Shapeshifter

Brian Jungen, Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005), partial installation view. Photo Trevor Mills/Vancouver Art Gallery.

In the 1988 TV campaign for Nike’s Air Jordan IIIs, Spike Lee played an awestruck basketball fan named Mars Blackmon. “Yo Money, it’s gotta be the shoes,” was Blackmon’s explanation for Michael Jordan’s unparalleled finesse. Forget hard work or good genes — the implication was that for a mere $150, anyone could fly.

Of course, anyone knew better. Still, the black, red and white shoes promised a taste of hope, fame, money, success, enlightenment. In their wake, footwear and advertising would forever change, with the profits from Nike’s Jordans ushering in shoe genealogy, guerilla marketing campaigns and all-out “lifestyling.” Ask any kicksologist (i.e., running shoe aficionado): AJs changed the world.

Or ask Brian Jungen.

“Air Jordans were the perfect product to address what I wanted to talk about,” the Vancouver-based artist says on the phone, reeling from a busy workweek. “I wanted to address commercialism and the fetishization of trainers and of Aboriginal art. I also wanted to address the division of labour, the production of goods and the relationship between the First and Third Worlds. There is a developing world within the First World on First Nations reserves.”

Brian Jungen, Prototype for New Understanding #8 (1999). Nike Air Jordans, hair. Collection of Colin Griffiths. Photo Trevor Mills/ Courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery.

Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005), Jungen’s series of West Coast Aboriginal masks made entirely from re-stitched Air Jordans, highlights his debut North American survey, Brian Jungen, an exhibit at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. The masks are stunning, with Nike’s iconic kicks transformed into a raven, killer whale, thunderbird, eagle and more.

Jungen starts with a simple premise: re-contextualizing consumer products to give them new meaning. Fine, nothing new there — Marcel Duchamp popularized “ready-made” art when he signed a urinal in 1917; most every artist thereafter has run with the idea in some direct or indirect way. Jungen, though, has found a way to up the stakes. By starting with a loaded palette — Air Jordans have more history than some small countries — and reconfiguring Nike’s shoes into coveted, spiritual Aboriginal symbols, he’s breeding mythical objects from two antithetical sources. He’s also, amazingly, doing it with his tongue delicately planted in his cheek.

The subversion of the commercial into the sacred raises questions of authenticity, manipulation, identity, abuse and the power of symbols and objects; all this from masks with tufts of free flowing hair sprouting from their Jordan tongues. It’s nice to find an artist who can comment on consumer fascination with cultural differences with such ease.

Jungen, born in 1970 in British Columbia’s Fort St. John to Aboriginal and Swiss parents, is a member of the Doig River band of B.C.’s Dane-Zaa Nation. He graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1992, and has been exhibiting ever since. Prototypes for New Understanding — first displayed in a 1999 exhibit at Vancouver’s Charles H. Scott Gallery — was the series that put him on the art world’s radar. It is now one of the most requested series from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s contemporary holdings. The latter institute is responsible for organizing the traveling exhibit, the timing of which couldn’t be better. Jungen is hot.

Cetology (2002). Plastic Chairs. Photo: Trevor Mills/Courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery.

And he’s about more than footwear. Cetology (2002) is the name of the 40-foot whale skeleton that’s currently hanging from the ceiling of the New Museum’s main exhibition hall. From afar the skeleton looks, well, skeletal — white, massive, historical. Up close? The entire thing is made from pieces of white, plastic lawn furniture, cut up and arranged meticulously to form a replica of the real thing, flippers and all. Two other whale skeletons in the exhibit, Vienna (2003) and Shapeshifter (2000), are smaller but equally as impressive in their plastic mimicry. This is the first time all three sculptures have been displayed together.

Like Jungen’s Prototypes, these “bones” can be viewed on many levels. Not only are the whale skeletons astounding to look at — think gigantic lawn-chair contortionism — but they are also about the earth (petroleum byproducts, waste, recycling), the function of objects (innovation, imagination, use), the conventions of museum display (value, worth, authority) and Aboriginal myth (a recurring theme in Jungen’s work). Shapeshifter — the smallest of the three whales, but still an intimidating 21 feet long — is named after a mythical creature that can morph from human to animal and back again.

Other works in the exhibit play with the reconfiguring and re-use of everyday objects, with baseball bats, cafeteria trays and more taking on new meaning; Jungen even used the shoeboxes from his mighty collection of Air Jordans to create Habitat I and II, tiny geodesic domes made as small homages to Buckminster Fuller and his work on utopian architecture. “I needed to do something with all of the boxes,” Jungen laughs.

Jungen is clearly in a good place. His work has a simple premise, uses universally recognizable objects, and revises without obscuring. He conveys his messages using a language we all speak, one of products and brands, signs and symbols.

He also has stamina. What’s obvious in this comprehensive exhibit is Jungen’s knack for working out and expanding on themes like mass production, cultural scavenging and perceptions of Aboriginal culture in a variety of different ways — and all in enough detail to keep his (and our) interest, but not so much that he loses focus. This can only bode well for his future. And what might that bring? Jungen mumbles something about, “ambitious projects… too early to tell.” Under his breath, I think I hear something that sounds like “the Tate.” The world’s Mecca for international contemporary art? I’m not the least bit surprised.

Brian Jungen’s survey is showing at New York City’s New Museum of Contemporary Art until Dec. 31. The exhibit travels to the Vancouver Art Gallery on Jan. 28, 2006.

Julia Dault is a Toronto writer.