Air Jungen

Not all of Jungen’s work is overtly about the stereotypes with which First Nations peoples have typically been cast or about questions of identity in a global society, but these issues have a way of creeping into his work. This may be because Jungen’s art subtly raises the question — without answering it — of the possibility of a regional culture and identity that moves beyond nostalgia in a world where a kid can grow up on remote Dane-zaa lands and learn less about First Nations culture than about the television programs and pop music and hip-hop fashions worshipped by kids in Toronto. Jungen has often insisted that the work he makes out of Air Jordan trainers is not inspired by a passion for the player or for basketball but rather by the branding and celebrity-endorsement issues that arise from professional sports.

The somewhat cagey Jungen now admits there is probably more to it. “I only considered this idea of ceremony a few years ago,” he said. “It occurred to me that I was making facsimiles of one kind of ceremonial garment out of another and that the role of sport in culture in a way fulfills a kinship ritual that ceremonial competitions once did in non-western societies.”

In a society where religious ceremony no longer creates a sense of collective identity, sport is the secular ritual that provides fantasies of excellence and moments of transcendence. For Court, which debuted in 2004 at Triple Can- die gallery in Harlem, New York, Jungen built a basketball court to scale out of 224 wooden tabletops that had been used in sweatshops, leaving open the rectangular holes and notches where the industrial sewing machines would normally be set. The three-point arc is carefully painted in; there are hoops suspended at either end. The laminated wood of a basketball court, waxed and polished to a mirror shine, has a sleek, seamless elegance, but Jungen’s court is thick and even brutal, and the ironies it embodies are equally blunt. The sewing machines that would have been screwed into the tabletops could easily have been rattling in front of workers in the crowded sweatshops of China, cranking out the beautiful and heraldic white, black, and red Air Jordans that would eventually be on the feet of nba stars or those of native kids fantasizing about those nba stars.

Jungen’s court is one that the viewer figuratively trips over. It is more than simply a statement about the brands and endorsements of big-money sports and the hard economic realities that underlie them; its metaphors are far more ambiguous and suggestive than that. Perhaps basketball courts stand in for the ceremonial spaces — religious, political, social — that have traditionally served to bind a people’s identity. Perhaps what Jungen’s fractured, makeshift court implies is the great extent to which such spaces have become compromised.

Brian Jungen’s art inevitably has an ambivalent relationship with museums, even those devoted to contemporary art, where curators are sensitive to the suspicion with which artists often approach institutions. A lot of Jungen’s early work is fuelled by an interest in the institutional presentation of First Nations culture as an appropriate object of scrutiny for scientists rather than students of human history. David Hurst Thomas’s seminal history of anthropology and archeology, Skull Wars, was premised on the idea that native culture was essentially extinct. Art works such as Shapeshifter and Cetology were in part inspired by visits to Vancouver’s aquarium, a different kind of museum, its thick glass windows providing an underwater view of the resident killer whale. Jungen commented, “I wanted to reference the aquarium and the captivity of the animals,” and that seems more apt: works of art in museums often feel as though they are being held captive, in a kind of solitary confinement, unable to engage with the world unfolding around them.

In recent years, Jungen has become increasingly oriented toward temporary works set in less institutional environments — what he likes to call “structures for habitation.” His interest in architecture, in the aesthetics and politics of the spaces in which we live, is by no means new. Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time (2001) is modelled after a hollowed-out stack of blue lunch trays that were used in a 1980 prison escape from the Millhaven Institution and which are now part of the collection of the Correctional Service of Canada Museum in Kingston, Ontario. In Jungen’s piece, each of the approximately 1,200 trays represents an aboriginal male incarcerated in a Canadian prison, the different colours correspond to the length of sentences meted out, and the sounds one hears represent the televisions provided in the windowless cells. For Little Habitat I (2003) and Little Habitat II (2004), Jungen meticulously cut up Air Jordan boxes and assembled them into compact geodesic domes. Both Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time and the Habitat works are about alienation and failure — of architecture used to isolate and repress, of a mode of high-modernist formalism that Jungen is clearly drawn to but that is disconnected from the character of living communities.

Several of Jungen’s recent projects, on the other hand, propose a more symbiotic relationship between “structures of habitation” and the world that surrounds them. Habitat 04 — Cité radieuse des chats/ Cats Radiant City (2004), first shown at the old Darling Foundry in Montreal,consisted of stacked plywood units covered with carpet that served as temporary housing for some of the city’s many stray cats. Jungen and staff at the Darling Foundry worked with the local humane society in an effort to arrange for the adoption of the cats.

Echoing the title of Le Corbusier’s never-realized Radiant City, and alluding to Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 housing project in Montreal, Habitat 04 introduces the flux and indeterminacy of life into austere modernist forms. For Inside Today’s Home (2005), Jungen constructed an elaborate suspended birdhouse for domesticated finches out of ikea periodical- file boxes and shelving brackets. The exhibit was viewed from the outside, through peepholes in a plywood wall or on closed-circuit television.

Compared with Court, Habitat 04 and Inside Today’s Home are optimistic works. They suggest that we need to stop thinking of the divide between nature and culture as sharp and unequivocal, that we need to give up the idea that history offers us identities and ways of living that have stable boundaries. Perhaps what it means to be part of a live culture, rather than terminally relegated to the storage facilities of museums of natural history and anthropology, is to be part of something that is unstable, ephemeral, and continuously transforming.

At the end of his talk and walking tour of his exhibition at the New Museum, Jungen glances at Modern Sculpture — blobby floor sculptures made from silver soccer balls filled with lava rocks he created for a group show in Iceland — and moves on to talking stick (2005). Jungen may be drawn to the kinds of site-specific installations that are popular with critics, but he is at heart a sculptor and a consummate craftsman.