A Commercial Vision

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Jungen is something of a cultural hybrid himself. His father, born in Switzerland, was 3 when he came to British Columbia with Jungen's grandparents, who had been enticed to Canada by government promises of farmable land. His mother was of native background, a member of the Dane-zaa Nation. "Interracial couples were very taboo," he says. "White guys could have native girls as girlfriends, but not wives." Jungen grew up on farms around Fort St. John, a once remote oil and logging center in northeastern British Columbia. He was 7 when his parents died in a fire; he was taken in by his father's sister and her husband. But by that time he had already absorbed his mother's gift, common among native peoples, of adapting objects to new uses, just as he does now. "She was constantly trying to extend the life of things," he says. "Packages, utensils. Once we had to use the back end of a pickup truck as an extension for our hog pen."

By 1992 Jungen was a graduate of Vancouver's celebrated Emily Carr College of Art and Design, where he had brushed up against Pop, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism and Conceptualism. One big influence--although he saw their work only in photographs--was New York City artists who played with the idea of consumer culture in the 1980s--think of Jeff Koons suspending those basketballs in fish tanks like miraculous relics, or Haim Steinbach, who simply placed consumer goods on nicely laminated wooden shelves, sleek altars for sacred merchandise. Five years after he finished school, Jungen had his first show. One year later, he made the first Prototype.

As a final irony, those Prototypes have become a kind of sacred merchandise in themselves, sought after by museums and collectors as that ultimate in magical commodities, a work of art. (They're even more valuable than vintage Nikes, which fetch a nice price on eBay.) The Vancouver-based Gen X writer Douglas Coupland has one. So does the great Air Jordan himself. His representatives contacted Jungen to acquire one last year after reading an article in Sports Illustrated about the New York City show. Once the Prototypes started selling briskly, Jungen may have been tempted to start churning them out like, well, like tribal art for the tourist trade. Instead, and wisely, he brought the product line to a different conclusion. He made just 23. That's the number Jordan made famous.

What matters most is that the Prototypes are not just political cartoons. They don't amount merely to the sum of their presumed meanings. Like real native masks--or Michael Jordan--they have a fascination that can never be entirely explained. All the same, if Jungen's thinking started and ended with the Prototypes, he would have a hit on his hands but not a career. But time and again he reorients himself, and ends up someplace interesting.

The Vancouver show includes his three massive mock whale skeletons--Shapeshifter, 2000; Cetology, 2002; and Vienna, 2003--all made from white plastic stackable lawn chairs. Even close up they look like the extravaganzas of bone formation beloved of natural-history museums. But in each of the lawn-chair "skeletons," nature becomes culture becomes nature again in an endless loop. These sea shapes are made of plastic, a product derived from oil, which is itself derived from condensed, fossilized creatures. And history, natural and otherwise, is complicated. Whaling was once a staple occupation of the Pacific Coast native peoples, until blubber was overtaken as a source of fuel by oil, which is used to make plastic. And so on.

For the Vancouver show, Jungen and some assistants also spent days producing a new work in one of the museum's galleries, an almost 6-m tepee made from the coverings and wooden slats of 11 black leather sofas, the denatured equivalent of cowhides. Home Depot meets home tepee. "We treated the sofas like cattle," he laughs. "We herded them in, then we gutted them, then we skinned them." He didn't brand them first. He didn't have to. You know right away this must be a Jungen.