Sunday, May 30, 2010

The artwork of Brian Jungen.

This month in Art in America there is an article about Brian Jungen. Jungen's artwork takes modern day common objects and transforms them into different cultural icons. His work draws reference to Marcel Duchamp's readymades but takes them to the next level. His work is awe inspiring, beautifully crafted, and brilliantly conceived.

The following passage is from wikipedia:
Jungen's art draws upon the tradition of "found art", espoused by such twentieth-century artists as Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp. Instead of presenting objects "as-is," however, Jungen often reworks them without fully concealing their original meaning or purpose. For instance, Jungen's series Prototypes of New Understanding consists of aboriginal masks assembled and hand-sewn from parts of Nike Air Jordan shoes. Jungen writes: "It was interesting to see how by simply manipulating the Air Jordan shoes you could evoke specific cultural traditions whilst simultaneously amplifying the process of cultural corruption and assimilation. The Nike mask sculptures seemed to articulate a paradoxical relationship between a consumerist artefact and an 'authentic' native artifact."













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