Jimmie Durham
From the West Pacific to the East Atlantic
11/10/2003 t/m 11/01/2004
This autumn GEM is presenting a major retrospective of recent work by Cherokee
Indian Jimmie Durham (Washington 1940). In the 1980s, this artist, writer, poet
and human rights activist gained an international reputation for colourful and
ironic pseudo-ethnographic objects, drawings and installations criticising
primitivist and colonial tendencies in Western thought. Since his move to Europe in
1994, his work has taken a new direction, becoming site-specific and less
concerned with his own ethnicity. Durham felt that the work he did in Europe
should relate to the particular place where it was to be exhibited. Otherwise, he
would merely be an exile ‘speaking of the past or of faraway places’.
Encompassing around 120 video and other installations, sculptures, drawings
and paintings, the exhibition at the GEM turns the spotlight on these less
well-known works produced by Durham in Europe since 1994. It is the first such
major retrospective of his work anywhere in the world.
At first sight, Durham’s recent work looks deceptively simple. He tends to use
everyday materials like stones, PVC pipes and wood, and household articles like
washbasins, clothes, television sets and children’s toys. However, by
juxtaposing the objects in unexpected ways, he makes the viewer look at the
world in a new way. His work bears witness to the attention he pays to his
materials and to the respect he feels for them; indeed, in his bric-ŕ-brac
sculptures he goes so far as to endow them with quasi-human personalities. For
instance, by bombarding a refrigerator with stones he creates a St. Frigo; a block
of granite crushing a bed with its weight is A Stone Asleep in Bed at Home; two
stones linked by a nylon thread become A Wild Rock Taking Its Pet Rock for a
Walk in the Art Forests in Berlin. Durham’s critical, humorous work questions and
unmasks the way we are conditioned in our day-to-day life by the objects, the
architecture and the language we use. Although his recent work seems at first
sight poetic rather than political in nature, it continues to express just as clearly
an unease about the way we deal with each other and with the world around
us. In his work, Durham is still unravelling the patterns that underlie prejudice and
power.
The initiative for this exhibition came from the artist himself. As he explains, ‘In the
old days, strangers could become Cherokee citizens by living with us for seven
years and learning the language - ‘learning to speak’, in our way of saying it. So
after seven years in Europe it just seemed natural to me to make a ‘presentation’
of myself: a report’. Although it has eventually taken another two years to
organise the exhibition, Durham still sees it as a kind of test of his abilities: ‘Have I
been learning to speak? Am I speaking contemporaneously or repeating old
stories?’. The exhibition and the accompanying publication revolve around key
concepts formulated by the artist himself: plumbing, philosophy, geography,
hermeneutics, architecture and ‘bricolage’.
From the West Pacific to the
East Atlantic has been organised in cooperation with the [mac] in Marseilles
(F) and Baltic in Gateshead (UK).
