In order to reach the permanent display of Northwest Coast Indian artifacts at the American Museum of Natural History in New York from West 81st Street, you have to descend a stairway and walk through a newly renovated, glass-enclosed gift shop stocked with kitschy facsimiles of the tools, jewellery, clothing, and headdresses of the peoples represented in the museum’s vast collection. From there you enter the damp, poorly lit bowels of the nineteenth-century museum. There, bison set behind thick panes of glass gallop in front of painted sunsets; mangy grizzly bears rear back on their hind legs, long claws chipped and brittle, dark glass eyes off-kilter. And in the next room, in beautiful old wooden cabinets, is what was at one time regarded as just another instance of the flora and fauna of North America: crudely sculpted, faceless Tlingit tribesmen in fringed robes and beaver-fur hats; dancing Nootka shamans in heavy bear costumes; and brightly painted Kwakiutl masks. What is not on exhibit, but is still part of the collection, are the thousands of skulls and skeletons of native Americans that were exhumed from graves by archeologists during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and even boiled down from fresh corpses strewn on battlefields.
Vancouver artist Brian Jungen stands in the doorway of a room at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York near the installation of his Prototypes for New Understanding, a series of twenty-three masks cunningly fashioned from Nike Air Jordan sneakers and human hair that bear a striking resemblance to the masks of Northwest Coast Indians. With his stocky build, broad face, and deep, dark eyes, Jungen casts a humble yet formidable presence.
It is just a week after an important mid-career survey of the thirty-fiveyear- old artist’s work opened at the New Museum (the show will subsequently travel to the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal ). But it is merely the latest step in Jungen’s ascent; over the past three years, the artist has had solo exhibitions in Montreal, Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and Vienna. It’s a long way from the interior of British Columbia, where Jungen, the child of a Swiss father and an aboriginal mother, was raised on a family farm on traditional Dane-zaa lands, before moving to Vancouver in 1988 to study at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design. Still, despite the exposure, the reserved, intense Jungen — hands in the pockets of his jeans, eyes fixed on the floor — is clearly ill at ease speaking in public. When asked about the relationship between his work and the art of his native ancestors, Jungen looks annoyed and impatient. “I was sort of pressured to make work about my identity, but then a lot of my exposure to my ancestry is through museums,” he says. “And the objects and artifacts in museums are not actually ceremonial.”
One of the most striking things about Prototypes for New Understanding, before the rich irony and cutting humour become apparent, is how beautiful and finely crafted the fierce, confrontational masks are. Clearly that is part of the reason they were such a catalyst for Jungen’s career. In “Prototype for New Understanding #4” (1998), for instance, the artist has unstitched the padded white leather tops of the shoes and splayed them out into a face, the black sides stretched and stuffed to form a pair of goofy ears, and the plush red interior pulled out to form a thick, curled tongue. Long strands of coarse black human hair hang from the back of the mask; in its otherwise empty white eyes is the Air Jordan logo, Michael Jordan leaping mid-air for a slam dunk.
“Prototype #9” (1999) has a grotesque, even menacing bent snout and lurid red lips; in “Prototype #11” (2002), buckled red leather bands strap shoes around a crinkled mouth hole to look like outstretched wings from which hair cascades; and the hooked beak in “Prototype #13” (2003) gives the appearance of a prehistoric bird, with a long shiny tail of hair attached to the back. Many of the sculptures in Prototypes for New Understanding resemble the distorted, shapeshifting animal forms — now demonic, now obscene and comic —common in Northwest Coast masks. But Jungen considers this series to be at least partly an exploration of material and form, and works such as “Prototype for New Understanding #20” (2004), a mandala-like wheel of shoes, as well as the closely related wall relief Variant I (2002), are almost wholly abstract. “My work is not about my personal relationship to these [native] traditions,” Jungen told me, “but about the interface of traditions with wider contemporary culture. I am interested in the role of native art in culture rather than in an interpretation of that culture.”
In a 1999 exhibition of the Prototypes in Vancouver, Jungen also included mural-sized wall paintings based on sketches he solicited from passersby, who had been asked to draw what they thought of as “native art.” Rendered in cheerful colours, the works reflect crude stereotypes of both aboriginal people and the range of aboriginal art: there are eagle heads, Indian braves in war paint wearing feathered headbands, teepees, totem poles, and frolicking whales. These drawings are fantasies about what historian Daniel Francis calls the “Imaginary Indian,” a romantic figure created since the middle of the nineteenth century by the depictions of First Nations people and culture by writers, painters, anthropologists, filmmakers, politicians, and others. Prototypes addresses a similar issue, but from a different and more complicated angle.
Northwest Coast masks have been fetishized and obsessively collected as shining instances of authentic aboriginal art. Jungen, on the other hand, has taken a popular line of a brand that has itself become a collector’s item and transformed it into one-of-a-kind works of “native art” that might in turn be mass-produced. “Before products are outsourced for production,” Jungen told me, “a design team creates several prototypes of which one is selected. I liked this idea of reversing it by using the mass-produced object to create a singular handmade prototype. I thought the Jordan trainers were a perfect icon to illustrate the idea of a global product reworked by the local.” Yet Jungen’s masks also suggest a different kind of prototype — one for a native art, and a native identity, that are not paralyzed by the past, that have the impurity and flexibility to move into the future.
For another series of sculptural works, which includes Shapeshifter (2000), Cetology (2002), and Vienna (2003), Jungen crafted what look like huge whale skeletons made out of white plastic lawn chairs. Like Prototypes, Jungen’s skeletons do not initially appear to be constructed out of familiar, mass-produced material, a fact that comes as a revelation to most viewers, complicating an otherwise pristine illusion. In Shapeshifter, the tail has a long, slow undulation, but the central portion of the body is compacted and the head sharp, a ribbed cartilage at the top like a fin. Vienna, on the other hand, has an intricate body composed of curved parts that seem captured in a whipping, forward motion, its head long, elegant, and open.
Jungen’s refined formalism and meticulous craftsmanship are counterbalanced by the materials he employs and the histories his images evoke. The whale skeletons are not meant to be anatomically correct, but they are modelled after skeletons typically housed in natural-history museums. Indeed, the giant plastic sculptures are suspended from the ceiling and bathed in clinical white light that self-consciously evokes the style of presentation in museums, and they are closely related to the concerns of Prototypes. After all, whalebones are the remnants of a species driven to the edge of extinction by white North America’s voracious appetite for the fuel oil extracted from whales, and they are also part of the collections of museums whose storage vaults are stocked with the artifacts and bones of aboriginal peoples.
In these works, Jungen is interested in the way the skeletons evoke the stories and myths of the Northwest Coast tribes. In addition, the petroleum used in the manufacture of the plastic chairs nods not just to the whaling industry but more generally to the expansion of European civilization on the Western frontier that irreversibly disrupted the lives of First Nations peoples. These are among Jungen’s most lyrical works. Suspended from barely visible string, the white of the plastic chairs is cool and ghostly, and a sculpture like Cetology looks fragile, held together by a delicate balance. It is a triumph that something eerie and beautiful can be salvaged out of material as mundane as plastic chairs.
