Native intelligence

By Blake Gopnik

The Washington Post

October 20, 2009

You could say that Brian Jungen, an Indian artist of the Dunne-za First Nation in British Columbia, is a classic shape shifter: He's taken Air Jordan running shoes and turned them into ritual animal masks.

Or you might say he's been possessed by the trickster spirit: He's assembled the skeleton of a whale, sacred to so many of this continent's first peoples, out of fragments of cheap plastic lawn chairs.

If you said either of those things, you'd be playing into Jungen's hands. His new show at the National Museum of the American Indian, called 'Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort,' is all about probing such cliches of Indianness, which stick like glue to anyone with native roots. That probing puts him on the leading edge of native culture, as well as in the thick of international contemporary art.

Those red, black and white Air Jordans, pulled apart and reassembled into masks, look a lot like the most famous Indian carvings of British Columbia and Washington state -- but what's that to Jungen? The coastal groups that make such carvings have almost nothing to do with his people, who occupy farmlands a thousand miles away, on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.

Natives are supposed to be in touch with nature in a way that all the rest of us no longer are, right? And yet Jungen's own people are more likely to know plastic lawn chairs than an aquatic mammal that swims in oceans they may never have seen, except on TV.

Outsiders, and some natives, have often bought into a notion of 'Indianness' that risks leveling such differences. It's easy to act as though there's some Indian essence underlying groups that are actually more different from each other, by far, than the French are from Norwegians. Though we'd never make the mistake of imagining Parisians eating lutefisk, we're happy to imagine Dunne-za communing with whales.

We also wouldn't demand that every Frenchman wear a beret, but we do something close to that in dealing with the Indians who live right among us.

'Native cultures are living, and shouldn't be in the Museum of Natural History. . . . It's good for people to realize native art isn't just beads and carving,' says Jungen, giving me a tour of his show at NMAI. (There's always a risk in reviewing art alongside the people who've made it: They can be their own worst interpreters. But because the content of Jungen's art partly comes from our reading of its maker, it seemed sensible to look at it with him. It felt almost like looking at van Gogh's 'Postman' under the eye of his mail carrier.)

Jungen, a compact 39-year-old with cropped hair, a goatee and mustache, admits he has dabbled in the same weaving his native aunts are expert at. But whatever an outsider might think, it's important to Jungen that the patterns in his textiles have nothing to do with tradition, and that they be woven from sports jerseys cut into strips. A piece called 'Blanket No. 7' basket-weaves together one NBA jersey marked 'Iverson' with another that says 'Bryant,' forcing those famous rivals into a permanent coexistence.

Jungen says he is just as interested in 'the role of sports fans in culture' -- in 'the ceremony and pageantry of it all' -- as in any ties that pageantry might have to Indian culture and ceremony. But he also knows he's stuck with being an 'Indian artist,' and with being read as such, by whites and by his fellow natives. Culture is our biggest business, except for gambling,' writes NMAI curator Paul Chaat Smith, a Comanche, in his catalogue essay.

'Everything in here, because this is the Native American museum, will be read as Native American,' says Jungen. There's no way around the fact that, stretched taut in their display case at NMAI, the woven basketball jerseys of 'Blanket No. 7' read as halfway between a home-tanned hide and some kind of pseudo-Indian rug. (The piece has actually displaced a traditional Navajo textile that used to fill its vitrine.)

Jungen says this is the first time he's shown in an Indian art museum. Until now, his success has come from showing in major 'white' institutions such as the New Museum in New York and Tate Modern in London, as well as in group shows and biennials all around the world. The effect of the new Washington venue has been strange.

When Jungen made 'People's Flag,' a huge scarlet banner sewn together from red clothing, red umbrella skins and other mass-produced red textiles, it was to show at the Tate in 2006. The piece paid homage to the long history of popular protest and to England's left. 'It seemed awkward for me to make some sort of statement about the native condition in London,' Jungen recalls.

But as it hangs in his show at the NMAI, Jungen has discovered that 'People's Flag' is being interpreted as the flag of a united Red Nation of Indian peoples -- a concept that doesn't really exist in Canada, he says, where native groups tend to retain their separate identities.

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