지미 더햄
ג’ימי דורהאם
吉米·达勒姆
جيمي دورهام

Ghost in the Machine

source: frieze
Ghost in the Machine (2005), a life-size ancient statue of a helmeted Athena coiled with rope to a refrigerator, is surely about Cartesian mind-body dualism, but to me it just appears as some miraculous treasure hoisted from the depths.
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source: ensemblesmhkabe
Leeft in Berlin (Germany), geboren in United States.

Jimmie Durham is een invloedrijke kunstenaar. Zijn werk staat wereldwijd in de belangstelling. Het is diepgaand en toegankelijk, politiek en persoonlijk, en zowel ‘van het moment’ als ‘gangbare tendensen overstijgend’. Zijn werk stelt scherpe vragen en oefent een grote invloed uit op verschillende generaties kunstenaars, curators, theoretici en kunstliefhebbers. Zijn sculpturen, assemblages, tekeningen, teksten en installaties zijn vaak satirisch en humoristisch maar ook poëtisch. Zijn werk is visueel en verrassend..
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source: hcmec
JimmieDurham出生于美国的阿肯色州，他是一位切罗基族人，作为一个兴趣广泛，四海为家的人，Jimmie Durham身负各种角色，他是艺术家、作家、诗人，同时还是政治激进分子。他的艺术创作包括雕塑，绘画，写作，戏剧，和行为艺术等。
Durham是在20世纪60年代美国民权运动期间进入大家的视野的。他的第一次个展是1965年在美国得克萨斯州的奥斯汀举行的。1968年，Durham移民到了瑞士日内瓦，之后，他就读于日内瓦的一个高等美术学院，1973年，他回到美国参与“美洲印第安人运动”（AIM）。这个组织的目的是为印第安人争取在联合国的合法权利。从1973年到1980年，Durham一直为AIM工作，并成为这个运动的组织者。他同时还是国际印第安人理事会的美国代表。一直到AIM这个运动解散之后，Durham才回到了纽约，把自己的注意力重新投入到艺术上。
作为一个深入到印第安人生活中的艺术家，Durham的创作从根本上挑战了传统上对印第安人的理解和描述。他常常把印第安人使用过的木头，塑料，骨头，钢铁等引用到自己的作品里，他还把印第安人生活中的各种物品，比如牙刷，羽毛内裤，家庭照片等找来，按照社会类别和科学类别把现代印第安人的生活进行了古怪的分类。这些作品直接针对杂志和影视作品中对印第安人生活不真实的刻画。他通过展示这些作品试图说明——印第安人和我们一样，都是人，都过着正常的，普通人的生活。
2005年，Durham作为策展人策划了TheAmerican West（美国西部）展览，这个展览击破了关于牛仔和印第安人的神话。Durham通过自己这些不懈的努力，在印第安人和不了解他们生活的人群之间搭建起了一个对话的桥梁。由于Durham对印第安人的事业投入了巨大的热情，但却因为美国政府在对待印第安人问题中的不合作立场，最终Durham参加的AIM组织以解散告终，这使得Durham在1987年离开了美国，并决心永不回来。
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source: frieze
It took Jimmie Durham three tries to shatter the glass display case during his inaugural performance of his retrospective ‘Pierres Rejetées’ (Rejected Stones). The exhibition comprises a generous serving of largely sculptural, video and installation works, but also drawings and photographs, from his ‘Eurasian’ period, which dates from Durham’s arrival on the continent where he has lived a nomad’s life since 1994, seven years after his definitive departure from the United States. Twice Durham lobbed the smooth, roundish stone, procured from medieval poet François Vilon’s Paris home, and twice it gaily bounced away with a thunk (this re-enacted work, A Stone from François Vilon’s House in Paris, was first created in 1996). The American in me occasionally and involuntarily thinks in sports metaphors: ‘that’s two strikes!’ I worried. Then, when Durham heaved the stone with two hands onto the case, his entire body lifting off the floor in the effort, and the glass shattered as planned, another American saying came instantly to mind: ‘third time’s a charm’. Finally, as he encouraged us to gather around and listen to the faint, sparkling sounds of the settling glass, I unintentionally recalled vintage commercials for a famous breakfast cereal’s ‘snaps, crackles and pops’, and the forgotten image of a cheery towheaded child tilting his ear toward a sputtering cereal bowl.

These reactions were quite disconcerting, but it was admittedly not the first time that Durham had stirred some unconscious, uneasy recognition of ‘American-ness’ in me. His 35 mm film La poursuite de bonheur (Pursuit of Happiness, 2002), titled after one of three ‘certain inalienable rights’ the colonizers decreed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, features artist Anri Sala playing a celebrated Native American artist named Joe Hill, modeled on Durham himself, who is of Cherokee descent and was an activist in the Civil Rights and American Indian Movements for decades. In the film, Hill travels the highways picking up rubbish (or, rather, ‘found-objects’), which he turns into art. After his successful opening, he torches his camping car then moves on to France. When I first saw the film at a screening in Marseilles in 2002, the figure of Sala on the roadside immediately conjured the now-iconic 1970s ‘Keep America Beautiful’ television advertising campaign against highway litter, which starred a ‘crying Indian’ who roamed on horseback and by canoe through a waste-besieged, automobile ridden landscape.

It is impossible for me to do justice to the art historical or theoretical importance of this overview of Durham’s work. Individual pieces tug at me in such a way that I am incapable of adopting the appropriate distance. On the whole, Durham’s work is too archaeological in nature, too much about origins, and too playful, not to appeal my inner-child – though I somehow feel it shouldn’t. After all, we couldn’t be more different.

Ghost in the Machine (2005), a life-size ancient statue of a helmeted Athena coiled with rope to a refrigerator, is surely about Cartesian mind-body dualism, but to me it just appears as some miraculous treasure hoisted from the depths. Baby Please Don’t Go (2000), a pointy pair of bowed shoes peeking from beneath a funereal slab of mottled grey diorite, evokes houses falling on witches and recuperated ruby slippers, as well as a blank slate ready to receive Babylonian ruler Hammurabi’s code. Durham’s world is one in which odd-shaped stones are believably displayed as hunks of cheese or a petrified clouds (The Dangers of Petrification I and II, 1998-2007); an aeroplane is grounded and riven by a gigantic boulder, seemingly pelted by some vengeful, or bored, sky-god (Encore tranquilité, Still Tranquility, 2008); and a minuscule bird sits in a wonky wooden cage set atop a colourfully painted branch, with an attached hand-written sign indicating that this is A Peanut Shaped like a Bird (2006).

If one merely glances in that direction, one can clearly see Durham’s concern with ‘anti-architecture’, ‘estrangement’, ‘language’ and ‘negativity’ in the pocked and scratched wood slabs of Labyrinth 1-6 (2007), or the printed and stacked oil drums of Sweet Light Crude (2008): the visual evidence for those critical terms is bolstered by the artist’s statements and several exegetic essays in the valuable catalogue. One can also discern the power dynamics of master-builders and labourers at work across his production. Yet, despite myself, when faced with the wondrous profusion of work here, I am inexplicably drawn to it like some whimsical mystic writing-pad and become slave to my most childish of memories.
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source: muhkabe
Jimmie Durham is born in 1940 in the U.S.
He takes his first artistic steps in the field of theatre, literature and performance in the progressive African-American circles in Texas in the 60′s. He works with the Afro-American poet Vivian Ayers and does a performance with Mohamed Ali.
In 1968 he moves to the then very international Geneva, where he enrols at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts. During that period he makes performative, sometimes sculptural work. Together with three other sculptors, he forms the Draga group which explores how art can become more integrated into public life.
In 1973, he returns to the U.S. to become involved in the American Indian Movement, and remains politically active until 1980. He co-establishes the International Indian Treaty Council, is involved in the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, and is ultimately made the representative of the Indians to the United Nations – the first official representative of a minority within the organisation.
In 1980 he returns to art. As an essayist, he remains concerned with the image of Native Americans and his art work from this period both reflects and thematises this attitude, although it displays both a broader reflective quality and a stronger visual expression. Typical examples are the works with animal skulls.
Durham gains notoriety within the New York art scene, but finds that his work is seen as “Indian art” and fails to encourage fundamental – political or artistic – discussions. In 1987, he leaves the U.S. and goes to live in Cuernavaca, Mexico – where he stays until he moves back to Europe in 1994.
It is a period with many international exhibitions. In 1988 he creates Pocahontas and the Little Carpenter for Matt’s Gallery in London; he has an exhibition at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York in 1992, and the work Original Re-Runs a.k.a. A Certain Lack of Coherence travels in 1993 from the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London to the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Kunstverein Hamburg. In 1992, Jan Hoet invites him as one of the key artists in the Documenta IX exhibition in Kassel. He creates a large ensemble entitled Approach in Love and Fear, consisting of several sculptures and texts. A number of these works are now part of the M HKA collection and will be on view again during the exhibition.
The essays that Jimmie Durham continues to write and publish in magazines such as Artforum, Art Journal, and Third Text, as well as in various books are collected in the 1993 publication A Certain Lack of Coherence, a collection of his essays published by Kala Press.
Since turning away from the Americas in 1994 and permanently moving to Europe, Jimmie Durham has opposed two foundations of the European tradition: religion and architecture. Another theme that since has emerged in many of his works is his vision of Europe, which he calls Eurasia – Jimmie Durham sees himself as a ‘homeless Eurasian orphan’. In Europe, he has successively lived in Brussels, Marseille, Rome and now in Berlin. His work can be seen in several international key locations: the Biennials of Venice in 1999, 2001, 2003 and 2005; in Marseille, The Hague and Gateshead (England) (in the retrospective film From the West Pacific to the East Atlantic), at the Sidney Biennial in 2004, the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (in the retrospective Pierres rejetées … [Stones Rejected …]) …
Presently, in 2012, M HKA hosts a comprehensive retrospective of Jimmie Durham’s oeuvre in which approximately 120 of his works will be shown. Durham’s major installation Building a Nation (2006) was on view this year in Kasper König’s last exhibition Before the Law at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne which ends on April 22, and the artist will also take part in dOCUMENTA (13) later this year.
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source: 9511019857
Jimmie Durham (nato nel 1940 a Washington, Arkansas, da una famiglia di origini e tradizione cherokee) è un artista, ma anche poeta e saggista nordamericano; attualmente vive a Roma. La sua prima personale è del 1965 a Austin (Texas); successivamente (1968) si sposta in Svizzera a Ginevra, dove studia alla École des Beaux-Arts per poi ritornare nel 1973 negli Stati Uniti; partecipa tra l’altro allo scontro tra indiani nativi americani e forze governative a Wounded Knee. E’ molto attivo nell’American Indian Movement (AIM), dove lavora come organizzatore politico fino a diventare membre del Consiglio Centrale del movimento. Quando alla fine degli anno ’70 l’AIM si frammenta, Durham, che in quel momento vive a New York, ritorna all’arte e alla scultura, scrivendo anche poesie. Nel 1987 si trasferisce in Messico, per poi ritornare in Europa nel 1994. Attualmente vive a Roma. Tutto il suo lavoro tende, con forte carica ironica, ma grande precisione, a criticare l’attuale stile di vita occidentale, diciamo “coloniale” per un indiano che trova il suo territorio invaso da stranieri, contrapponendo una diversa teoria e un diverso modo di guardare il mondo. Jimmie Durham nel suo lavoro usa modalità espressive diverse spaziando dal disegno alla scrittura, dalla scultura all’ installazione. Quest’ultima spesso entra in un rapporto critico con l’architettura occidentale codificata. Il riferimento contenuto nel titolo dell’installazione, Detour over Rome, creata per l’occasione nel giardino dell’Acquario Romano, fa riferimento all’ultima città dove Jimmie ha scelto di risiedere. “Detour over Rome” è un intervento pensato e realizzato appositamente per l’Acquario Romano, un progetto artistico che si integra al luogo interessando sia l’interno che l’esterno dell’edificio della Casa dell’Architettura. Rispetto al “Gran Tour” del Settecento-Ottocento, che aveva una sua regolarità con una andata e un ritorno, “Detour over Rome” destrutturizza questo concetto di viaggio circolare ordinato. . E’ come un viaggio su Roma, ma anche sull’arte, imprevedibile e caotico. Una tubatura in pvc parte dal terreno percorrendo la cima di una pietra di basalto, a superficie irregolare, dalle dimensioni di 1,5 metri x 1,5 circa, e proseguendo continua in direzione dell’edificio. Il suo diametro si riduce progressivamente in prossimità del davanzale e della finestra del primo piano da cui entra per dirigersi verso la biblioteca e continuare all’interno dell’edificio con un passo non-direzionale, concludendosi in filamenti di rame.