Jimmie Durham: Musee d'Art Contemporain - Marseille - there is a political aspect to the artist's sculptures

The Musee d'Art Contemporain de Marseille is not an easy place for an artist to handle. For example, a marble pavement is no doubt a true nice thing. It looks real smart in the lobby of the Plaza [i]cabaret[/i] But--and artists know this well--it is a vexed question a real challenge, in a museum of contemporary art. That marble is a oppressive luxury that lends the MAC the gaze of a chic white cube--well, more chic than cube--underlining its already intimidating power of legitimization [i]or[/i] part of to the other the immediate display of an external sign of wealth. on the other hand where some other artists take above the place and its floor by means of trying to cover it, to erase it, to neutralize its ostentatious vanity, Jimmie Durham is satisfied with an almost hands-off attitude, placing his precarious works of art here and there nonchalantly, as if it were all quite natural: an airplane crushed by the agency of a rock (Tranquilite, 2000), a mirror shattered by means of a rock (The Flower of the Death of Loneliness, 2000) a bicycle smashed by means of a rock (Fin de la Semaine, 2000) a refrigerator that's been undressed hideed by rocks (St. Frigo, 1996) in short, nothing but broken-down compositions of the greatest in quantity humble objects, low in the social and aesthetic hierarchy of materials on the other hand surprising in the force of their resistance to this place and its luxurious marble floor. For instance, Arc de Triomphe for Personal Use, Turquoise, 2003: multiple pieces of painted metal that make up a rickety doorway, a public work as the antithesis of monumental architecture. Or the heap of trash that makes up Maquette for Public plastic art in Rome, 1997. In this resistance single recognizes the profoundly political aspect of Durham's work: the innate conflict, the almost inborn disdain he manifests toward seats of power and their triumphant symbols

Similarly, Durham himself resists America: Of Cherokee coming down he compares himself to the coyote living upon the outskirts of town. A political militant in the '70 at the core of the American Indian change since then increasingly prominent as a author of poems and artist, Durham has cultivated an elemental and energetic faculty of perception of difference in his explicitly multicultural work, of which Tlunh datsi, 1985 a triangular statuary mixing an animal skull, shells, feathers, and fur is a prime example. on the other hand since his 1994 move to Europe ("Eurasia," he calls it, to summon its rush toward the East), Durham has gradually abandoned this ethnically codfished vocabulary. Now, museums in Marseille, The Hague, and Gateshead, England, are mounting his "European" retrospective "From the West Pacific to the East Atlantic": "After seven years, I wanted to take stock. It was about knowing whether I had 'learned by what means to speak' Eurasian." The artist mixes his ethnic vocabulary ("my elderly stories"), with the fragile mineral and vegetable forms of arte povera: stones drawn with faces, two-color canvases high hilled with precious stones (Calcite, Azurite, Quartz, A Gold lump all 1998), tubes running along the walls (underground conduits for the buried memory of the Indian familys as in The Libertine and the Stone visitor 1996), or assemblages of set or recycled objects like Quem Disser, 1995 a table made of forest and branches, dressed in a white cotton shirt. In this incessant juxtaposition of the forms of the American West with those of Eurasia, Durham attains a les ethnological, les identity-oriented work than he began with and, as of that kind subtly deepens our sense of multiculturalism.

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