Date posted: February 10, 2007

Brian Jungen Retrospective

Witte de With, Rotterdam (until February 11, 2007)

I had already seen some images of Brian Jungen's masks made out of Nike Air Jordan trainers so I was delighted to visit an exhibition of his work just before it closed. As a matter of fact the exhibition at Witte de With in Rotterdam, which is on until February 11, is his first major solo show in Europe.

To me the masks look like African tribal masks. To a native Canadian they may look more like Indian masks, although an association with the protective masks worn by icehockey keepers is also possible. As Brian Jungen himself has said (somewhere): "The Nike mask sculptures seemed to articulate a paradoxical relationship between a consumerist artefact and an 'authentic' native artifact."

A similar tension can be found in the lay-out of the exhibition. The masks are presented in the way traditional masks are displayed in ethnographic museums. Another work, and one of the highlights of the show, a whale skeleton made of plastic garden chairs, Cetology (2002), is displayed in the manner of natural history museums. As a viewer you are thus confronted by a flood of associations. You recognize the object, the material from which it is made, the mode of presentation.

In all his work Brian Jungen recycles material taken from mass culture and turns them into hybrid objects with multiple connotations. Some of the political connotations escape me, since I'm not familiar with the Canadian context they refer to, but for once this doesn't matter since the gap between cultures is one of Jungen's themes. It probably also says something about me that I see Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time (2001), which consists of piles of cafetaria trays that hide a television set inside its core, first as an ironic commentary on Donald Judd like minimalism. The same goes for some other works which to me recall the work of Dan Flavin and other minimalists.