Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, Whitney Museum

I very much wanted to see the Jimmie Durham retrospective at the Whitney Museum. I’ve known about Jimmie Durham as an American Indian artist for at least 30 years and his relocation to Europe in the 1980s seemed a loss for the art world of the United States. No one I know has heard of him. I’ve seen his work occasionally in European museums, but it was a surprise that major museums in the United States would mount a show. There has been some controversy about his self-identification as American Indian, and that aspect of his work was not emphasized in the exhibition until near the end. That made sense because his work address many subjects and aspects of his identity.

Although I was eager to see the exhibition, I expected to be disappointed because I know Durham makes extensive use of found objects and thought I would see a lot of abstract constructions of detritus. In fact, I found the exhibition riveting, fascinating, touching, amusing, and both personal and universal. The first room captured me with a video of Durham hacking away at a chunk of obsidian, making an abstract sculpture from this very hard stone, used to make amazingly sharp tools in ancient Mexico.

Slash and Burn, 2007
Collection of Mima and Cesar Reyes

Slash and Burn, detail

The first object I looked at was this one, titled Slash and Burn, 2007, and the label provides very helpful context for the work: “While in residence at the Atelier Calder in the Loire Valley, Durham found a fallen beech tree in Strasbourg, France. Inspired by its physical traces of history – it had declarations of love carved into the bark as well as seven bullets from World War II embedded in it – Durham cut the tree into several planks, which he incorporated into a series of sculptures including this work. Fascinated by the patterns and holes created by insects and fungus growth, he chose to accentuate these natural phenomena by painting them with watercolor. As he has done in a number of other works throughout his career, here Durham includes text that directly addresses the viewer and describes his process of embellishing the beech tree.” The label, the text on the work, and Durham’s additions to the plank of wood all contribute to the depth of both personal (both his own and others), natural, and national history the slab evokes. It was difficult to move away from this very simple object.

Carnivalesque Shark in Venice, 2015, glass, goat leather, piranha teeth, papier-mache and acrylic paint
Collection of Eleanor Heyman Propp

Because we love Venice and collect glass, the second object, Carnivalesque Shark in Venice, 2015 also caught my attention, a glass shark with a painted carnival mask, which was simply amusing. 

The Dangers of Petrification, detail, 1998-2007

 Many of the works are gatherings of found objects with inscriptions that suggest political issues, artistic media, or Durham’s personal issues, often all at once, so that they have both broad and specific context. Sometimes the sculpture or panel composing several found objects was uninteresting until one read Durham’s descriptions of the items. For example, I found  The Dangers of Petrification, 1998-2007, two vitrines of rocks, labeled as petrified states of various unlikely items particularly amusing. The objects played with our assumptions about what things look like, as well as the idea of scientific collecting and categorizing. The rocks seemed possible as petrified everyday foods, but it took a particular kind of vision and imagination on the part of the artist to see them as petrified German black bread, chocolate cake, cheese, or bacon.

Malinche
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent, Belgium

 Malinche, detail

In another gallery was a composite portrait labeled as La Malinche, the woman Cortez took up with in Mexico, considered the ancestor of mixed race Mexicans, mestizos. First planning it as an image of Pocahontas, Durham revised it and added figure representing Cortez. The face of La Malinche is remarkably expressive, considering the simple materials and abstracted style used to create it. A detail of it illustrates Holland Cotter's positive NY Times review of the exhibition, which also includes illustrations of many more works in the exhibition.

Wahya, 1984, detail. Bear Skull and more
Coll. of Luis H. Francia and Midori Yamamura

Wahya, 1984 detail of other side

Then there are the totem-like constructions employing animal skulls and various found objects. Looking at my photographs I was stunned by how completely different they are from each side, as well as how powerfully expressive they are.

I Will Try to Explain, 1970-2012
Private Collection, courtesy of kurimanzutto, Mexico City

 In several of the works, Durham’s inscriptions make them almost literary and certainly biographical, always in an unprepossessing mode. I Will Try to Explain, 2007-2012, a rather simple collage, caught me with the sentence involving the cat skin, but carried through with mention of friends, the struggle to make good art, and the history of the farmer, the cat, the object itself, and the artist. It’s almost like poetry.

Untitled, 1982, baby buffalo skull, beads, goat leather, hawk feather, shells, acrylic paint
Collection Joe Overstreet and Corrine Jennings

 For many of the works the accompanying texts and the context provided by the labels add multiple dimensions to the already sculptural forms. One example is the single skull, remnant of a 1982 installation of  elaborated animal skulls, Manhattan Festival of the Dead, with texts urging the gallery visitor to purchase them for $5 each because the work of dead artists goes up in value and the artist is already approaching the life expectancy of an American Indian, and dedicating the works to the members of the American Indian Movement who were killed after the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee as well as to everyone in New York “killed by subways, .38 slugs, needles or desparate [sic] acts, without any proper ceremonies to help their passage and our passage.”

There is a particularly amusing self-portrait with identifying inscriptions, , 

from Six authentic things, 1989,  Real Obsidian (Private Collection)

Une etude des etoils, 1995
Collection of Herve Lebrun

and A Study of Stars, 1995. The little inscription above says "The Cherokee stars have seven points" in French. I particularly liked the computer key and the starleaf gum leaf.

At this point I realized that I had gone through the exhibition backwards.

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