Brian Jungen Sculpture

Over the last 15 years Brian Jungen of Vancouver has become the prince of metamorphosis in art, his special talent celebrated by museums from Korea to Vienna. This season, till August 8, his retrospective, titled Strange Comfort, dominates the National Museum of Indian Art in Washington, D.C.

Jungen was born 40 years ago in Fort St. John, B.C., to a Swiss father and a mother from the Dunne-za, a First Nation of the Athapaskan language group. His sculpture often takes Indian-derived forms, modified by his sophisticated knowledge of modern styles and his ironic sense of art's place in the world.

He's built his successful career on transforming familiar manufactured objects into something no one else could have expected. He looks at Nike basketball shoes, for instance, and sees that they might become, with modifications, effective versions of masks made by West Coast Indians.

He examines expensive golf bags and decides they could be made to look something like totem poles. He ponders white plastic garden chairs and reshapes them into an astonishingly effective sculpture of a whale skeleton.

He has the ability to repurpose (a newish verb, since the 1980s) common objects. He practices an art of radical substitution, an inspired form of surrealist confusion. This method requires an artist who can throw a strange, startling light on even the most pedestrian objects. The central idea goes back at least to Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), who flourished at the Hapsburg court in Vienna and today holds his place in the museums for his grotesque portraits of humans apparently composed of fruit, vegetables, fish and other produce. In the 1940s Picasso followed a similar course in some of his most memorable sculptures, like a bicycle seat made into the head of a bull, two toy cars that became the head of a baboon, and a pair of milk pitchers reborn as a goat's udder.

Whether by Arcimboldo, Picasso or Jungen, the original form remains clearly visible in the finished work of art, making the change into a form of comedy. Works in this tradition emphasize art's power over the material world, its eerie way of undermining the reality of commonplace objects. It seems likely that Jungen, consciously or not, has followed Picasso's example; from Picasso he seems to have acquired a kind of license to set up as an alchemist of imagery.

Jungen's work has added new levels of complexity to the already enormously complex subject of Indian culture. The catalogue accompanying the current show has an essay by Paul Chaat Smith, a Comanche who is an associate curator of the National Museum of the American Indian. He calls Jungen "that rare artist whose work is accessible yet unsettling, funny yet infused with loss."

Anyone can see why the work is funny but why does it express a sense of loss? Because Jungen's reworking of Indian masks and other icons can be understood as an uneasy form of mourning for the societies that first produced these objects.

Long-ago Indian tribes placed art at the centre of their communal lives. That's now part of the past. In the 21st century, native art can still be created, and may still call itself "authentic," but among Indians of today it has apparently lost the force and meaning once taken for granted. For many contemporary Indians, the old images that Jungen adroitly manipulates evoke only nostalgia.

Some of Jungen's admirers like to see his work as a criticism of consumerism. Some of the wall texts accompanying his work in Washington express that view. But Smith argues the opposite: "While many Native artists, for understandable reasons, relentlessly skewer non-Indian ideas about who we are, Jungen brings them into his exhibitions and practically invites them to tea."

For years Jungen has been celebrated in museums and galleries that ignore issues of ethnicity and devote most of their space to contemporary art in the various Western traditions.

It's unusual to see him embraced by the National Museum of the American Indian, which deals mainly in historic art and artifacts. Paul Chaat Smith's role as curatorial explainer of Jungen provides yet another kind of complexity.

Smith, known in the past for his radical position within the American Indian Movement, opposed the very idea that Indians should have a museum of their own to sit beside all the other Smithsonian buildings on the magnificent D.C. Mall, bearing the imprimatur of the federal government.

Smith called this separate tribute to Indian art "a bad idea whose time has come." But last year he included, in his collection of essays, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (University of Minnesota Press), a rueful explanation of why his negative feelings about the museum evaporated when he realized he needed a job. The ambiguities to be found in his writing about Jungen are matched by the ambiguities in his own career as a civil servant.

Given Jungen's own background and his frequent use of commercial products to depict traditional forms, he attracts critics anxious to incorporate his work within their own views of society. Cuauhtmoc Medina, a curator at the National University of Mexico, sees Jungen's art as a way to turn the familiar styles of tribal culture into a critique of consumerism and the market economy: "His works are games that mobilize aesthetic and cultural misunderstandings to explore ways to politicize cultural stereotypes in the age of global capitalism." (In the slightly different game that Medina plays, the phrase "in the age of global capitalism" can be tacked on the end of almost any conceivable sentence.) For Daina Augaitis of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the cutting up of Nike footwear "literally rips apart an icon of trendy consumerism, lancing the seemingly impenetrable hold of commodity culture."

It would be cruel to deprive these critics of their clichs, but Jungen's work deserves better. A large selection of it, such as the one now in Washington (and another scheduled for the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto next year) demonstrates the diversity of his ideas, the generosity of his intentions and the largeness of his imagination. He can't be contained within the conventions of art-speak or the stunted imaginations of people who demand that art provide a confirmation of their own tired politics. Jungen, clever and shrewd and intensely self-aware, escapes from both ethnicity and rhetoric. He's an original.