Alexandra Lockett

Metamorphosis: Brian Jungen and Simon Starling

Brain Jungen was born in 1970 to a Swiss-Canadian father and a First Nations mother and was brought up in the Dane-zaa nation of north-eastern British Columbia.   Jungen draws upon his dual heritage as the source for his work.   His highly aesthetic objects combine the images and objects associated with the capitalist West with images (often stereotypical) of Indian and First Nations art.   Although an established artist in North America, Jungen's work is little known in Europe (his first solo show in Europe is currently on at Witte de With, in Rotterdam).   Some of the political significance and aspects of his work might be somewhat lost on the European.   Simon Starling was born in 1967 in Epsom, UK.   Despite his different background, Starling similarly addresses issues of nationality, politics, and identity.   Jungen and Starling also use similar mechanisms in their work.   Both explore the process of transformation, the history of modernism, utopian architecture, and the animal.

Both Jungen and Starling labour intensively transform objects, reconstructing them to suggest something else or to change them entirely.   Starling often changes one object into an entirely new object, with clues to its previous existence; for example, a silver ladle is cut in half, and one half is transformed into counterfeit twenty pence pieces; half a ladle and the twenty pence pieces are displayed side by side.   Jungen makes rebel objects, hybrid objects which slip between the readymade, alteration, and appropriation; for example, Nike trainers become masks.   Both Jungen and Starling recognize the global economy and capitalism as a basis for communication.   Jungen uses material and images from mass culture to comment on the current economic and political climate.   The cultural history of Starling's silver ladle (it was made by a Glaswegian silversmiths) and what it is transformed into (money) also evoke economic systems.

Jungen's Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005) are a contemporary example of bricolage: a set of what seem to be ceremonial masks which, rather than being carved from wood, have been produced by cutting and remolding red, white, and black Nike Air Jordan trainers.   Jungen plays on the similarity between Coastal design and the trademark colours of the legendary Air Jordans and creates artifacts that fuse two iconic sources: Nike footwear and Aboriginal masks.   The Prototypes slip between being a fake consumer product and an authentic native artifact, disrupting expected museological frameworks and ethnographic displays.   Our cultural assumptions are questioned.   Where are these objects from?   To whom do they belong?   How should they be categorized?   Where should they be displayed?

The transformative nature of the Prototypes echo the transformative nature of the American trainers (which is its main selling point)- wear these and you will become a sports star like Michael Jordan.   Jungen uses professional sports as a model for political tactics.   The American shoes used to make the sculptures are a symbol of something "all American".   The work reflects the current climate of American aggression and abandonment of international diplomacy.

Similarly, Simon Starling takes objects to make new objects, hinting at their previous existence.   Work, Made-Ready , 1997, appears to be an ordinary bicycle, perhaps a Duchampian bicycle.   But look closer and we see the aluminium frame has been welded and cut, suggesting it has been fashioned from something else.   The bike frame is made from a Charles Eames chair.   A classic design item has been transformed into a commonplace leisure consumer good, which is, in turn, transformed into a work of art.   The second half of Work, Made-Ready is vice versa of the first- an Eames chair made from a bike.

Starling's work asks us: What is the difference between high art and everyday culture?   How differently are mass production and serial production evaluated in different contexts?   Can art be useful?   What is authentic?

Both Jungen and Starling have an interest in the animal, and in particular architecture for animals.   For Burn Time, 2002 , Starling built a fully functioning hen coop in the Scottish Highlands.   The coop is a reduced scale model of Bremen's neo-classical Ostertor building, 1826.   Today the building is a museum in the memory of Bauhaus designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld.   Wagenfeld designed a revolutionary egg boiler between 1931-1935, a functional icon of new design.   Several months later, the eggs that the hens had laid were available at the Camden Art Centre.   The heat used to cook the eggs was provided by the Wagenfeld house - it was destroyed and used as firewood.   A paltry chicken coop is first transformed into a cultural monument, then into a work of art, and then used as a mere source of heat.   These metamorphoses portray a circuitous chain of links which have as their theme opposing aspects such as cultural and physical reception, artistic and natural production, and birth and destruction.

Brian Jungen has also designed homes for animals.   Habitat 04- Cats Radiant City , 2004, is a cat sanctuary for stray and abandoned cats.   Jungen worked in collaboration with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to set up a new system for finding homes for stray cats and a new way of fundraising for the society.   So, for example, rather than having a glitzy exhibition opening, a fundraising dinner was organized, and limited edition floor mats were sold.

The work harks to the modernist ideas of Le Corbusier in his visionary but unrealized project Radiant City and Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67 housing development.   Le Corbusier and Safdie attempted to solve the problem of mass housing by proposing housing which was inexpensive, promoted density with privacy, and promoted a sense of the social and communal.   Jungen's Habitat 04- Cats Radiant City is made from boxes covered with pink, brown, and cream carpet, materials at the other extreme to those used in Modernist architecture.   To keep them entertained and fit the cats were provided with a gagcym.   Despite the comfort of the Cats Radiant City , there is also a more sinister side.   The city is scattered with CCTV cameras, which capture images of the cats, and broadcast them on TV screens in the gallery restaurant.   Rather than pointing to utopia, the city points to distopia, a modern model of social control and surveillance.

Habitat 04- Cats Radiant City is one of several archetectual works by Jungen.   In Little Habitat Jungen pays homage to the creator of the geodistic dome - Buckminster Fuller. Geodesic domes are a form associated with utopian architectural and social vision.   During the post war housing shortage these structures were important- they could be constructed easily, rapidly, cheaply, using readily available equipment and materials.   Many artists have used the geodistic dome in their work- for example: N55, the artists at Black Mountain College, and Mario Mertz.  

But Jungen's Micheal Jordan shoe box domes point to distopia.   Little Habitat conflate the empty dreams of utopian architecture with the false promises of commercial products - monuments to disappointment.   Jungen's Little Habitat is little, to small to inhabit, the human towers over it.   Yet it implies inhabitation - Jungen uses objects and materials that are usually associated with shelter, clothes, warmth, food, and economy.  

Jungen and Starling are interested in the relationship between the economic, cultural, and use value of objects.   Their practices consider a wide range of issues from identity politics and globalization, to ecology.   Their work engages in discourses of the ready-made, machine made and hand made, transformation, and the changing value of labor.   Both artists examine the processes that are behind existing objects, reversing, perverting, or deconstructing them to make new objects.   Today, our lives are extremely complex; Starling and Jungen go some way to exposing this complexity, relentlessly trying to get to the bottom of it.