I could go on about why I love Eyre's movie about James' work, especially this shot, and James would expect me not to be quiet this morning. When an installation artist like James passes, the loss is too great to talk about immediately because it was James' use of his body and voice within his art space that can never be replaced, but later we will try as he did in making his Chapel for Pablo Tac. To feel that loss, I think James would say that home was more important than art, so at La Jolla there's a great piece missing this morning.
I want everyone "down the hill" to have a sense of what we've all lost. I wrote the article below for The Union Tribune around 1995. It's not up to date because over the years James gave much more. Just a month ago after dinner he shared a movie he made using The Beach Boys' "In My Room."
James Luna told us, "we got it all...so tap it down." We will do so.
When James Luna says,
"I'm a California dude," he doesn't mean that he surfs. He means that
he knows who he is. And who he is an installation/performance artist who uses
traditional Native American art forms as well as surf music and video.
Ironically,
much of Southern California does not know about Luna though he is nationally
respected performance and multimedia artist. Luna may have performed and had
his work in some the most prestigious museums in the United States--including
The Whitney Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of
Natural History--but he has yet to present a performance piece in San Diego
County where he is a member the Luiseño Indians at the La Jolla Reservation in
North County (He has, however, exhibited installations at Centro Cultural de la
Raza, and his "Artifact Piece" from the Museum of Man later gained
international attention at The New Museum of Art's Decade Show in New York).
On
August 21, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in La Jolla will present Luna
in a lecture/performance that brings local audiences as close to a Luna
performance as they have ever been. Whether the evening at MCA conclude as
Luna's performance did at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts--with the audience
either standing on their feet or falling in worship at Luna's--is yet to be
seen.
"Let's
get this out front: theater is not what I am, though there are any number of
similarities," Luna says. "Installation is very broad and that's one
of its strengths. I approach it as I approach a painting. I don't think about
acting. I am not a trained actor. But that's not to say that I don't script or
monologue. I do, but it comes out of the art."
Many
of Luna's monologues emerge from the objects he creates. As multimedia art,
Luna's verbal expression cannot be separated from his visuals. He uses anything
he can to get his point across. In his performance piece The Shameman, Luna
portrays an enterprising shaman who sells objects that combine such disparate
materials as condoms and a tennis racket, a cellular phone and a buffalo horn.
Many artists lecture on their work, but few move back and forth between two-dimensional and performance work as Luna does. Consequently, Luna's lectures are unusual. "James' lecture is unlike anything we've done," says MCA education curator Seonid MacArthur. "His use of sound, movement and music in his performance pieces will be new for us...he's not so much about ritual as he is about combining his heritage and sense of ritual with humor."
Luna's
lectures did not always include performance. "I do this a lot and found
that showing slides or video of a performance didn't do it," Luna says. At
MCA, his lecture will include excerpts from Artifact Piece, Places for People
to Meet and The Shameman.
"I
am not a trained actor," Luna emphasizes. "I am a visual artist when
I do a performance piece, which comes from a different place than where actors
come from," Luna said. "And I am not just about Indian issues . . .
that should be clear in Shameman because there were other issues in that piece.
I'm a therapist, used car salesman and an evangelist."
Luna
is a California dude of this century, if not the next: "I use pop imagery
because I like it. It makes a nice soup, a blend. . . . Political art gets
caught up in being the victim and loses sight of the whole person."
Humor
is a good portion of Luna's recipe. "I've had people come to see me
thinking I'm going to do a nice tom-tom dance. And as I unload, they realize
this isn't what they came to hear," Luna says. "But they have every
right to leave--or to laugh."
The
laughter at his performance of Shameman at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts
was loud and long, coming from an audience primarily made up of Indians. Those
who came to see him dance to a tom-tom instead saw him fancydance to Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy."
Luna
asked the audience to hold hands: "It's not easy to hold hands. That's the
feel of humanity," he told the crowd." Touch that white person. Come
on you rich Arizona Indian."
In The Shameman, Luna's sense of humor cuts deeply in two directions:
first against "shamans" who sell spirituality and secondly whites who
buy it as a commodity. America may not be a happier place since European
contact complicated land, language and religion. But at least America is a
funnier place with white people here.
In
"Notes on My Art Work #674," Luna writes, "I am not a healer but
can be considered a clown." And clowning has its own healing power; as
Luna says humor is "the first step in recovery."
"That's
an Indianism, to be able to laugh at ourselves," Luna said, discussing the
sharp satire in Shameman. "We are really more alike than we are
different." It's the humor in Luna's work that lets the audience get close
enough to feel where the painful wounds are between us.
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