married to the whale (Burnham), one of the ultimate symbols of nature’s freedom and magnificence. Jungen draws attention to the displacement of the natural by the synthetic and the degradation of the environment by commerce. He forces the viewer to consider that the chairs are part of the ever accumulating anti-nature world that threatens to crowd out nature entirely (Watson 19). There is a fantastical splendor in such a gesture and the reaction was a veritable frenzy. Kitty Scott, Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada, made Shapeshifter one of her first purchases. The Vancouver Art Gallery was quick to snatch Cetology for its own collection.
It is easy and glib to cast Jungen in the role of Native artist, but such labels annoy him and he is quick to reject the sobriquet. “I was sort of pressured to make work about my identity, but then a lot of my exposure to my ancestry is through museums. And the objects and artifacts in museums are not actually ceremonial.” (Baird 91) Understandably, Jungen is fuelled by an interest in the institutional presentation of Aboriginal culture, and motivated by the desire to re-conceive Aboriginal motifs which are imbedded in the cultural imagination, both First Nations and white. “For many contemporary urban Indians a vast amount of energy is spent locating oneself within an Indian ‘spectrum,’ an inherited economy of imagery and iconography sewn into the public consciousness… Settling on a place within the slippery slope will always be secondary to how Indians are identified within the dominant culture.” (Rimmer 22) Indeed, categorizing Jungen as a mere Native artist does him a disservice and delimits the scope of his accomplishments. Jungen is more than that; he is a major contemporary artist and a citizen of global culture who deserves a correspondingly wide stage. It would, however, be disingenuous of him to ignore his background, and so he has incorporated his ethnicity in the forces shaping his production.
Talking Sticks (2005)
Talking sticks (2005) are some of Jungen’s most interesting manifestations of post-modern sensibilities, demonstrating further his use of omnipresent consumer goods as a dominant medium and their subversion into new objects. Several baseball bats lean against a wall, each engraved with a call to unite: “heroes of labour,” “collective unconscious,” “united to crush,” “work to rule.” The design of the words are reminiscent at first glance of those found on Northwest Coast totem poles, but a tilt of the head and suddenly talking sticks become vehicles for the conflict between the finely-crafted and the mass-produced, between batons used by medicine men and those used in mainstream sport, between intense political discourse and blissfully ignorant afternoons on a grassy diamond. Though perhaps not as grand and majestic as the whales, nor as deliciously subversive as the Prototypes, the talking sticks are no less recognizable as another juxtaposition, this time of Marxist workforce theory versus the tradition of the baseball bat in North America and the socio-economy which supports its iconic and even ceremonial emplacement in our culture.
Indeed, Western culture, or at least some fringes thereof, is beginning to intimate that capitalism and its attendant culture is not a suitable blueprint for civilization. The very real negative impact on pluralism and the environment and the increasing suspicion that sustaining the status quo has hidden but enormous costs are only just leading our culture to begin questioning its very foundations. The Nikes as consumer goods, deconstructed and reconfigured as art modeled after a subsumed culture, ask the viewer to question the legitimacy and validity of the mainstream paradigm and its effect on the globe. Further, the masks are displayed in vitrines, customarily used to demonstrate to the casual observer that the object underneath the glass is special, important and valuable; the vitrine bestows weighty legitimacy to the art piece and hence the message inside. The whales, enormous chimerical representations in petroleum-based resin imbued with the residue of everyday life (Augaitis 10), reference Aboriginal myth while commenting on consumerism and the global economy. They call into question the viability of our resource management practices as well as notions of hybridization and value. Finally, the talking sticks cum baseball bats manifest the relationship between the accepted idea of a traditional form and the embracing of a very contemporary material. Jungen’s take on the centuries-old practice of incorporating non-Native objects into Native discourse demonstrates an ongoing bipolarity or juxtaposition which is thematic to all his work; in this case his art is stripped of all superfluity and reduced to the sparest of post-modern Minimalism.
Brian Jungen has cast a glamour on the art world. He is today’s post-modern It Boy, and the moniker is well-suited. His work is intelligent, unexpected and surprising and capitalizes on the current trends in juxtaposition, marginalization and pluralism in post-modern art theory and criticism; Brian Jungen’s art is a gateway to journeys through perspective.
Interesting reads:
Augaitis, Diana. “Prototypes for new understandings.” Brian Jungen. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery and Douglas and McIntyre, 2005: 5-13.
Baird, Daniel. “Air Jungen.” The Walrus. February 2006: 90-95.
Brown, Lindsay. “Entitlement: Brian Jungen’s Untitled.” Brian Jungen. Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2002. 24-27.
Burnham, Clint. “The instant “I get it” of Brian Jungen’s art.” The Vancouver Sun 38 Jan., 2006: F3.
Dault, Julia. “British Columbia’s best.” The National Post 26 Jan., 2006: B7.
ibid. “Brian Jungen.” Galleries West. Spring 2006: 51-55.
Jungen, Brian. “In conversation: Brian Jungen and Simon Starling.” Brian Jungen. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery and Douglas and McIntyre, 2005: 129-136.
Kamping-Carder, Leigh. “Lost and Found: Reversing Minimalism and Ethnography in Brian Jungen’s Field Work.” The Knoll. April 2006: 18-22.
Medina, Cuauthemoc. “High Curios.” Brian Jungen. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery and Douglas and McIntyre, 2005: 27-37.
O’Brian, Amy. “Bought, sold and yet amused.” The Vancouver Sun 28 Jan., 2006: F3.
Rimmer, Cate. “Brian Jungen.” Mix. Winter 2000/2001: 22.
Roelstraete, Dieter. “1,986,965 (2001 Census) An intertidal travelogue.” Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists. Vancouver: Muhka, Antwerp and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2005: 127-156.
Rugoff, Ralph. “Capp Street project.” Brian Jungen. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery and Douglas and McIntyre, 2005: 107-111.
Scott, Kitty. “Habitat 04.” Brian Jungen. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery and Douglas and McIntyre, 2005: 115-124.
Shier, Ried. “Buddies, pals.” Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists. Vancouver: Muhka, Antwerp and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2005: 79-90.
Smith, Trevor. “Collapsing utopias: Brian Jungen’s minimalist tactics.” Brian Jungen. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery and Douglas and McIntyre, 2005: 81-89.
Wallace, Ian. “The Frontier of the Avant-Garde.” Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists. Vancouver: Muhka, Antwerp and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2005: 51-60.
Wallace, Keith. Foreward. Brian Jungen. Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2002. 12-23.
Watson, Scott. “Shapeshifter.” Brian Jungen. Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2002. 12-23.
Brian Jungen is represented by Catriona Jeffries.
Ciekawy artykul, bede wpadal na twoja strone czesciej zapewne
Great info, thanks for useful article. I am waiting for more
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