Jimmie Durham

Jimmie Durham was born in 1940 in Houston (US), he lives and works in Berlin (DE)

Shaman sorcerer healer, nomadic magician, exiled concrete poet, Eurasian performer, genius tinkerer, the iconoclastic artist Jimmie Durham, while not claiming the stereotype of his Cherokee origins, is a confirmed activist for the civil rights movement and the Native American cause.

His protean work combines assemblages, collages, heterogeneous objects, from stone to PVC, from refrigerator to plank, from oil barrel to tree trunk, from handwritten words to charcoal drawings… From the very beginning of his artistic practice, Jimmie Durham settled in Eurasia, fascinated by the idea of this infinite continent. While the American art scene of the 1960s was devoted to minimalism or pop art, his insolent détournements of found objects brought awareness to the fracture of our consumer societies, in the most direct and immediate way. Broken, soiled, clumsily assembled, these cast-offs of society regain meaning and life.

Fundamental in Jimmie Durham’s glossary of primitive materials is stone; more tool than monument, it exacerbates the anti-architectural stance of the artist, who opposes all authoritarian thinking or opinion. With comic violence, the stone stoned a refrigerator (Saint Frigo, 1996) or any other object brought to the artist (Smashing, 2004), and a naïvely made-up rock destroys a car (Still Life with Stone and Car, 2004) or seems to have been brutally dropped on a small airplane (Encore tranquillité, 2008).

In the film À la poursuite du bonheur, with Anri Sala in the role of Joe Hill, Jimmie Durham once again handles with benevolent irony the figure of the artist and the gap that sometimes separates his world from that of art. Durham’s alter ego, Joe Hill, gleans eclectic materials thrown by the roadside, assembles them in his caravan-studio, then exhibits his obscure collages in an art gallery.

The struggle between nature and culture, wild and polished, is also the subject of the enigmatic sculpture Gilgamesh (1993), composed of a door in balance, pierced by a PVC tube, an axe lodged in the wood, a lock and a button on the edge. “A finished sculpture by Jimmie Durham always remains unfinished(1),” in that it establishes a disorder that one perceives as carefully thought out, and offers an open work, an image of the world’s discontinuity.

(1) Laura Mulvey, Jimmie Durham, Phaidon Press, 1995. Quoted by Friedrich Meschede, L’Expulsion de Babel, exhibition catalogue Pierres rejetées, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, Paris Musées, 2009.

– Mai Tran, “Estuaire, le paysage l’art et le fleuve,” Revue 303 no. 106, 2009.