Brian Jungen

Rotterdam. This winter Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, mounted the first large-scale European solo exhibition of Canadian artist Brian Jungen. Vancouver-based Jungen, born to a Swiss-Canadian father and First Nations mother and raised in the Dane-zaa nation, is a prolific young artist who has gained international recognition with work that combines a critique on globalisation and consumption – in particular the position of the art object within that economy - with questions of ethnography and cultural identity. What strikes the spectator upon a first encounter with Jungen’s work is that he manages to invest his objects with the properties inherent to their source material – be that Nike footwear, soccer balls, baseballs or plastic chairs – and that, simultaneously, he is a master at crafting something new out of it, so that any reference to the original source material seems absolutely remote and disassociated. It is specifically this accumulative strategy of skilful craftsmanship, purposeful refabrication and an almost cheeky recyclage of consumer objects into something wholly new, and yet not new, that leaves a smile on the lips of those who first encounter them. It is the smile of those who are »in the know« it seems as if Jungen lets us in on the little secrets of commodity fetishism, not in the least in relation to the art market.
Take for instance his celebrated series »Prototype for New Understanding« (1998 – 2005) where he fashions the epitome of urban footwear - Nike Air Jordan trainers – into tribal masks, some of them complete with human hair. Beautiful as objects, and displayed in the white cube gallery in a similar way to that in which the original trainers would be arranged in a shop window as consumers’ objects of desire, these masks operate on multiple levels. They still entail the promise of retail, of street credibility lifestyle branding, and of shoe functionality. This becomes mixed with what critic Jessica Morgan has called a »misplaced use value«¹: no longer shoes for walking or icons of sportive invincibility, they have become art objects which are branded – similar to the original Air Jordan trainers – with the seriality of mass-produced uniqueness. Jungen manages to unite seemingly paradoxical qualities: the mundaneness of a mass-produced shoe that has acquired cult status, stripped of its essence – namely its »shoe-ness« - with the idea of an ethnographic reality that is supposed to offer something real and authentic in the form of a tribal mask. Yet also here it seems impossible to create something that is truly original in its singularity and uncontaminated. In doing this, Jungen has offered us an object that is perhaps most authentic to our day and age.
This occupation with the »authenticity« of the object is also something that returns in his mural drawings, which in the Rotterdam 2006 iteration were effectively etched into the venue’s pristine white walls. In its conception, years ago, Jungen had asked passers-by to draw images of their idea of »Indian art«. The result was a series of child-like stereotypical depictions, such as totem poles, tipis, smiling suns, Lysol cans, and animals. Collected under the title »Fieldwork«, Jungen behaves like an anthropologist doing ethnographic research on Western conceptions of indigenous art and, by corollary, questioning the value and meaning of notions like »native« and »original«. As with the ambiguity of his Nike footwear tribal masks, here the properties of run-down ethnic stereotypes shimmer through drawings reminiscent of pop art. This rub between art-historical reference and the artist’s own translation of a clichéd ethnic imaginary into something »befitting« the art gallery context becomes an instance where playfulness and surface meet something more monumental. Jungen has literally carved out these drawings into the gallery walls, giving them an aesthetic weight, but by corollary also bestowing them with art market value.
Seriality is not only something that occurs in Jungen’s work as a theme, but is very much ingrained within his artistic practice as strategy. Whether we think of the masks of »Prototype for New Understanding«, or his series of whale skeletons (»Shapeshifter«, 2000; »Cetology«, 2002; »Vienna«, 2003), fabricated out of white patio plastic chairs. In Rotterdam, »Cetology« (2002) was shown, its title referring to the study of marine mammal science, especially whales. One again we see the whale and the stack of chairs simultaneously. The mere life-size scale and detail of the piece impresses; this is the notion of »representation« taken to a different level: we have here a perfect replica of a whale skeleton in which the bones have been replaced by plastic chairs. Immediately the reference to a natural history museum exhibit is conjured. Natural history museums go to great lengths in cataloguing, researching and displaying representations of the bio-diversity of the natural world. Yet this representation is always static, since what fills the rooms of these museums are de facto collections of dead objects. By insisting on the usage of inorganic matter like plastic, Jungen not only highlights the plasticity of representation, but also the mechanisms involved in its construction. The chairs are always replaceable; there is no individuality to them, unlike the »real« bone of a particular whale specimen. If you will, it is almost a perverse metaphor for capitalist production. What matters is the idea of what we are looking at – a whale, a tribal mask – not the authenticity of the source material. Commodity fetishism – with as locus the shop window, or for that matter the white cube art space – operates on the premises that it satisfies the desire for an idea, wherein the object functions as a mean to an end, but is not the end goal itself. Meticulously, Jungen manages to capture these convoluted trajectories in his work.