At the Indian Museum: Native intelligence.

By Blake Gopnik WASHINGTONAuYou could say that Brian Jungen, an Indian artist of the Dunne-za First Nation in British Columbia, is a classic shape shifter: HeAAEs taken Air Jordan running shoes and turned them into ritual animal masks.Or you might say heAAEs been possessed by the trickster spirit: HeAAEs assembled the skeleton of a whale, sacred to so many of this continentAAEs first peoples, out of fragments of cheap plastic lawn chairs.If you said either of those things, youAAEd be playing into JungenAAEs hands. His new show at the National Museum of the American Indian, called AoBrian Jungen: Strange ComfortAo, 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 stateAubut whatAAEs 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 JungenAAEs 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 AoIndiannessAo that risks leveling such differences. ItAAEs easy to act as though thereAAEs some Indian essence underlying groups that are actually more different from each other, by far, than the French are from Norwegians. Though weAAEd never make the mistake of imagining Parisians eating lutefisk, weAAEre happy to imagine Dunne-za communing with whales.AoNative cultures are living, and shouldnAAEt be in the Museum of Natural History. ... ItAAEs good for people to realize native art isnAAEt just beads and carving,Ao says Jungen, giving me a tour of his show at NMAI.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, itAAEs 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 AoBlanket No. 7Ao basket-weaves together one NBA jersey marked AoIversonAo with another that says AoBryant,Ao forcing those famous rivals into a permanent coexistence.Jungen says he is just as interested in Aothe role of sports fans in cultureAoAuin Aothe ceremony and pageantry of it allAoAuas in any ties that pageantry might have to Indian culture and ceremony. But he also knows heAAEs stuck with being an AoIndian artist,Ao and with being read as such, by whites and by his fellow natives. Culture is our biggest business, except for gambling,Ao writes NMAI curator Paul Chaat Smith, a Comanche, in his catalog essay.AoEverything in here, because this is the Native American museum, will be read as Native American,Ao says Jungen. ThereAAEs no way around the fact that, stretched taut in their display case at NMAI, the woven basketball jerseys of AoBlanket No. 7Ao 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 heAAEs shown in an Indian art museum. Until now, his success has come from showing in major AowhiteAo 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 AoPeopleAAEs FlagAo, 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 EnglandAAEs left. AoIt seemed awkward for me to make some sort of statement about the native condition in London,Ao Jungen recalls.But as it hangs in his show at the NMAI, Jungen has discovered that AoPeopleAAEs FlagAo is being interpreted as the flag of a united Red Nation of Indian peoplesAua concept that doesnAAEt really exist in Canada, he says, where native groups tend to retain their separate identities. (Here in the United States, weAAEve got such things as Rednation.net, a Web site for Indian issues, and the Red Nation Film Festival in Los Angeles.)JungenAAEs dad was Swiss Canadian, and he says it was his fatherAAEs family who first took him in after both his parents died in a fire when he was 7. But somehow only his late mother, as a Dunne-za, manages to count in the interpretation of his art.Her artist son has embraced her culture. HeAAEs spent long spells with his Indian relations on farms near the far northern town of Fort St. John, on the border of British Columbia and Alberta, and hopes some day to build a home there. (He now lives mostly in Vancouver, where he moved to attend Emily Carr College of Art and Design. After finishing there in 1992, he lived for a few years in New York but wound up Aotoo poorAo to stay.) Jungen insists, however, that Aomy involvement with my family and traditions is personalAuitAAEs not where my art comes from.AoAt least some of his art comes from much more public perceptions, and misconceptions, of Indianness in the contemporary world. ItAAEs as though Jungen has figured out that his best chance at undermining the clichE[umlaut]s is from within, by inhabiting them.ThatAAEs why he is happy the NMAI is displaying the Air Jordan masks in deluxe plexiglass cases, with the kind of theatrical spotlighting usually reserved for AoexoticAo ethnographic artifacts. It gives his art, though clearly sourced in mass-market retail culture, the potent aura of ritual objects. That is close to what Air Jordans really are in the larger culture all of us swim in. Jungen says that some kids see only the cut-up shoes, and donAAEt get the native references at allAuand that doesnAAEt leave them any less intrigued. AoPeople respond to the work so well because they have a personal relationship to mass-produced materials,Ao Jungen says.The way he hybridizes shoes and masksAuor golf bags and totem poles, as in six soaring sculptures now at NMAIAumay in fact have more to do with the sampling and mash-ups of mainstream DJ culture than they do with any esoteric native traditions.Washington Post photos by Sarah L. Voisin.LATWP News Servic

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