Jimmie Durham

In his artistic research, Jimmie Durham was interested in what happens “away from language”, in the relationship between forms and concepts. Working against Western Rationalism, his practice was rooted in uncertainty and paradox. Durham created in an array of mediums: drawings, installations, video (which he used to document his performances), and sculptural constructions often combined with written messages, photographs and objects. Covering a broad range of subject matter in artworks —as well as in essays and poetry— his production was often laced with the agility of wordplay, a dry, highly critical humor and, above all, insight. He consistently addressed the political and cultural forces that construct our contemporary discourses, the history of oppression, the futility of violence and the powerlessness of the minorities in the world. Jimmie Durham worked with both natural and artificial materials, and was particularly drawn to the intrinsic qualities of those that have been used throughout history as tools: stone, wood, bone, iron and glass. Stone was a primary material for Durham due to its role in defining power dynamics of culture and society through architecture and ideas of monumentality; he used it to underscore the polemics of nature vs. culture, religion, architecture, and Eurocentric ideas of history. Jimmie Durham moved to Geneva in 1969 and enrolled in the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he worked on sculpture and performance. In 1973 he moved back to the U.S. and became involved in the American Indian Movement as director of the International Indian Treaty Council and its representative before the United Nations, thus becoming the first official representative of a minority within this organization. In 1980, he focused his attention back to art, but remained concerned with dismantling stereotypes of American Indians that had been widely accepted and disseminated in American culture: a theme he returns to in many of his essays. Durham gained notoriety within the New York art scene, but found his work was seen as “Indian art” and failed to encourage fundamental —political or artistic— discussions about how American Indian history and culture have been misrepresented by others. Disappointed by this misunderstanding and by the American government’s intractable policies regarding the Indian movement, he left the U.S. in 1987 and moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, until he returned to Europe in 1994. Jimmie Durham passed away in Berlin in late 2021.