Jimmie Durham, the resonance of the world.

Jimmie Durham is a significant artist who has transformed considerably the understanding of art from the seventies till now. Through his work and writings, he made clear, in an oblique, patient, and human way, that time is to be gained progressively and not through sensational events. His political activities on the central council of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) have been subject to critical controversy as well as to enthusiast praise, since he never conceded to the touristic promotion of the Indian artifact market as the meaning of of an original tradition, while opposing to the white puritanism of political correctness that exculpates the arbitrariness of violence and genocide, by attacking the creative arbitrariness of western artists’ free mind.

A non-aligned and inventive position characterizes the artist Jimmie Durham, claiming his personal identity and the social difference his has to assume as an artist. Incidental conditions lead the still adolescent Jimmie to realize the complex and multifaced nature of art. He recognized the dynamic role of an artist in society in relation to the more conventional position of the members of a community. He will decide then, while working as an apprentice plumber, to spare money and learn languages, travel in Europe, and study. This unexpected turn in his life will complete his education discerning the singularity by which history gives more attention to the sense of humanity of people than to the barbaric wars and genocides, and realized the importance this sense has to the cancellation of fear and violence.

His education recalls legendary journeys and circumstances, out of which Jimmie Durham becomes an accomplished contemporary artist, who transforms the myth into history and the narrative to reasoning. His biography together with the development of his work, go from shock to adventure and discover new perspectives in life and in the world. Therefore, his work and his stance are exemplary, singular, and admirable. I doubt there is a part of a living reality that doesn’t participate organically to his work, expressing out of the profound culture that he condensed as a reserve of civilization, a poetic dimension of the world’s enchantment.

What is essential in the heritage of history and tradition of American Indians inaugurates a dialog with what is most progressive and substantial in the purpouses of a contemporary western world. On a borderline between the white colonial world 2 and the submitted status of the various indigenous communities, Jimmie Durham succeeds systematically to surmount the linguistic and semantic gaps and to emancipate the human being beyond discrimination and identity segregation. To the syndrome of politically correctness, he opposes the radical life stance of a poet and a free person.

His work is par excellence the expression of this freedom. An Enlightener and a Wanderer, he shares spontaneously and unexpectedly, the deep feeling of humanity and imagination beyond any affectation. He observes and proceeds by mixing freely and separating critically, things and meanings. He transposes mythological understanding into demythifying poetics, preestablished knowledge into critical puzzlement, like it happened at the threshold of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, when languages and perspectives circulated within a creative chaos. The unhindered mockery composes with the most severe critique, spreading the doubt versus any univocal conception of the world. Like James Joyce, Jimmie Durham feels no concern of the cultural modernist formalism, while he cares for a linguistic and conceptual fusion allowing passages between civilizations.

The simplest insignificant thing can generate fear. Simultaneously, the same little thing can state a gesture that cancels fear. A same movement that clasps a hand initiates a war or seals the peace. A same gaze looks at an animal as a wild threat or a familiar companion. Like in the art of plumbing, the water flows or stops within the same pipe, the same channel. This knowledge, generated by listening to the flow of things, is particularly clear in his work. The relation between the flow and the turn it takes according to a friendly or a hostile feeling, inspires his work and defines his relation to materials – to the commerce of the human mechanisms that may function in harmony or in contrariety towards the mechanisms of nature.

Jimmie Durham knows how to hear the resonance of things. He acquires it from the tradition of cultures in which language is part of a much wider relation to the sounds and the silences of the world. Like in non-logocentric civilizations, for Jimmie Durham the sense exists between words and cries. Nothing is univocal and if ever something happen to be, it is because it accuses a lack of attention to the world. Because the world is multifaced as a polysemy full of surprises. Rhythm is what unveils reality which is not given as a representation but as an understanding and an intuition of the world. Because the world is multifaced as a polysemy full of surprises. Rhythm is what unveils reality which is not given as a representation but as an understanding and an intuition of the world.

The significance of Jimmie Durham’s work is recognized internationally in its personal continuity all the way to now. His position becomes more relevant in time, for the visual art as for the possibilities to conceive civilization. The relation between human beings and the world is determinant in his works. From whatever refers to everyday life to what defines monumentality, between the smaller and the bigger, there is no substantial difference. The world and reality are not measurable by the magnitude but by the sense of time and Jimmie knows it. The substantial difference concerns the remains from what we experience in life every day, and the reflexion of a singular moment in the social space that marks an event, we reflect afterwards in our memory–this means monumental. The words of the great social anthropologist Pierre Clastres (in his essay, Copernicus and the Savages, 1969) can make us aware of Jimmie Durham’s offering, since he allowed us to realize actively: “ (…) that negation doesn’t mean nothingness, and that just because the mirror doesn’t show our own image it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to look at.”

Denys Zacharopoulos