Artists > 2012: Flights of Fancy > Jimmie Durham

Work

Jimmie Durham’s Spring Fever, an assemblage of apparently leaking oil drums, fenced-off from the Mansion, but too shiny to be believably derelict, gave birth to an effluvence of petroleum-based paints. What had this work to do with the Biennial ambition of ‘framing identity’? Emma Ridgway’s catalogue essay highlights the transforming nature of conversation, its ability to shift ideas, perceptions and preconceptions. In it, Ridgway tells several stories, one of which relates to her personal experience of Jimmie Durham: Experiment Marathon in Reykjavik brought 40 artists and scientists together to demonstrate their work. Durham was not particularly cooperative and pinning down what he planned to show was fruitless. Ultimately, he delivered a choreographed performance “designed to heighten the tension and anxiety of the audience to comic effect and make the rules of the framework and backstage conversations explicit. Worthwhile conversations are as much about watching and listening as they are about thinking and responding.” Durham’s work for the Biennial was, in its way, an invitation to a conversation: the artist refers to the ‘ubiquity’ of oil barrels – their presence in our lives as definers of place, the petroleum they contain being used to manufacture everything from clothes to birthday candles and their place in all forms of communication. He goes on to relate, “I have a more personal connection to petroleum in that when the US drove my people from our old home in the Carolinas they allowed us land in Oklahoma. In little more than fifty years that land was also taken away and soon became the first large oilfield. Today the Cherokees are the second largest Native American group, but with no reservation, no land base at all.”

Biography

Jimmie Durham is a sculptor, essayist and poet. He was born in the USA in 1940. He began working as a sculptor in 1963. His first solo exhibit was at the University of Texas at Austin in 1965.

The cultural and political uses of material, objects and space were the centre of his practice at this beginning.

In 1969 Durham moved to Europe and studied at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Geneva. Along with three other sculptors he formed a group, Draga, which researched ways to allow the plastic arts more access to public life.

At the same time, along with a Mapuche Indian from Chile and a Quechua Indian from Bolivia, he formed an organisation, Incomindios, which attempted to coordinate and encourage support for the struggle of Indians of the Americas.

In 1973, he returned to the US to become a full-time organiser in the American Indian Movement (AIM). During this time he served as director of the International Indian Treaty Council and representative to the United Nations. In the early 1980s Durham returned his attention to art in New York City. During these early days of ‘post-Modernism’, Durham worked with a loose group of artists who were Puerto Rican, Afro-American, Asian-American and American Indian, following the instigation of his partner, the artist Maria Thereza Alves. This group exhibited together frequently in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn.

In 1983, West End Press published Columbus Day, a book of his poems and in 1988 his poetry was also included in Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry.

In 1987 Durham moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he was based until moving to Europe in 1994. During his time in Mexico, Durham began to exhibit internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial, Documenta IX, ICA London, Exit Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. He also published a number of essays in books and periodicals, including Art Forum, Art Journal and Third Text. In 1995, A Certain Lack of Coherence, a collection of his essays, was published by Kala Press. Since moving to Europe, Durham’s work has focused primarily on the relationship between architecture, monumentality and national narratives. Publications on anti-architecture include: Der Verfuhrer und der Steinerne Gast, Springer, Vienna, 1996; Between the Furniture and the Building: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Walter Konig, Cologne, 1998; Stoneheart, CCA, Kitakyushyu, 2001; Jimmie Durham, Edizione Charta, Milano, 2004 and The Second Particle Wave Theory, University of Sunderland and the Banff Centre, 2005. His exhibitions in Europe have included venues such as the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (solo), Musée d'Art Contemporain in Marseilles (solo), Museum Voor Actuele Kunst in den Hague (solo), Hamburg Kunstverein (solo), FRAC in Reims (solo), SMAK Museum in Ghent, Wittgenstein Haus in Vienna (solo), Kunstverein Munich (solo), and the Venice Biennale (1999, 2001, 2003 and 2005), Whitney Biennale (1993 and 2006) among many others. In 1995 Phaidon published Jimmie Durham, a comprehensive survey of his art.

In 2009, on the occasion of Durham’s retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Pierres rejetées, a catalogue of Durham’s work in Europe was published.