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Introduction

Nicolaus Schafhausen

Brian Jungen is an unexpected artist, a belief I hold as strongly today as I did when I first saw his work. In 2002, during an intensive series of studio visits to over twenty artists in Vancouver, he was the only one whose practice stood out as clearly different. To my outsider’s eyes, as a European in Canada, it seemed that he had adopted the approach of his conceptual predecessors – artists such as Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace and Ken Lum – and transformed it into a strategy; internalizing it in order to move on and create something new.

When curating the group exhibition Nation at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 2003, I included Jungen’s work as I felt that it went far beyond the limited view of national identity embodied by so much German contemporary art, still concerned with the polarized experiences of East and West Germany. Today, at the head of a contemporary art center in the Netherlands, I still feel that Jungen’s work is much more complex and multifaceted in its exploration of cultural identity – whether national, international, or transnational – than any of his Dutch contemporaries. It appears to me that it is only the younger generation of Dutch artists who are beginning to deal with the true complexities of cultural identity, artists such as Melvin Moti, whom we have invited to respond to this exhibition.

Jungen treats his own dual cultural heritage as a resource, as a site for creativity. In the academic field, the question of cultural identity has been a topic of discussion for at least the last twenty years. Despite a recent shift in funding and political policy to promote cultural diversity in the arts, I see few examples of this working in the mainstream cultural field. Only recently, for example, have traditionally ethnographic collections in Europe begun to reconsider their own framing, to acknowledge the problematic nature of their origins and to seek alternative methods of conception and presentation for the future. In this, Jungen is ahead of the game, playing with ethnographic conventions whilst toying with the clichés of contemporary culture. Despite seeking to challenge our cultural assumptions, he is never moralistic and avoids adopting the superior position of the artist as genius.

Jungen is not only unusual due to his subject matter, but also in relation to his chosen medium. Few contemporary sculptors make such beautiful objects, or work at this strange intersection between the readymade, appropriation, transformation and translation (both material and metaphysical). So original is his method that it even throws into question – for me, at least – what a sculptor is today. In this book, Clint Burnham is even provoked to ask whether Jungen’s work is art. In many ways, it is the most “classical” art to be shown at Witte de With for some time, despite its original fusion of innovation and tradition. It is not abstract, but is both easy to identify and to identify with, depicting existing cultural products and borrowing from contemporary codes.

Brian Jungen is young to be having such a major retrospective. For me, the works on display at Witte de With are tied to a specific point in his artistic development and are also closely related to the period in which they were made: the turn of the century and the peak of globalization (intellectually if not de facto). For this reason, I consider the exhibition also as an artistic time capsule and I am intrigued to see what kinds of leitmotifs will emerge in Jungen’s practice in the coming years.

With this exhibition, I am also curious to see how the works on display function when shown outside of the North American continent, which is where they usually reside, primarily in Canadian private and public collections. Despite the European roots of the colonization of the New World, we no longer share the same history. For us, when contemplating Jungen’s Prototypes for New Understanding, our immediate associations are more likely to be African masks or Pablo Picasso than the cultural products of First Nations’ artists. Whether Jungen’s own translations can be successfully translated into a totally new cultural context remains to be seen. Will his work pack the same political punch as it does at home? To Witte de With’s audience (40% Dutch, 60% international), will it be viewed as a body of work located purely within the globalized art system, its geographic origin of little importance? Or will it be read as the product of a specific geo-political and historical situation?

This publication functions not only as a record of Brian Jungen’s exhibition at Witte de With, but also as a textbook that complements and extends the existing publications on his work. The interview by Solange de Boer and Zoë Gray with Homi K. Bhabha – a key thinker in postcolonial studies and in the notion of cultural hybridity – is here a metadiscourse, bringing to the fore the concepts at the heart of Jungen’s practice and acting as a theoretical umbrella to this entire project. Edgar Schmitz’s essay takes us into the architectural interior of Jungen’s projects, revealing the artist’s fascination with both human and animal behavior, and the monstrous potential of the point at which they overlap. Jessica Morgan reflects upon her own experience of curating a project with Jungen, and shares with us her insights into his working method. Jungen’s monumental whale skeleton sculptures are the subject of study for Clint Burnham, who regards them in the light of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Through this diverse range of approaches and written formats, and through the experience of the exhibition itself, we aim to enable numerous points of entry into the intricate practice of this important international artist.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone at the Vancouver Art Gallery for their hard work in enabling this transatlantic collaboration to take place. I would also like to express our gratitude to the Canadian Embassy in The Hague and to the Department for Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada for their support. Thank you also to the writers who have contributed to this publication and to Brian Jungen, without whom this project would never have existed.