On a wall of his retrospective, a stubby length of wood — perhaps six inches, oriented vertically, and sanded smooth — hangs beside a written narrative of a tree’s birth on the Slovenian-Croatian border, leading to the discovery, by the artist, of a piece of that tree floating in the water off the Lido in Venice. Jimmie Durham understands that art objects are things about which we tell stories.
Such stories may be theoretical, historical, or fictional, as in the case of “The Piece of Wood,” 2005; and they need not be written in order to be transformative. But Durham harbors intense feelings for his materials, and since in his case these include both language and objects, he often writes. In an essay in the exhibition catalogue, he says, “Only now, however, preparing for this retrospective, do I realize that I have never made a separation between writing and making sculptures.” One can think of the show, “A Matter of Life and Death and Singing,” as a dance for stories and objects; sometimes they take the floor singly, at others in tandem.
If his stories represent our human relationship to objects, for Durham, objects are no less lively without us. The earliest pieces on view at M HKA evince his lifelong enchantment by stone, bone, and wood. And it is tempting to describe Durham’s early work, with its animal skulls and Paleolithic-looking implements, as shamanic or totemic — but doing so would fail to convey both their humor and their sophistication. His skulls grin, his masks vamp, and objects appear with witty captions: Above two lathe-turned pieces of wood wound with thread is pinned a sheet of paper offering the phrase “Une machine désire de l’instruction comme un jardin désire de la discipline” [A machine desires instruction as a garden desires discipline].
The reason one might want to describe such objects as totemic is that Durham was born a Wolf Clan Cherokee in Arkansas, and has long been involved with the plight of indigenous peoples. “On every continent we are oppressed,” he writes in his catalogue essay, “and at best at the whims and mercy of the nations founded against us. What, I might say, refusing romanticism, makes us different? We are stateless peoples. Stateless with no wish, no possibility to make our own nation-states.” Durham has been plurally stateless for decades, and it is for this reason that he remains virtually unknown in the country founded against him, the United States. He moved to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1969, where he received a BFA from L’Ecole des beaux-arts. From 1973 until 1980, he ceased making art while he worked as a political organizer for the American Indian Movement and as the United Nations representative for the International Indian Treaty Council. He’s lived abroad (some say in exile) since 1987, first in Mexico and, since 1994, in Europe. Currently he resides in Berlin and Naples.
His work, while drawing on his indigenous American heritage, is equally rooted in a European conceptual tradition. In style and temperament it bears some comparison with the work of his friend David Hammons. Yet where Hammons’s politics tend to be pointed, Durham approaches the political obliquely, most frequently through a critique of architecture — by which he means visual manifestations of state ideology. His methods are metaphorical and performative, rooted in comedic theater, and extend from sculpture to photography, video, writing, painting, and installation. A collapsible arch in cheery red, blue, and yellow, “Arc de Triomphe for Personal Use,” 1996–2007, can be erected anywhere, anytime one feels like celebrating a victory. Durham clearly relishes mocking national pretensions. He also seeks to liberate objects from their grip and from various roles imposed upon them. For the sculpture “St Frigo,” 1996, he threw cobblestones at an old refrigerator, freeing the cobblestones from the street and saving the life of the fridge, “by making it a martyr,” as he explained in an interview. “It was going into the trash, now it is eternal, now it’s art.” Such is his feeling for things that he even seeks to disturb artistic roles imposed upon them. “A Stone Bra for the Venus de Milo,” 1998, couples a photograph of the classical sculpture with a plaster bra hung on a nail.
Although some of his actions, such as smashing an object with rocks (he’s done it to televisions and a glass case, too) might seem violent, Durham’s nature is empathetic and his politics nonviolent. As Richard William Hill notes in the exhibition catalogue, “Durham is not transgressive. His boundary-crossing is not designed to shock or scandalize... His intention is not to demolish monuments but to disrupt our faith in them at the deepest level.” Hill gets at a paradox fundamental to Durham’s work: He consistently sets himself “against belief ” — which is a chapter title in the catalogue — yet does so in a mode, art, that operates through belief. Take one of the recent pieces on view, “Rocks Encouraged,” 2010, which consists of a soundproofed room with a number of large pieces of petrified wood. Visitors could enter only one at a time, “no matter how theatrical or impractical that might turn out... I wanted the most thoughtful, meditative piece,” he explains in an accompanying text. Outside hangs a poem by Durham from the early 1980s with the same title, but there it is clear that the rocks are encouraging “us.” It is typical of Durham’s wit that the title of an artwork is richly ambiguous. Is it that the rocks are encouraged to believe they are pieces of wood? Or vice versa? Or is it that these rocks masquerading as wood ought to encourage the lone visitor to believe she or he can be other than what we might appear to be?
By smashing old beliefs with new ones, Durham sends off sparks of understanding.
To see more works by Jimmie Durham, click the slide show.
This article will appear in the October issue of Modern Painters magazine.