Jimmie Durham
Jimmie Durham, Ghost in the Machine, 2005. View at Sala Trenker, Ortisei - Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Collection Museion, Bolzano. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
One of the key protagonists of visual art and poetry of the late-20th and early 21st, Jimmie Durham was strongly engaged in the American Indian Movement during the 1970s, to then join the artistic community of New York in the 1980s he was an important figure of the downtown New York City artistic community. Throughout his practice, marked by a tone that is simultaneously incisive and humorous, Durham has been challenging Eurocentric ideas of history and binaries between nature and culture. His work took form through a variety of mediums, from drawings, and installations through to video and found objects, often combined with written messages, photographs and glosses. His attention to the relationship between materials, experiences and language led him to investigate the material roots of historical narratives and to question those binaries that have undergirded Western thinking since the Enlightenment and its correlative, imperial expansion and its destruction of Indigenous lives, landscapes and livelihoods. At times, Durham parodied museological display techniques in his works, a further questioning of the way in which the very logic of the display and reification of art emerges from the same tradition and its necropolitical unfolding.
Biennale Gherdëina ∞ presents two works by the artist. In Ghost in the Machine (2005), a life-size statue of the Greek goddess Athena stands tied with a rope to a refrigerator. Whether referring to the theatrical technique of Deus ex machina, which dates back to Greek classicism, or to 20th-century questionings of Cartesian dualism in the face of nuclear threats (see Koestler’s 1967 philosophical psychology classic), the work humorously pushes the metaphorical relationship between the two components, ‘ghost’/ god and ‘machine’ to their visual and absurd extreme. In encountering this work, we recognise ourselves no more as the combination of a soul and a body, than we would as the product of a forced bond between a goddess and a domestic appliance.
Also on view in Persones Persons is Une blessure par balles (2007), an example of the artist’s use and re-interpretation of found objects through museological-like captioning, a major feature of the artist’s creative production. Marked by inscriptions that gloss the wooden plank’s various holes and imperfections, we read the artist’s re-interpretation of these as the encounter of human and more-than-human agencies in material form: “A BULLET FROM THE SECOND WORLD WAR”, “INSECT HOLES” and “WORM HOLES”.
Jimmie Durham, Une blessure par balles, 2007. View at Sala Trenker, Ortisei - Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Collection Museion, Bolzano. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Jimmie Durham
Jimmie Durham, Ghost in the Machine, 2005. View at Sala Trenker, Ortisei - Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Collection Museion, Bolzano. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
One of the key protagonists of visual art and poetry of the late-20th and early 21st, Jimmie Durham was strongly engaged in the American Indian Movement during the 1970s, to then join the artistic community of New York in the 1980s he was an important figure of the downtown New York City artistic community. Throughout his practice, marked by a tone that is simultaneously incisive and humorous, Durham has been challenging Eurocentric ideas of history and binaries between nature and culture. His work took form through a variety of mediums, from drawings, and installations through to video and found objects, often combined with written messages, photographs and glosses. His attention to the relationship between materials, experiences and language led him to investigate the material roots of historical narratives and to question those binaries that have undergirded Western thinking since the Enlightenment and its correlative, imperial expansion and its destruction of Indigenous lives, landscapes and livelihoods. At times, Durham parodied museological display techniques in his works, a further questioning of the way in which the very logic of the display and reification of art emerges from the same tradition and its necropolitical unfolding.
Biennale Gherdëina ∞ presents two works by the artist. In Ghost in the Machine (2005), a life-size statue of the Greek goddess Athena stands tied with a rope to a refrigerator. Whether referring to the theatrical technique of Deus ex machina, which dates back to Greek classicism, or to 20th-century questionings of Cartesian dualism in the face of nuclear threats (see Koestler’s 1967 philosophical psychology classic), the work humorously pushes the metaphorical relationship between the two components, ‘ghost’/ god and ‘machine’ to their visual and absurd extreme. In encountering this work, we recognise ourselves no more as the combination of a soul and a body, than we would as the product of a forced bond between a goddess and a domestic appliance.
Also on view in Persones Persons is Une blessure par balles (2007), an example of the artist’s use and re-interpretation of found objects through museological-like captioning, a major feature of the artist’s creative production. Marked by inscriptions that gloss the wooden plank’s various holes and imperfections, we read the artist’s re-interpretation of these as the encounter of human and more-than-human agencies in material form: “A BULLET FROM THE SECOND WORLD WAR”, “INSECT HOLES” and “WORM HOLES”.
Jimmie Durham, Une blessure par balles, 2007. View at Sala Trenker, Ortisei - Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Collection Museion, Bolzano. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo