Art by Brian Jungen, this is a whale skeletons built with white, plastic, folding lawn chairs.
Why is the afterwash of an election so dispiriting? Stephen Harper's majority was the choice of substantially less than half the country, but it was still genuine change, and therefore interesting - at least until the commentariat got hold of it, and summarized, generalized and explicated it to death. Never before have so few minds told so many what to think, and why. A massive wave of intellectual certainty washed across the land, and suddenly I found myself muttering oaths at the multi-channelled enema bulb that is the media.
Luckily, I wandered by the Art Gallery of Ontario, where sculptor Brian Jungen was installing his new show the day after the vote. If you haven't heard of Mr. Jungen, you will: He's the new Andy Warhol, an artist from the Dunne-za tribe in northern British Columbia who sculpts fresh dreams from the status quo of our lives: whale skeletons built with white, plastic, folding lawn chairs; Haida masks out of reassembled Nike runners; totem poles from golf bags - icons transformed into new icons, after passing through the double filter of tradition and consumerism.
His new creations had been erected here and there between Henry Moore's famous plaster casts of massive-hipped women and giant interlocking bones. Mr. Jungen's creations are less arty: deer hides scraped and stretched around body panels from cars and trucks, and mounted on chest freezers. Hides, trucks and deep freezers are everyday objects where Mr. Jungen is from, and he lashes them together in ironic but uncynical ways. Anything can mean something, and nothing means only one thing.
It was 11 in the morning, an excellent time to be looking at art. Mr. Jungen, 42, goateed, soft-voiced, dressed in black, was sitting quietly in a corner. He refused to have his picture taken. A conversation ensued about what is real and what is not.
Grateful Bystander: Did you vote?
Brian Jungen: Yes, I did. In the advance poll.
GB: Were you happy with the result?
BJ: Uh. No. But I've never been on this side of the country during an election. In B.C., because we're the last polls to close, and we have a smaller population base, it's kind of predetermined by the time the media reports on our end.
GB: So it feels more real here?
BJ: No, I don't think it felt more real. It just felt faster. I guess. ( Laughs.) In terms of results. But nothing changed much in the West.
GB: Do you think of your work as realistic?
BJ: It exists in reality. So, yes. But it's not a representation of anything literal.
GB: So when you recently went up to northern B.C. to visit your family, to reconnect with their traditions and the environment, and you saw freezers and cars and skins of elk and deer that your relatives had hunted, at what point did all that come together in your brain?
BJ: Well, I started making these arrangements of things, and kind of putting them on top of freezers, just playfully, years ago, when I was up there. But I decided to kind of explore that further, in terms of making, I guess, formal artwork, if you will, in a gallery space. And I liked that I could just kind of buy the freezers anywhere, and use them as pedestals. They're kind of ready-mades - I like to use things that people have some sort of immediate relationship to.
GB: Hence whale skeletons made out of lawn chairs.
BJ: Yes.
GB: So what comes first, the whale skeleton or the lawn chair?
BJ: Uh. A bit of both, I suppose. I don't know - I don't think, I guess, in a linear way. More looking at things and how they may come apart, or how they can be used in different ways, or comparing different surfaces, textures and things like that - of everything: walls, buildings, furniture, products. … I rarely look at things and have this kind of epiphany, or this kind of moment where things happen. I think that's a very romantic way of looking at art production.
GB: Did you decide to put certain sculptures in front of certain Moore sculptures? Like that skin-and-auto-frame one in front of that tall dogbone-like Moore that looks like a Celtic cross?
BJ: Yeah, I wanted to make kind of group conversations, if you will, between the Moore pieces and my work. And also it's a beautiful room. … I don't really know that much about the individual Moore works. So I started to just kind of treat them as - people, in a way.
GB: Do you like the Moores?
BJ: Yeah, I do. Quite like them. I like some more than others. Just like I like art more than an artist. I don't like to say, "Oh, I really like that artist," because I like maybe some art of theirs more than others, you know? It's like music.
GB: So you're not a massive Moore student.
BJ: Oh no. I'd never really seen any other Moores than the one in Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver.
GB: Now that the campaign's over, does the election strike you as something real? In the same way that, for instance, you've got a sculpture here, some sawhorses made of beautiful prime cedar, propped in a corner - BJ: Douglas fir.
GB: Sorry, out of prime Douglas fir, beautiful practical objects that speak to the subject of the fir trees, to the use of them, and the abuse of them. … That's what's I find great about your work: It gives me lots of ideas. ( Pause.) But does the election seem real to you? Do politics seem real to you?
BJ: Politics at some kind of a micro-level, like band politics on my reserve, those kinds of politics have an immediate effect. In terms of the national election, I'm not - well, I guess we'll have to wait and see. I think it's real to the extent that it will affect people's lives. So, depends what he does.
I left a few minutes later. Out on the street, the city seemed fresh again, its details longing to be noticed. I felt a lot better. There wasn't a commentator in sight, waiting to tell me what was and wasn't important - because the country no longer meant just one thing, and one thing only.