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Spotlight: Brian Jungen: Cool Cooler Coolest

The crowd at the opening of “Hammertown” in Edinburgh, Scotland, didn’t quite know what to make of it—a Coleman cooler filled with Budweiser “tall boy” beers sitting on the floor in an art gallery—until Brian Jungen, whose work it is, walked over to it, took out a can and pulled the tab, a bit like a hostess leading with the correct fork. Ah, ha! The art students in attendance got it immediately. They as quickly followed suit, lifting some brews and settling down around Beer Cooler (2002), whose polystyrene sides and lid are carved all over with images of fire, skulls, chains, goat’s head, eagle, phoenix, dreamcatcher, spider’s web and the slogan “Divine articulate irony, born in flames.”

“It was a gift; I was giving alcohol back to Europeans,” says Jungen, breaking into a dazzling smile. The work of this Vancouver-based artist, whose parentage is European and Athabascan First Nations, turns on the volte-face, the coup of reversal. As a work, Beer Cooler is a play on potlatch, the Northwest Coast social occasion at which the host establishes or maintains his rank in society by bestowing gifts upon his guests in a display of wealth and generosity that leaves them not only in his debt but with an obligation to hold a return potlatch.

In one signifying object, Jungen’s contribution to “Hammertown,” a travelling show of works by eight young West Coast artists, recalls traditional, decorated Northwest Coast cedar boxes and present-day coolers—both vessels used to carry food and gifts to a potlatch. His tricksteresque gesture reverses the European introduction of alcohol to aboriginal peoples, sends it back. It is breathtakingly simple, almost casual, and yet its aim is very precise. Once the thought is planted, it is impossible to consider Beer Cooler without contemplating colonialism and its ills, the destruction it has wreaked on aboriginal peoples and the ways in which European and North American histories are intertwined.

Jungen typically sets his hook in an ordinary, apparently benign but in reality loaded everyday object. He has transformed athletic shoes made in Third World factories into parodies of indigenous ceremonial masks; turned non-biodegradable plastic deck chairs into the bones of whales, an endangered species; stacked shipping pallets and prison cafeteria trays into modular architectures; and rigged metal C-clamps into a free-standing figure of existential angst. Jungen brings the models of artist-as-ethnographer and artist-as-Trickster together into one complex, post-colonial artistic trope, and like Janus, he looks in two directions at once, backwards and forwards. The provocative, tension-filled dualities of his work, in which he appropriates freely from modernist, postmodernist and First Nations art, have made him one of the most interesting young artists in the country.

A Google search on the internet quickly yields the latest developments in a rapidly ascending career. In December, the 32-year-old artist won the inaugural Sobey Art Award, the richest purse, at $50,000, given to a Canadian artist younger than 40. He has shown across Canada, since his first solo exhibition in 1997, in Calgary, and according to the HTML site of the Vancouver Art Gallery, his works in the permanent collection are among the most requested for loan, along with those of Geoffrey Farmer, Jana Sterbak, Jeff Wall, Emily Carr and the Group of Seven. Not mentioned on the Web site is the VAG’s plan to mount an international travelling exhibition of Jungen’s work in 2005.

Last fall, he showed for the first time in the United States in a group show at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, a contemporary art gallery with one of the best programs below the 49th parallel. Jungen’s US solo debut, “Cetology,” seen also in Toronto last year, closed recently in Seattle at the Henry Art Gallery. At the end of 2003 he will mount a new installation in New York City at the new, multicultural Triple Candie arts centre in Harlem. (“Harlem is the new Chelsea,” says Jungen, “the last part of New York that’s cheap to live in.”) In the coming fall, he will enter a three-month residency at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco to develop some new work.

Then there is Europe: since 2000, Jungen has shown there in group exhibitions in Finland, Sweden, Scotland and England. This summer, he is included in important international group shows at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and Italy’s leading contemporary art gallery, Castello di Rivoli in Turin; a solo show will appear in Vienna at the Secession gallery in September. In all, seven of his masks will be seen abroad this season, says his dealer Catriona Jeffries, “and invitations are coming in all the time.”

Jungen is now travelling so much that he can say Vancouver has become “a bit like a bedroom community” for him: “I can work here and party elsewhere.” But Vancouver is more than the dull suburb of a global world economy, whose lack of distractions makes it a good place to knuckle down, Jungen hints jokingly in conversation. The city is filled with constant reminders of colonialism in its streets and museums, and, in its well-stocked shops and busy port, of commodification and globalization. These are three preoccupations of Jungen’s work, ones he shares in different ways with at least three generations, including his own, of leading Vancouver artists.

His attachment to place, then, is not nostalgic but the consequence of specific present and historical conditions that his work simultaneously draws from and critiques, from the perspective of a double consciousness. Jungen was born in Fort St. John, an inland town in northeastern British Columbia, 90 kilometres from the Alberta border, in the Peace River area that straddles both provinces. The region is the seat of western oil and gas development and the traditional hunting land of the Dunne-za Indians, an Athabascan-speaking people. Jungen’s mother was Dunne-za, his father Swiss. Both of his parents died when he was eight; afterwards, he lived with his father’s sister and her husband.

Paradoxically, Jungen is a member of the Doig River First Nation who has close ties to his maternal family, and yet is a self-described totally assimilated, urban Indian: “I eat pizza/wear track pants/speak only English,” reads a legend in his artist’s book Brown Finger. At the same time, he is a contemporary artist whose personal, cultural and artistic hybridity is embodied in work that eludes easy categorization. The dialectical nature of his work—objects made from a commodity or material whose own meaning or associations are the image-object’s incompatible opposite—creates a third term. Its power lies in its ability to disrupt common sense and rupture the taken-for-granted surfaces of “natural” appearances.

The third term is a hallmark of subcultural style, which expresses identity in the display of difference. Jungen began to explore it during an intense period of drawing, between 1994 and 1998. The sources of the drawings are pop culture, National Geographic magazine, cartooning, art history and the street. The drawings he chose to include in Brown Finger, an early work that was part of an exhibition at the Vancouver artist-run Or Gallery in 1997, show him playing with stereotypes of Indianness and gayness. These are joined in one drawing into the figure of an Indian wearing a Plains chieftain’s headdress, clutch purse, skirt and high heels. With an upraised arm, this definitively exotic Other is giving the “How” sign to a teepee village in the distance, or maybe he is just waving at the tribe.

In drawings like these, Jungen develops a visual form of reverse discourse, the appropriation and reversal of a slur or stereotype. In the reversal the stereotype becomes humanized and empowered through humour. The image repertoire of the drawings, a vast number of which have been lost, also includes a tomahawk-brandishing chieftain riding a skateboard, a “drunken Indian” and an Indian fucking a Mountie in a scenic-postcard landscape emblazoned with the name Canada. There are also fantastical hybrid creatures, wearing single feathers, whose round heads are based on team logos, as in the Chicago Blackhawks or Atlanta Braves, and whose naked bodies are boyish and human. A winged version of the latter hovers like Tinkerbell above the drunken Indian’s head—the transformed stereotype coming to the aid of an unreconstructed one.

At the time of this seminal work, Jungen was sharing a studio on Vancouver’s east side with Geoffrey Farmer, a friend from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design and one of the celebrated students who went there in the early 1990s, a group that included Jungen, Farmer, Damian Moppett, Steven Shearer and Ron Terada. Jungen and Farmer were both interested in identity, gender politics and cultural studies. They drew together, made deliberately bad drawings, played the Surrealists’ game of “exquisite corpse” and drew Grim Reapers on pages torn from snowboarding magazines, ironically likening themselves to members of an uber-male snowboarder cult.

The drawings can be seen as the playful preparation or research for Jungen’s unexpectedly inventive, self-styled practice in three dimensions. This period of his work followed close on the heels of an eventful year in New York, to which Jungen decamped in the fall of 1992, after two months at Concordia University. In New York, he hung out with Nicole Eisenmann, an artist whose primary medium is drawing and whose rambunctious, cartoony, often wall-size work addresses identity and lesbian sexuality with outrageous humour. He visited the “depressing” Northwest Coast galleries, with their dusty vitrines, at the American Museum of Natural History, and looked at the huge whale skeletons in the adjacent gallery. He saw work by Robert Gober and the Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, artists who make objects that defamiliarize the everyday. And, while making the rounds of museums and art galleries one day, he stumbled over Niketown, the athletic-shoe emporium, which had just opened with dynamic state-of-the-art displays.

“I thought it was the best museum I saw that day,” Jungen says. In tricksteresque fashion, he likewise declares that the best museum in Vancouver is the airport, where corridors and departure lounges are decorated with screenprints of Northwest Coast Indian designs. He wields the favourite art-world qualifier, “best,” with irony. Niketown is “the best museum” because it points to the morbidity of the traditional museum and demonstrates consumerism’s appropriation of the “museum effect,” which can make any object look like art. “The deadness of the past is what shines through the museum piece,” Didier Maleuvre writes. “...history is not a discourse about the past or the present, but rather a way of conceiving one’s alienation from time, a way of suffering the disjointedness of consciousness in time.”

The airport might be “the best museum” because it is so upfront about alienation: it displays not objects so much as the misappropriation of Native Canadian art as the symbol of “Super, natural British Columbia” and, by extension, of national identity. The airport offers a much clearer picture of still-existing, iniquitous colonial power relations than the display of tribal treasures as high art in the traditional museum, which continues its colonial role by perpetuating the idea of the exotic Other.

Both of Jungen’s “bests” point to the museum as a form of representational practice that dissembles, distorts and hides the true nature of things, like who’s on top or the mercurial fluidity of culture. Then he does a volte-face and demonstrates that, yes, a Nike Air Jordan trainer can be art. And then, by isolating the Nike masks in museum-like cases, he uses the museum effect, which Svetlana Alpers argues is “a way of seeing” that “one might as well try to work with,” to invite this “attentive looking.”

Jungen explained the genesis of his Nike mask sculptures to Dan Smoke-Asayenes, who reported on the Sobey Art Award for the online aboriginal newspaper Raven’s Eye. “I was interested in using the collection of Aboriginal art works in museums as a reference point...and how that work has become synonymous with Native art practice and the identity of British Columbia,” he said. “I wanted to use material that was completely paradoxical to that, but merged some ideas of commodification, globalization and [the] work production of material. So, I used Nike Air Jordan trainers which had a very similar red, white and black color scheme and graduated curved lines, and proved to be very flexible working material.”

A close examination of Jungen’s ingenious craft reveals that each of the Nike masks, which Jungen titles Prototype for a New Understanding, is a cut-up, reassembled with as little alteration of the original material as possible and resewn along the same stitch lines. What’s more, the back of the mask shows the parts of the shoe where the “Made in...” labels are attached, linking Jungen to Nike workers in Third World countries. With each examined detail, including the Nike swooshes, lank hair, embroidered Air Jordan logos and holograms, the Prototype(s) come into focus as biting, abject, carnivalesque parodies of the commodification of First Nations art and the exotic.

The Nike masks are branded. The image of the traditional Northwest Coast mask, once the embodiment of connection to the supernatural world, is now bound to the image of a global commodity which is itself a brand. This then is the basis for a new understanding of Native art, of what it is, what it was, of the dominant society’s claim on its depleted spiritual powers and the uses to which they are put—to mask the soulless, disconnected character of the global economy. Is it also, perhaps, the basis for a new understanding of art’s function?

The Prototype series now numbers twelve masks, with three new ones added to the initial nine made in 1998–99. Shapeshifter (2000) and Cetology (2002), skeletons of a right whale and a bowhead whale respectively, made from white, moulded-plastic stacking chairs, are also cut-ups with origins in museum display. In all of them, it is important that the commodity remains recognizable as it is refashioned into the new image-object, for the double meanings and the tensions between them to come into play in the third term, the sculptures. Jungen’s chosen method of making them, bricolage, contains a productive duality as well. The concept is related to the construction of subcultural styles and to Lévi-Strauss’s idea that the magical systems of connection between things in non-literate “primitive” cultures equip people to “think their own worlds,” coherently.

“The process involves a ‘science of the concrete’ (as opposed to our ‘civilised’ science of the ‘abstract’) which far from lacking logic,” observes British literary theorist Terence Hawkes, “in fact, carefully and precisely orders, classifies and arranges into structures the minutiae of the physical world in all their profusion by means of a ‘logic’ which is not our own.” Jungen’s process as a bricoleur, which is never ad hoc but slowly and carefully considered, references two ways of thinking of the world, as concrete and as abstract. The result is that meaning in his work constantly circulates between these two poles, one system of thought incomplete without the other, the images or objects from one culture incomplete without the other culture’s images or objects, with their union as a third term forever embodying opposition and difference.

Jungen names Martin Kippenberger and Bruce Nauman as the biggest influences on his earlier work. In conversation, the artist he mentions most often is Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, for actions like An Indian Act: Shooting the Indian Act (1997), in which Yuxweluptun fired a bullet through a copy of the federal Indian Act. This conceptual side of Yuxweluptun’s practice provides a performative model for Jungen’s Beer Cooler and for how its delivery to Europe is figured as an Indian act.

Kippenberger’s work with rough wooden pallets in the mid-1980s is a model for Jungen’s loose stack of ten meticulously crafted and finished red cedar pallets, Untitled (2001), his most abstract work. The structure of Kippenberger’s Model of administrative building of resorts for recuperating mothers in Paderborn (1985) suggests a house in a landscape. The material and shape of Jungen’s work—the negative spaces in the stacked pallets recall the form lines of Northwest Coast art—refer to Northwest Coast culture. Houses and, once again, the cedar boxes used to transport goods to the potlatch are evoked and joined to the ubiquitous carriers of goods in the global economy. The implication in the relationship of pallet to stack is that when the stack is broken down into its modular elements, the pallet becomes the transporter of an idea about art, cultural goods that can also be dispersed globally.

In fact, the pallet, which solves a formal problem by serving as the base of Jungen’s large floor sculptures, also reads as the physical carrier of a work like Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time (2001). The pallet appears again in Void (2002), which departs significantly from Jungen’s ethnographic/tricksteresque models and the single objects. Procedurally, he continues to follow the “grammatical” steps that Kippenberger described as simple strategies to be “applied and modified in the light of ideas suggested by found objects”: “Positive-negative, enlarge-reduce, reverse, read backwards, superimpose, duplicate, cut up, destroy, repeat, enumerate, abbreviate, combine.”

Where Jungen’s earlier work positioned a viewer in a confrontational relation to an object in continuous space, the two-part tableau Void repositions the viewer as a spectator looking onto a confrontation. A spotlit, standing skeletal figure made entirely of ovoid C-clamps, fixed to a wooden shipping pallet, faces a wall of stacked red Coleman coolers. The wall is six coolers high, four across, and two deep. Seen head on, the circle of light that illuminates the figure like a sun and casts its shadow on the wall shines squarely upon its centre. Step to the side and the light opens suddenly onto the void, a hole cut into the wall revealing that the containers are empty. Indebted equally to the thin figures of ovoids and curves in Yuxweluptun’s paintings and to modernist sculptors like Ibram Lassaw, Jungen’s figure looks into this emptiness and sees itself mirrored by its own shadow, a skeleton at a feast on nothingness.

The potlatch theme that runs through much of Jungen’s work, including the Nike masks (masks are worn in potlatch rituals) and the whales (hunted by Northwest Coast tribes, and believed to possess supernatural powers), culminates in Void. The work, with its representation of opposite economies, has many implications. Its title invokes the concept of the sublime and contemplation of the unknown. Or perhaps it is inspired by Georges Bataille’s theory of potlatch and its contradiction, that in this society of consumption whose agent is status and the gift, one can never grasp the ungraspable. The artist contemplates a cultural void.

Meanwhile, Jungen is drawing again. He is thinking about making figures wearing costumes and armour, suggested by a passage in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian. In this remarkable apparition, Indians fresh from a massacre come galloping down on their next targets, dressed in carnivalesque motley “like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious,” their hybrid garb—skins, bits of silk finery, parts of military uniforms, pieces of Spanish armour, stovepipe hat, umbrella, “white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil”—a dark catalogue of “appropriations” that embody every kind of cultural contact in North America.

This series of essays on emerging Canadian artists is sponsored by The Fraser Elliott Foundation in memory of Betty Ann Elliott

Summer 2003

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