
James Luna
James Luna once lay in a vitrine of the kind found in natural-history museums, a live exhibit, his scars from drunken accidents marked with little labels. And in a videotape of a Christmas Eve spent at home on the Luiseño reservation in California (made in 1993 with filmmaker Isaac Artenstein), Luna was the picture of abjection, going through a six-pack and innumerable cigarettes while making abortive telephone calls to loved ones. The bleakness in I.una’s work has functioned as a protective camouflage, as a way of saying, “There’s no transcendence here, no Indian spirituality to salve your