Jimmie Durham: postmodernist "savage." - Native American artist

Jimmie Durham presents a dialogue for which neither the Native nor the non-Native world is ready. As a Cherokee artist, writer, bard performer and treaty activist, he dioceses the world through the organ of visions of Coyote- - the trickster, the Native American embodiment of all that is base and godlike in humans. His art flays away the decorative wrappings that disguise the American Indian in the United States's colonial present

To begin with, Durham's work is frequently deceptively modest, its anger and its intelligence veiled by the agency of a deliberate obtuseness and formal awkwardness. His oeuvre can be wrestl into five overlapping categories. First, there are the handsome statuarys that focus on animal craniums large and small, plain or embellished, re-embodying and redecorating a physical past. next to the first there are the satirical works, like upon Loan from the Museum of the American Indian (1984) which bring together almost randomly an uneven assortment of "sociofacts and scientifacts" (toothbrush, feathered underpanties, family photos) framed by means of captions about the ordinary life of present-day Indians. These brief true copys satirically protest the ethnographic habit of perceiving anything about Indians as fair game for the display cases of history, deflecting the naive points of "educational" display to evidence that "they're human beings. just like us" (to adduce an idiotic line from the movie Black Robe). Third, there is the work in which the relationship between writing and rendering becomes more intimate smooth as the conflict between the sum of two units deepens.[1] "The Bishop's Moose," Durham's 1989 one-man exhibit that opened at Exit Art and traveled around the political division for a while, was center upon drawings, assemblages and assemblage-drawings, greatest in quantity of them involving inscriptions, which can be loosely fitted together as installation. Fourth, there are the powerful, of recent origin almost monumental, almost abstract statuarys like the 100-foot-long snake he showed not long ago in the exhibition "Will/Power" at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio [see review in this issue] -- its mud-formed head contrasting eerily with its pale-green, industrial-pipe material substance And all along, a fifth category has accompanied the others -- performances and impermanent indoor or outdoor installations that sometimes blemish into the artist's writings.

Until lately Durham's art works have been fairly small in scale, carved and assembled (often upon the road) from found on the other hand not necessarily quaint objects. Juxtaposed with images or body s sometimes recycled from earlier installations, they may incorporate a certain number of scribbled words (even "scrawled" is too dramatic a description for his lackadaisical epistolary style) -- a far call from the commercially imitative neatness of plenteous conceptual postmodern art. His work is honestly unobtrusive and humorously disjunctive, with a bite that is worse than its bark. The particulars themselves may not seem to "amount to much" on the outside of context, precisely because of the way Durham brings them together to make tricky political points.

drawn out an involuntary "American," like with equal reason many indigenous people occupying a "fourth world" within the first world, Durham mov from fresh York to Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1987 He lives there with Brazilian-American photographer Maria Thereza Alves. His installations made in the last five years in Ireland, England, Canada, Belgium, Germany, as well as the U have become the way he transcends cultural homelessnes They stand over against the histories of specific sites [i]or[/i] part of to the other Cherokee eyes and with special attention paid to local parallels or intersections with Cherokee history. For instance, Durham's 1988 London exhibit at Matt's Gallery, titled "Mataoka Ake Attakulakula Anel Guledisgo Hnihi: Pocahontas and the Little Carpenter in London," dealt with the kidnapped Indian princess who died in London as "Lady Rebecca" and an 18th-century Cherokee delegate to London whose nickname was "the Fixer," in honor of his diplomatic talents.

Similarly, for very much like the Wild Irish, an outdoor cast made at the Orchard Gallery in Derry Northern Ireland, in 1988 Durham distributed a broadside that drew parallels between the histories of sum of two units colonized peoples: the Irish and the American Native. The focus of the installation was a ceremonial pole/ Celtic cros carved upon the spot from a standing yew tree Attached to it were rest objects, including two large rearview mirrors and "a homemade savage video camera made of forest-land and a coke bottle lens" intended to challenge the British Army's ubiquitous surveillance cameras in Northern Ireland. Behind the extremity was a small earth work, erected to resemble an archeological dig. The final ultimate part of the project was an ongoing compilation of photos and "evidence" submitted by the agency of the public as Durham wandered around the city talking to clan about history and tradition.

Durham says he has not been a "studio artist" for 20 years:

I alone do things specifically for a present to view or a project because I want it to be uniteed to whatever I am up to in society and whatever society's up to I'm not satisfied by making shapes and then throwing them at the world I'm not really an artist upon my own, [he insists,] I'm a social artist in that I want my work to be part of whatever discourses are going upon .... It is very problematical for me -- I don't think I hold a real self. When I'm "on my own" in the forests or here on my canyon terrace [in Mexico], I'm just being with all the matter that's there. Without stimulus from outside I'd be consummately content in those situations for an indefinite time.[2]