JIMMIE DURHAM

MEDIA RELEASE

JIMMIE DURHAM
Exhibition at the Pori Art Museum, 5th September – 26th October 1997

Jimmie Durham – sculptor and painter, performance artist, poet, and essayist – has been one of the central innovators of contemporary visual expression since the mid-1980s. His list of exhibitions, performances, and texts is extensive; he has participated in the IX Documenta in Kassel and the Whitney Biennial, and his significant poetry book Columbus Day was published in 1983, followed by the essay collection Certain Lack of Coherence in 1993. Phaidon Press in London published a monograph covering Durham’s thirty-year career in 1995.

Jimmie Durham was born in 1940 in Arkansas, Nevada, into the Cherokee Indian Susi clan. In his youth, he worked on farms in the central southern United States, in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, as a horse breaker and trainer. Later, he “went mad and served in the navy,” which took him to North and South Vietnam: “Our job was to start a war.” After being discharged from military service, he returned to the United States. Self-ironic, he mentions that he started doing “various things that others called art.” Through a series of coincidences, he moved to Geneva, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Genève.

However, in the early 1970s, his social criticism led him to take on the role of an activist in the U.S. Indian civil rights movement. In this role, he was involved in the fierce 1973 Wounded Knee clashes between government forces and the indigenous population. Until the 1980s, he worked in the American Indian Movement and its central administration. As a representative of the Native Americans at the UN, he pioneered the founding and leadership of the International Indian Treaty Council.

In the early phase of his artistic career in the 1970s, Jimmie Durham was the founder and leader of the Foundation for the Community of Artists, and he also illustrated children’s books that promoted inter-racial connections. After serving as the editor of Art & Artists magazine published in New York, he worked as a freelance critic for numerous international art magazines.

As a poet and essayist, Jimmie Durham naturally blends literary and visual expression in his works, sharply and insightfully. As a postmodern ‘wild’ artist, he doesn’t consider himself capable of, nor interested in, creating ‘high art,’ but has defined his sculptures as ‘neo-primitivist new conceptualism.’ Technically, his works are endearingly awkward, often constructions made from found materials and assemblages resembling ethnographic displays that, through wordplay, poetry, and political satire, reveal colonial aspects of Western culture.

Jimmie Durham participated in the 1996 exhibition and publishing project Strangers in the Arctic by the Pori Art Museum and the exhibition exchange center FRAME, contemplating the conditions of cultural identity in the coldest regions of the Earth, in Russia’s Yakutia. Durham’s ‘center of the world’ was defined during this trip by a corner of a general store window in Yakutsk. However, from the other side of the coin, the artist’s stories of a large evil cat hypnotizing a space-faring girl or Nikola, an Evenki scientist, inevitably evoke the grim fate of indigenous peoples, following their subjugation and defeat in the face of the dominance of the majority population.

At the Pori Art Museum in 1997, Jimmie Durham’s center of the world is a sacred tree in Chalma, Mexico. According to tradition, pilgrims must walk there, and turning back or abandoning the journey is dangerous, as it could turn one into stone. Therefore, it is particularly courteous to kick a stone towards Chalma, as it might be the soul of a lost traveler. Upon reaching the sacred tree, the stone might return to humanity.

The exhibition shows the best route from Pori to Chalma. The press conference for the exhibition will be held on Friday, 5th September 1997 at 12:00. Welcome!

Jimmie Durham will be available for meetings at the Pori Art Museum from 2nd to 5th September 1997. For inquiries, please call +358 2 621 1080, fax +358 2 621 1091, or email marketta.seppala@pori.fi.

Jimmie Durham’s exhibition brings together many of the ideas raised in the museum’s previous exhibition Samaa maata – Samma land – Side by Side, which presented artists from Finnish ethnic groups. The second part of the exhibition, focusing on cultural history, will be shown at the Satakunta Museum, featuring room interiors and spatial works.

Translated with ChatGPT