{"id":1802,"date":"2016-05-29T21:05:06","date_gmt":"2016-05-29T21:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/?page_id=1802"},"modified":"2016-05-30T00:05:07","modified_gmt":"2016-05-30T00:05:07","slug":"jimmie-durham-holding-a-mirror-to-humanity","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/jimmie-durham-holding-a-mirror-to-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmie Durham: Holding A Mirror To Humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Jimmie Durham: Holding A Mirror To Humanity<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n

Humanity Is Not A Completed Project.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jimmie Durham (1)<\/em><\/p>\n

Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a <\/em>distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human.<\/em><\/p>\n

Paulo Freire (2)<\/em><\/p>\n

What stultifies the common people is not the lack of instruction, but the belief in the inferiority of their intelligence. And what stultifies the \u2018inferiors\u2019 stultifies the \u2018superiors\u2019 at the same time.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jacques Ranci\u00e8re (3)<\/em><\/p>\n

During the 1970s Jimmie Durham \u2013 visual and performance artist, poet, educator, essayist (and a few other western \u2018categories\u2019) \u2013 returned from art school in Geneva to become a sociopolitical activist in the US, where repressed \u2018minority\u2019 constituencies had rallied in solidarity with the black Civil Rights movement. Among the pertinent questions were: who speaks? How, for \u2013 and with \u2013 whom? Or, to rephrase, in terms later addressed to the intellectual by Edward Said: \u2018How does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where?\u2019 The discourse of the 1970s was dominated by anti- and neo-colonial struggles with a tendency towards an oppositional binarism that was expedient but perhaps inconsistent with Durham\u2019s more nuanced thinking. But two books \u2013 both of which drew on grassroots practices not simply on theory \u2013 had considerable impact on thinking about a just society: Frantz Fanon\u2019s The Wretched of the Earth (6) and Paulo Freire\u2019s Pedagogy of the Oppressed<\/em>. Both authors had understood that the oppressed could not \u2018speak truth to power\u2019 precisely because those oppressed had been dehumanised by the forces of injustice \u2013 and because power wasn\u2019t prepared to listen. Effective resistance to disempowerment emerged when the native spokesperson abandoned nostalgia for a now idealised past, as well as ingratiating or recriminatory appeals to the oppressor, and instead entered into dialogue with the people and their realities: the only addressees capable of transforming their circumstances were the people themselves, assisted by educators who drew on \u2018meaningful themes\u2019 within the community that could enable the realisation of collective consciousness.(7) In such a dialogical context, all participants were encouraged to transcend their own certitudes. Jacques Ranci\u00e8re was later to assert that learning takes place when \u2018tutor\u2019 and \u2018pupil\u2019 are equals in a reciprocal process: \u2018Essentially, what an emancipated person can do is be an emancipator: to give, not the key to knowledge, but the consciousness of what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself.\u2019(8) To the extent that Freire\u2019s emancipatory educational programme hinged on creative thinking about socio-political realities, and Fanon\u2019s new national consciousness insisted on the primacy of culture, both positions possessed an aesthetic<\/em> dimension.<\/p>\n

This early attempt to decolonise western epistemologies towards a more just vision of humanity provides a topography of possibilities by which we might approach Jimmie Durham\u2019s integration of the aesthetic, the socio-political and the ethical \u2013 the extent to which his artistic and writing practices subtly disclose the dehumanising manipulations of power. Durham resists any form of art practice that anaesthetises reality; it is through his engagement with the material and political conditions of the peoples whom he encounters on his itineraries as a visiting artist, and with whom he comes to observe, to listen to and learn from, not to preach, that an emancipatory pedagogical dimension renders his work an art of agency and resistance to received ideas.<\/p>\n

It is necessary that, with great urgency, we all speak well and listen well. We, you and I, must remember everything. We must especially remember those things we never knew.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jimmie Durham (9)<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just of a matter of speaking in the first person. But of identifying the impersonal physical and mental forces you confront and fight as soon as you try to do something, not knowing what you are trying to do until you begin to fight. Being in this sense is political<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Gilles Deleuze (10)<\/em><\/p>\n

Gilles Deleuze(10)<\/p>\n

My first encounter with Durham\u2019s exceptional artistic sensibility was the mixed\u2013media installation On Loan from the Museum of the American Indian<\/em>, 1985, in Joe Overstreet\u2019s Kenkeleba Gallery on New York\u2019s Lower East Side. This was a collection of found and handmade \u2013 often absurdist \u2013 objects, labelled and categorised as \u2018artefacts\u2019, \u2018sociofacts\u2019 and \u2018scientifacts\u2019, arranged in museum vitrines and mounted on the wall like an ethnographic display. It was a seriocomic critique of white America\u2019s stereotypes of indigenous peoples, with an undertone of unacknowledged sociopolitical realities, and brought to mind stories of how the \u2018native informant\u2019 would often deliberately mislead the anthropologist for a laugh. It was as if Durham was turning a mirror onto dominant culture so that it could see what he saw; looking at the world with fresh eyes was typical of his later observations of Europe. Among the first of these was an installation for the Orchard Gallery, Derry, in 1988. Outside the city walls, on the bank that leads down to the Republican Bogside, he raised a pole, which was topped by a carved wood surveillance camera and a pair of car wing mirrors facing the British military\u2019s surveillance mast sited inside the city walls (the traditional Loyalist stronghold) monitoring the Bogside.(11) Observations of surveillance and control reappear in later work in various guises: for example, Forbidden Things<\/em>, 1993 \u2013 a spindly frame that recalls the security gates at passport control \u2013 is similar in design to several \u2018personal arcs de triomphe\u2019 <\/em>that playfully suggest ways to aggrandise oneself. But the Derry installation was symptomatic of Durham\u2019s approach to making work as he travelled the length and breadth of Eurasia as a listener and observer who is particularly alert to the \u2018impersonal physical and mental forces\u2019 in the everyday that cripple our capacity for creative thought.<\/p>\n

The vitrine display is a sculptural assemblage that Durham has frequently visited, and is consistent in spirit with those works that allude to \u2018surveillance\u2019 insofar as it mimics the European obsession with collecting, categorising and hierarchising the world, not least through the violence of naming<\/em>. As critiques of hierarchical thinking, Durham\u2019s Wunderkammer<\/em> function as subversive \u2018pedagogical\u2019 tools, anti-monumental and anti-spectacle, that instruct through surprising juxtapositions. His objects \u2013 some found, some fabricated \u2013 have neither intrinsic nor hierarchical value. In Various Shapes and Materials<\/em>, 2010, we find \u2018glass\u2019, \u2018squarish things\u2019, \u2018spherical objects\u2019, \u2018things with similar holes\u2019, and so forth, with an occasional item fashioned from body parts involuntarily donated by some poor animal \u2013 items that Durham will have rescued during his perambulations through the city and its environs. On the one hand, they present the joy and aesthetic pleasure of materials, the reclamation of life from Death-by-Discard; on the other, they carry a subtle political wit. Of the two vitrines comprising The History of Europe<\/em>, 2012, one contains a sheet of paper presenting facts about Europe\u2019s identity, a loose timeline of its \u2018achievements\u2019 and an account of the contents of the other vitrine: Exhibit A is a primitive Stone Age tool; Exhibit B is a rifle bullet dating from 1941 damaged by battery acid (presumably before it could damage a person).<\/p>\n

When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.<\/em><\/p>\n

Frantz Fanon (12)<\/em><\/p>\n

Stone suffers from architectural weight, the weight of metaphor, and the weight of history.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jimmie Durham (13)<\/em><\/p>\n

When Durham relocated to \u2018Eurasia\u2019 in 1994 he quickly turned his critical and inquisitive eye on visual expressions of the two principles of European ideology that had devastated the peoples of the rest of the world: scripture (the Biblical text and writing) by which Europeans justified dehumanising others, and the stone monument (especially the triumphal arch) as a signifier of state power and permanence. He called this collusion between architecture and belief \u2018architexture\u2019. Two of the crudest manifestations of such of state hubris \u2013 the Nazi Tausendj\u00e4hriges Reich<\/em> and the presidential portraits defacing Mount Rushmore in South Dakota \u2013 are alluded to in Museum of Stone<\/em>, 2012, alongside examples of the unperverted beauty of stones. Included is \u2018Balanced Rock\u2019 goes on Tour!<\/em> (original home, Utah), which presents photographic \u2018selfies\u2019 of the Rock\u2019s encounters with some of the triumphalist monuments in European cities, Mount Rushmore and Trafalgar Square\u2019s Fourth Plinth. As Richard W Hill has noted, \u2018Durham understands art as precisely those communicative forms of agency that escape or undermine the ideological dimensions of state architecture and language.\u2019(14)<\/p>\n

The artist perhaps reserves his most acerbic wit for \u2018scripture\u2019. An earlier work The Testament According to John<\/em>, 1989, is a painting of a penis ejaculating the words \u2018In the beginning was the word\u2026 and the word was God\u2019, followed by an account of how the work was received, thereby exposing authority\u2019s power over language and meaning. Even more contentious is the distinctly anti-monumentalist Shrouds and Swaddling Clothes of Decommissioned Saints<\/em>, 1996: two plastic baskets containing dirt and dishevelled clothing, which refer us again to the European obsession with collecting \u2013 this time, the \u2018relics\u2019 of Christian saints. This work is also challenging to the viewer\u2019s \u2018belief\u2019 in what constitutes \u2018art\u2019 because, like the series of steel buckets of 1995 containing dirt, human or animal hair and cotton or synthetic clothing, or his exploding graphite drawings, they occupy an indeterminable space between \u2018something\u2019 and \u2018nothing\u2019. Through this resistance to the conventions of aesthetic beauty and interpretation, Durham seems to ask us to consider what \u2018truths\u2019 are expressed in the hierarchical value we place on things. Then again, we might attend to what he means when he says: \u2018What a mean, stupid and destructive little concept is Truth. I am sure that beauty has no connection to truth. Truth is simply a nasty invention of the state; first to make us \u201cconfess\u201d and then to make us \u201cbelieve\u201d\u2019.(15) Durham\u2019s point parallels Deleuze\u2019s complaint against the \u2018tyranny of the signifier\u2019, which insists on the question, \u2018What does it mean?\u2019, when, as he says, \u2018the only question is how anything works, with its intensities, flows, processes, partial objects. None of which mean anything.\u2019(16) Durham thus frees us to appreciate flows and processes that refuse closure: the conversation among differing materials, or the graphiteness of the graphite in its dialogue with paper. Humans are not the only entities that \u2018speak\u2019 if we are minded to listen.<\/p>\n

Repressive forces don\u2019t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, thing that might be worth saying.<\/em><\/p>\n

Gilles Deleuze (17)<\/em><\/p>\n

We are, therefore I am. <\/em><\/p>\n

Brian Yazzie Burkhart (18)<\/em><\/p>\n

Although I have chosen \u2018humanity\u2019 as an anchor for this set of thoughts on Durham\u2019s work, his worldview has little to do with European \u2018humanism\u2019, except in so far as, in its secular mode, humanism repudiates blind faith and selects those pedagogical practices that it recognises as liberatory. Durham\u2019s view is anti-anthropocentric; human beings are part of a holistic world in which all our relations \u2013 non-human forms of life, inorganic and organic \u2013 are integral to ecological health and survival and in themselves deserve equal rights of existence and respect. In this sense western \u2018humanity\u2019 is found wanting. A glance at Durham\u2019s most recently published collection of essays, Waiting To Be Interrupted<\/em>, 2014, reveals the extent to which his observations of Eurasian places he has visited include conversations with the local flora and fauna (alongside stones). It is here that Durham deviates from Freire\u2019s Pedagogy<\/em>, which makes conventional anthropocentric assertions about animals based on their assumed lack of self-consciousness and agency; in Freire\u2019s reflections, animals do not figure amongst the ranks of the oppressed. Durham\u2019s perspective finds partial sympathy with Derrida\u2019s critique of the Cartesian subject and thoughts on \u2018human-animal\u2019 relations as fundamental to understanding ethical and just action, and yet Derrida retains precisely the distinction between \u2018human\u2019 and \u2018animal\u2019 that indigenous philosophy rejects. (19) In his recent installation at Parasol, \u2018Traces and Shiny Evidence\u2019, 2014, Durham\u2019s concern with ecological matters came to the fore: in the lower gallery, replicas of animal skeletons painted with Chameleon<\/em> pearlised paint, auto-parts, oil drums seemingly seeping spillages and PVC tubing snaking through the gallery into the garden pond signalled the \u2019poisonous beauty\u2019 that is western humanity\u2019s relation to the natural world; in the upper gallery ghostly graphite forms on paper of what could be stuffed animals recall the \u2018post-nature\u2019 dystopia of Philip K Dick\u2019s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em><\/p>\n

What, then, is subjectivity in Durham\u2019s universe? It is a collegiate collective commensurate with the Native American philosopher Burkhart\u2019s revision of Descartes: \u2018We are, therefore I am\u2019, where \u2018we\u2019 includes non-humans. Durham\u2019s observation that humanity is incomplete also finds correspondence with Deleuze\u2019s thoughts on humanity as a process, a becoming<\/em>, and that the act of writing (we shall add making) is to free life from what imprisons it: \u2018creating isn\u2019t communicating but resisting\u2019.(20) What is Durham\u2019s interest in etymologies if not his desire to get to the root of what matters, of language\u2019s material origins in humanity\u2019s corporeal experience of the world, in contrast to which our stultifying entrapment in linguistic abstractions has become \u2018unhomely\u2019, incapable of articulating anything \u2018worth saying\u2019? In Durham\u2019s work, art doesn\u2019t speak a \u2018Truth\u2019, but discloses not-knownness, where open-endedness and suspicion of any instantly determinable \u2018meaning\u2019 opens perception to a traumatic zone of indistinction between speechlessness and speaking, listening and hearing. It is also an opening to that imaginative space of irreverence and possibility closed down by prescriptive and instrumentalised ways of thinking, and in which the liberatory function of what Freud called the \u2018humour that smiles through tears\u2019 more often than not is Durham\u2019s vehicle of transmission.(21)<\/p>\n

In 2000 Durham installed a freestanding cubicle on a street corner in Ghent, entitled You Have Another Chance<\/em>. The front was painted with the title in English, Flemish and French and contained a simple swing door; the cubicle\u2019s corners were bordered with lights for after dark; the back panel was roughly painted in diagonal red and yellow stripes, over which was handwritten \u2018Gaterug \u2013 Go Back Reconsider \u2013 Retournez Reconsid\u00e9rez \u2013 Heroverweeg.\u2019 What was Durham urging us to reconsider? Another chance at what? Perhaps, in the spirit of true pedagogy, he was urging us to \u2018remember those things we never knew\u2019, and to reimagine a less anthropocentric, more self-critical humanity \u2013 before it is too late.<\/p>\n

\n

Essay published in Jimmie Durham: Various Items and Complaints<\/em>, catalogue to the exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries, London: Koenig Books, 2015, pp 8 \u2013 11. <\/p>\n

(1)<\/a> Jimmie Durham (Rome 2006.), cited in Koen Leemans and Luc Lambrecht. (eds), Commitment, <\/strong><\/em>Mechelen: De Garage and Grimbergen: Culturuumcentrum Strombeek, 2007.<\/p>\n

(2)<\/a> Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed<\/em> (1972), trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, pp 20\u201321.<\/p>\n

(3)<\/a> Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation<\/em>, (1991), trans. Kristin Ross, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, p 39.<\/p>\n

(4)<\/a> A political organiser for the American Indian Movement, Durham became Director of the International Indian Treaty Council and its representative at the United Nations. His partner, the artist Maria Thereza Alves, was also a member of the IITC and in 1981 co-founded Brazil\u2019s Partido Verde (Green Party).<\/p>\n

(5]<\/a> Edward Said, \u2018Speaking Truth To Power\u2019, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures<\/em>, London: Vintage, 1994, pp 63\u201375.<\/p>\n

(6)<\/a> Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, (1961), trans. Constance Farrington, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.<\/p>\n

(7)<\/a> During their years in Cuernavaca, Durham and Alves attempted to initiate an interactive educational club, but were thwarted by local politics. Durham subsequently pursued this dialogical approach to teaching as Visiting Professor in various workshop programmes such as the Advanced Course in Visual Arts, the Antoni Ratti Foundation, Como. See their publication Jimmie Durham<\/em>, Milano: Edicioni Charta, 2004.<\/p>\n

(8)<\/a> Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, op cit.<\/p>\n

(9)<\/a> Jimmie Durham: Matoaka Ale Attakulakula Guledisgo Nhini (Matoaka and the Little Carpenter in London<\/em>, London: Matts Gallery, 1988.<\/p>\n

(10)<\/a> Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations<\/em>, (1990), trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p 88.<\/p>\n

(11)<\/a> The pole was vandalised; the culprits, according to the local people, were probably the British military.<\/p>\n

(12)<\/a> Fanon, op cit, p 252.<\/p>\n

(13)<\/a> Jimmie Durham, \u2018Between the Furniture and the Building (Between a Rock and a Hard Place)\u2019, 1998, artist\u2019s book republished in Durham, Waiting To Be Interrupted: Selected Writings 1993\u20132012<\/em>, Antwerp: M KHA and Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2014, pp 121\u2013170.<\/p>\n

(14)<\/a> Richard W Hill, \u2018The Malice and Benevolence of Inanimate Objects: Jimmie Durham\u2019s Anti-Architecture\u2019, in Jimmie Durham: A Matter of Life and Death and Singing<\/em>, JRP\/Ringier: M KHA, 2012, p 75.<\/p>\n

(15)<\/a> Jimmie Durham, \u2018Why Beauty \u2013 (Why Not?)\u2019, Waiting To Be Interrupted<\/em>, op cit, pp 363-364.<\/p>\n

(16)<\/a> Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations<\/em>, op cit, p 22.<\/p>\n

(17)<\/a> Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, <\/em>op cit, p129.<\/p>\n

(18)<\/a> Brian Yazzie Burkhart, \u2018What Coyote and Thales Can Teach Us: An Outline of American Indian Epistemology\u2019, in Anne Waters (ed), American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays<\/em>, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, pp15\u201326.<\/p>\n

(19)<\/a> Jacques Derrida, \u2018The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)\u2019, trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry<\/em>, Vol 28, No 2 (Winter), 2002, pp 369-418.<\/p>\n

(20)<\/a> Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations<\/em>, op cit, pp 143-176.<\/p>\n

(21)<\/a> The extent to which traumatic history is transfigured into ludic humour in Durham\u2019s work is posed in Jean Fisher, \u2018A Distant Laughter: The Poetics of Dislocation\u2019, in Antoon Van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle and Nicole Note (eds), Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspectiv<\/em>e, Brussels: Springer, 2009, pp 157 176.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jimmie Durham: Holding A Mirror To Humanity Humanity Is Not A Completed Project. Jimmie Durham (1) Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. Paulo Freire (2) What stultifies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1803,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/page-template-with-left-sidebar-and-marquee-slider.php","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"yst_prominent_words":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeanfisher.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=1802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}