Farewell to Jimmie Durham, the great artist who denounced the limits of Western rationalism

Jimmie Durham, one of the most important artists on the world stage, passed away yesterday in Berlin at the age of 81. Confirming the news was Monica Manzutto, co-founder of the Mexican gallery Kurimanzutto, which represented the artist. The cause of Durham’s passing is not known at this time. Born in Houston, Texas, in 1940, he had moved to Europe in 1994: a sculptor as well as a poet and essayist, he was also known to have been a civil rights activist for African Americans and Native Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, and on this substratum he based his artistic practice with which he sought to deconstruct the foundational elements and stereotypes of Western culture.

The beginning of his artistic career dates back to 1965, the year of his first solo exhibition in Austin, also in Texas. Then, in 1969, the move to Geneva to study at the local École des Beaux-Arts, then the return to the U.S. in 1973: Durham became a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), and at this time he also began to present the image of himself as a person of Native ancestry (in particular, he has long claimed to have Cherokee ancestry: ancestry that, however, has since been questioned by representatives of the Cherokee people). After seven years of work with AIM, Durham moved to New York City and his artistic career took a turn: he began to create sculptures that aimed to transcend traditional representations of Native people and achieved success in what was then the artistic capital of the world. His sculptures also achieve success because of their particular language, and the use of unusual materials: animal skulls, feathers, shells and natural elements, sometimes accompanied by ironic texts, and used to reflect on the stereotypes that surrounded the raprpesentation of native peoples.

He then became director, from 1981 to 1983, of the Foundation for the Community of Artists in New York, wrote poems and articles, and then moved again, this time to Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1987. Meanwhile, his success became planetary and he exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, documenta IX, the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerp, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. After moving to Berlin in 1994, he moved again to Naples; Durham would always remain very attached to Italy. In the 1990s and 2000s, he continued to rack up successes and exhibitions in major museums around the world, until he was awarded, at the last Venice Biennale (2019), the highest honor, namely the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. The 2019 Biennale was the latest in a long series: he had exhibited in Venice in 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2013. And then again two editions of documenta (1992 and 2012), three of the Whitney Biennial (1993, 2003 and 2014), two of the Istanbul Biennial (1997 and 2013).

“Making use of a plurality of languages, such as drawing, writing, video, performance, and mainly sculpture,” reads the website of Madre in Naples, a museum that houses Durham’s works and where the American artist has exhibited twice, in 2008 and 2012, “Durham orchestrates cultural symbols and pure object presences among themselves, in a constant dialectic between beauty and its deconstruction. [...] Recurring materials in Durham’s sculptural, installation and performance practice include stone and boulder, which take on symbolic value or perform a plastic action. In many of his works, the symbols of contemporaneity and affluence (furniture, refrigerators, cars or airplanes), appear crushed under the weight of stones and boulders, which Durham described as references to architecture, a discipline that the artist critically interprets as a structure that deludes us into living in stability and that, in contrast to nature, instead creates an order that drives humans to an endless repetitiveness of gestures and customs.”

Solo shows featuring Durham’s work, in addition to the two at Madre mentioned above, include those at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2017-2018), and exhibitions at MAXXI in Rome (2016), at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2015), at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (nbk) (2015), at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice (2015), at the ICA in London, and then again the retrospectives at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerp (2012), the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2009), the MAC in Marseille and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague (2003).

In the citation for the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the curator of that edition’s international exhibition, Ralph Rugoff, had said, “I nominated Jimmie Durham for the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the 58th. International Art Exhibition because of his remarkable achievements in the field of art over the past sixty years and, in particular, because of his way of making art that at the same time knows how to be critical, funny and deeply humanistic. The first solo exhibition of Durham, an artist, performer, essayist and poet, was held in 1965 (perhaps, at this point, we should give him two lifetime achievement awards). His heterogeneous practice ranges from drawing to collage, photography to video, although his best-known works are sculptural constructions, often made from natural materials and everyday objects of little value that evoke particular stories. His sculptures are often accompanied by texts that comment lightheartedly but incisively on Eurocentric perspectives and prejudices. His work, which insistently denounces the limits of Western rationalism and the futility of violence, has also often dwelt on the oppression and misunderstandings perpetrated by colonial powers against diverse ethnic populations around the world. While Durham treats this material with great skill and levity, he also produces sharp criticism charged with insight and wit, shrewdly destroying reductive notions of authenticity. For the past fifty years Durham has been finding ever new, intelligent and effective ways to address the political and social forces that have always shaped the world in which we live. At the same time, his contributions to the arts are considered exceptional for their formal and conceptual originality, for the ease with which he can blend together dissonant parts and alternative perspectives, and for their irrepressible playfulness. His works move and delight us in completely unpredictable ways. Everything the artist makes reminds us that ’empathy is part of imagination and imagination is the engine of intelligence,’ to quote his own words. That deeply empathic intelligence radiates from his works like invisible rays of light, illuminating and changing the way of seeing of all who are fortunate enough to come across them.”

Pictured is Jimmie Durham. Venice Biennale photo

Farewell to Jimmie Durham, the great artist who denounced the limits of Western rationalism

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