KREUGER, Anders - Stone as Stone, An Essay About Jimmie Durham

31/7/2014 Afterall • Journal • Stone as Stone: An Essay About Jimmie Durham

http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.30/stone-as-stone-an-essay-about-jimmie-durham 1/8

Stone as Stone: An Essay About JimmieDurhamAnders Kreuger

A Stone from Metternich’s House in Bohemia, 1996, production shot for action in DerVerführer und der steinerne Gast (The Libertine and the Stone Guest). Installation view,Wittgenstein House, Vienna. Photograph: Marco Fedele di Catrano. Courtesy the artist andM HKA, Antwerp

Some Beginnings

My work might be considered ‘interventionist’ because it works against the two foundationsof the European tradition: belief and architecture. My work is against the connection of artto architecture, to the ‘statue’, to monumentality. I want it to be investigative, and thereforenot ‘impressive’, not believable.1

Those of us who have been taught to never write ‘not’ and always use ‘and’ instead of ‘but’might find this short statement by Jimmie Durham apprehensive or even negative. In fact it isprofoundly affirmative. Why should we ‘believe’ when we can strive for knowledge throughaction and reflection? Why should we ‘build’ when there are more flexible and responsiveways to be in the world?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. In 1951 Martin Heidegger, who repeatedly spoke in favour ofbelief and architecture, wrote: ‘Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking.’2 InHeidegger’s text this becomes a stepping stone for interesting speculations about the futureand cyclical time, but it immediately leads to other questions. Who are ‘we’? Westerncivilisation? The Germans? Philosophers who don’t wish to apologise for what they did beforethe War? And can I avoid identification with this crowd despite my enjoyment of Heidegger’sinsistence on thinking about thinking?

Precise and necessary words wear out much too fast when they are taken over bypolicymakers, managers and communication officers. The art world is no exception. In the lastyear or so I have felt a bit queasy each time I’ve wanted to apply the notion of ‘thinking’ toartists and their work. I couldn’t help remembering that our name for this beautiful activityrisks encountering the same fate as ‘knowledgeproduction’, namely to be loved to pieces by anincreasingly self-conscious industry of practise-based fine arts PhD programmes. But Iwouldn’t be able to speak of Durham’s 45 years of work as an artist and writer and activist andeducator if I had to avoid this word for fear of being too much ‘of the moment’. Durhamdoesn’t trade in received wisdom; his next move can never be predicted. Nor does he make afetish of what is to come. In his essays and interviews and lectures he has repeatedly defendedthe intellectual fundaments of art-making. For him intellectuality is ‘whatever you arethinking about’.3 And nothing seems to prevent Durham from thinking right now about the

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– Summer 2012



things he needs to know to be able to move on.

If the negative mode must sometimes be used to speak of Durham, it is to open our eyes forwhat we will not find in his art if we look for what is not there. He is not an American artist,not an Indian artist, not a Cherokee artist. Such categorising is simply not helpful in his case.He is not an artist who makes statements or elaborates a language, perhaps because he is alsoa writer. He is not an artist whose work can be systematised or summarised.

I brought up Heidegger not only because of his stance on thinking but also because heillustrates the European tendency to ascribe our own shortcomings to everyone. We have sothoroughly monopolised the ‘we’ that we don’t even notice when others are ahead of us. ‘Mostthought-provoking is that we are still not thinking’ makes sense in Europe after World War II,or, more generally, after the European takeover of most of the rest of the world. But those whowere, for instance, subjected to colonial rule could never allow themselves the luxury ofmystifying thinking to the point of making Heidegger’s phrase appear plausible.

Born in 1940 in (or, as he says, ‘under’) the State of Arkansas, Durham left school at sixteenand joined the US Navy. In his mid-twenties, in Texas, he emerged as an artist and poet. In1969 he moved to Geneva, where he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1973, the year ofthe occupation of the symbolic site of Wounded Knee, where a massacre of Indians wasperpetrated by the US Army in 1890, Durham moved back across the Atlantic. He became apolitical organiser with the American Indian Movement. He also became Director of theInternational Indian Treaty Council and its representative to the United Nations. At the end ofthe 1970s the American Indian Movement disintegrated, and Durham turned his attention toart again, exhibiting in New York and publishing numerous essays. Many of these werecollected in the anthology A Certain Lack of Coherence, which appeared in 1993.4 He wasbased in Cuernavaca, Mexico between 1987 and 1994, when he moved back to Europe.5 Sincethen Durham and his partner, the artist Maria Thereza Alves, have lived in Brussels,Marseille, Berlin and Rome. He has travelled and exhibited extensively. He has also continuedto write and is a sought-after teacher and lecturer.

But these are not the right beginnings for an essay about Jimmie Durham. He can bedescribed as a ‘sculptor’, if we accept that a sculptor today uses all the components of ‘visualart’: object, image, word and action. Durham may nail or glue or paint the image and the wordonto the object, or he may make his objects or images in front of an audience. His art turnsviewers into participants by being both seductively light and dangerously unknowable. Hiswriting combines the opinionated with the seemingly frivolous. It is integrated into theartworks as titles, accompanying legends, signage or screenplays, and in many other ways.

Durham has told me that asking questions is considered rude in American Indian culture.6

This might be seen as a specificity that attentive outsiders should learn to grasp, howeverquaint they find it. One of the fundaments of Heidegger’s ‘we’, and its predecessors all the wayback to Socrates’s ‘talk shows’, is our conviction that asking questions is polite (becauseotherwise we would only talk about ourselves); that knowledge, and indeed thinking, wouldnot be possible without questioning; and that the ‘quality’ of the question matters more thanthe results it helps us achieve. A contradictory and powerful set of beliefs. But Durham’s no-questions-asked policy is more than an inherited cultural convention. It is a conscious choice,an epistemic tool. The direct question can be seen as a crude method of knowledge-production. It only gives us what we have asked for. It is also intrinsically intrusive andviolent. Perhaps we should remind ourselves that the goal of the Inquisition was not to findout the truth but to produce confessions. Surely we would do much better to observe the worldaround us actively and listen carefully to what others choose to tell us. A more suitablebeginning of my essay might have been this quote from Durham:

I don’t want to consciously put things in my work that are from my background. But I don’twant to consciously take them out either. I just want to be an intellectual; and I happen to bea Cherokee. But it doesn’t mean that you are a different kind of intellectual, and I want myartwork to be an intellectual project. I don’t see it as an instinctual or an intuitive project,but completely intellectual. I want to think about art. I want art to be a part of humanity’sthinking process, not humanity’s ‘feeling’ process. We already have enough emotions,enough feelings, but we don’t have enough thoughts.7

Against Monument

Durham says he is against art’s connection to monumentality. But his own oeuvre doesn’tnecessarily negate the monumental, although contingency has always been important to him.For years he accepted almost every invitation to exhibit or take part in workshops or lectures,partly out of necessity but also partly by choice. Many of his works are made to appear ‘throwntogether’ from whatever materials were available. This has allowed him to perfect his own artof the possible, based on unprejudiced attentiveness to his immediate surroundings, whereverthey might be.



Contingency is a visible feature not least in the works that mark his second transfer to Europein the early 1990s. They have the wit, the economy and the grandeur from within to challengeDurham’s own understanding of the monumental as an imposition on people by anoverbearing state. His use of wood, which has featured prominently in his work since the1960s, is significant in this context. He has stressed how important the forest has been to him,the formerly vast woodlands that once formed a gradual transition between the northern andsouthern climate zones of the North American continent:

I have lived in the city most of my life, so that now I often think I’ve lived in the city all of mylife, even though I am originally from the forest and have acute memories of those emerald-and-tortoise-shell days. It is as though I’ve always lived in both places, sylvan and civil;perhaps the Wall has actually contributed to the unity of my duality — when I visit the Wallam I not seeing the trees under and around which I once fearfully and celebratorily walked?8

‘Celebratorily’ is a word we encounter now and then in Durham’s texts, often used to critiquethe triumphalism of the oppressive city/state. That is the subject of Gilgamesh, a sculpturefrom 1993 for which Durham also wrote the text quoted here, titled ‘Gilgamesh and Me: TheTrue Story of the Wall’. The sculpture stages the meeting of an unpainted wooden door, asturdy PVC pipe and an axe. The door is penetrated by the pipe and assaulted by the axe,whose blade is half-buried into its otherwise undented surface. A self-sufficient monument toitself, but also a re-presentation of the ancient Gilgamesh epic. The text focuses on the ‘wildman’, the necessary other for the king who ‘cut down the forest to build the city Wall’.9

Enkiddu Wildemann, Durham’s Akkadian-German alter ego, shows his counterpartGilgamesh ‘that his Wall must necessarily be considered as a door also’.10 Thence the shape ofthe accompanying artwork.

Durham’s views on architecture and belief are, Ithink, tightly bound to his reading of history as apattern of movements that must be continuouslyreinterpreted. He has not given up hope that wemight learn something if we call up thosemovements of people from the past. Why elsewould he tear a sheet from an old historical atlas,showing the complex population flows in Europefrom the fifth to the ninth centuries, and pin it tothe wall of his studio in Rome? The so-calledMigration Period left few built monuments, but itcreated the patterns (the ethnic make-up, thedouble-bind of promised liberation and socialoppression by state and church) that we considerto be European ‘normality’. The apparentlyhaphazard movements of Germanic and Slavic andFinno- Ugrian and Turkic tribes was prompted bycontingencies that have mostly been forgotten, andthey created new contingencies that still shapeevents throughout the continent but arenevertheless poorly understood. This map was partof Durham and Alves’s installation Museum ofEuropean Normality, first shown at Manifesta 7 inTrento in 2008.

Paradigm for an Arch is an assortment ofseemingly discarded objects laid out to form a

Romanesque arch. It was created for Durham’s solo exhibition ‘Architexture' at GalerieMicheline Szwajcer in Antwerp in 1994, and prefigures the many versions of Durham’s Arc deTriomphe for Personal Use (1996—2007). They are lightweight structures in wood or metalthat we can put up and pass through wherever and whenever celebration is called for, but theyalso subvert the function of the triumphal arch, personalising and democratising a concept ofglory usually reserved for the state. These portable monuments might also be read as atherapeutic attack on the overbearing superego, if they weren’t so ‘celebratorily’ ironic. TheParadigm instead wants to cure us of our awe for the glorious arch by laying it down on thefloor and by reminding us that we once had names for the various segments that constitute it.The words are the true monuments. Durham writes them down, in French and Flemish, onpieces of paper, and next to them he arranges pieces of wood and plastic and other materialsto illustrate how the arch achieves its goal. The left-hand side must be translated by a right-hand side, otherwise the arch would end in mid-air. Durham’s translation from word andstone and wood into materials that we feel free to despise, such as PVC plumbing tubes, is alsonoteworthy.

Jimmie Durham, Gilgamesh, 1993,wood, iron, PVC, axe, metal details, door300 × 140cm, tube 355 × 63cm.Photograph: Christine Clinckx. Courtesythe artist, Stichting Beeldende KunstMiddelburg/De Vleeshal and M HKA,Antwerp



I love plastic of any kind; I like the shape of pipes, tubes […] This plastic tube, I like it verymuch in the artistic sense, in the art-world sense. It’s very unheroic, unmonumental. Aplastic tube is not comical, it’s not strong enough to be comical, but it is never serious. Eventhe biggest piece of plastic PVC pipe won’t be serious. It will always be plastic tubing, itdoesn’t lend itself to being phallic at the same time. You think it would become phallic, but itnever does — or only in a silly way, and then it can be a little more humorous. So I like thepassivity of it, the non-heroic side of it.11

Will the choice of the less-than-noble plastic or other unloved materials undo themonumental? And is undoing the same as overcoming? Rhetorical questions, hardly suited forpolite American Indian society, but perhaps useful for talking about Durham’s PublicMonument for the Birthday of Rome (1995). For this work he collected various pieces ofrubbish that appealed to him as objects halfway out of use and installed them on a siteoverlooking Rome, as a ‘formless’ sculpture. Its form and content so appealed to passers-bythat they had to be prevented from subtracting from it by a specially contracted securityguard. So the anti-monumental should not be confused with the anti-aesthetic. The situationoffered a temptation to deplete a whole system of concepts (‘public’, ‘monument’,‘participation’), but Durham instead enriched them into almost tangible values (‘sculpture’,‘project’, ‘appreciation’). Paradox and irony are notoriously treacherous as artist’s tools. Theyrequire the right hands.

In the mid-to-late 1990s Durham devoted much energy to refining his practice of ‘stoning’, orletting stones impact on diverse objects. Works such as the stoned television sets ofResurrection (1995), the stoned refrigerator St Frigo (1996) or the short videos later compiledunder the title Collected Stones (1995— 2002) have become icons of this period in Durham’swork. The longer essays he wrote at the time are also important sources for his thinking, inwhich stones are prominent. In Between the Furniture and the Building (Between the Rockand a Hard Place), published in conjunction with an exhibition at Kunstverein München in1998, we read about a grand scheme. There are nine large pieces of carved granite sitting in aquarry on the west coast of Sweden. Intended to become part of the ‘Arch of Peace’ planned byAdolf Hitler and Albert Speer for post- War Berlin, they were never shipped. Durham wishesto turn them into actors in a film:

The film will not be a documentary, although it will kind of ‘document’ itself. It will be afeature-length film (about 90 minutes) of high artistic merit, and therefore ‘commercial’ insome sense; even if not a ‘summer blockbuster’. We’ll get one of those barges that have noengine, and after taking the stones by truck through the forests to the harbour, load thestones onto the barge and tow them across the Baltic in the direction of Rügen Island andBerlin. Then we’ll sink them, barge and all, in the Baltic Sea (forming a useful artificial deep-water reef to support a variety of marine life). The stones will be free — and light, becausethey will have been transformed into light and cellulose (the film). But they’ll be eternal, too,as carved granite cannot be, because they will be art, and art is eternal, people say.12

I find it entirely in line with Durham’s intentionally inconclusive face-off with monumentalitythat these barges will, most probably, never be sunk before a film camera. In the meantime,celluloid has gone out of fashion.

Against Belief

For Jimmie Durham belief is a political matter. Through his work for the American IndianMovement Durham gained experience of ‘real’ politics: something not many other leadingcontemporary artists can claim. I have already quoted from the interview he gave to theGreenlander artist Julie Berthelsen in 1996. In response to her question about religion, hesaid:

I don’t like any religion at all. I don’t like the idea of it and I hope we get rid of it. I think it’salso a modern invention. I think religion isn’t very old and that religion, as we know it, is aninvention of the state, in every case. […] The bush people of the Kalahari desert, they have nostate or religion. I don’t think it makes them primitive but rather it’s a proof of theirsophistication. They have never invented a state. They must be a superior people.13

This uncompromising attitude has found a direct expression in some of Durham’s artworks.In Shrouds and Swaddling Clothes of Decommissioned Saints (1995) he let clean garmentssoak in a brew of dirt, hair and white glue in two plastic laundry baskets, one red and one blue,and then ‘froze’ them in position. This echoed the works in his exhibition of ‘old clothes’ fromearlier that year.14 What if these very fibres had been used for swaddling the newborn andcloaking the newly deceased? And what if these people at both edges of life weredecommissioned saints?

The Pope has been decommissioning a lot of saints, which I think is a nice idea. His problemis that he’s making new saints. All the fascists in the world are now saints. I took two baskets



of clothes, white shirts and things — they were all white — that I made dirty with a little bitof mud and hair and froze them with white glue so that they were hard.15

Such imaginary contact with formerly canonised bodies does not make these discardedgarments special or precious to Durham. They lie forever tossed into cheap laundry baskets, agesture of calculated unkindness towards a sign system that has justified countless crimes, notleast against the peoples of the ‘New World’. Since the sixteenth century the Americas havebeen counted on to continuously swell the ranks of the Catholic Church and protect it from thedangers of reform, while its dominance in Europe has been undermined by criticality.

To work against belief is not just to be critical of religion. It is also to do what you can toadvance knowledge. Tocetea, a one-minute video made in collaboration with Alves in 2003,shows three attempts at ‘making paintings’ by dropping a rather heavy stone from quite highup into a plastic bucket filled with red, blue and yellow paint, in the hope that the splattersmight meaningfully stain a series of wooden panels. The results don’t quite meet thoseexpectations (the paint stains had to be peeled off the clear plastic covering on the floor andstapled onto the panels afterwards), but some kind of learning appears to be going on. Thetitle means ‘I teach myself’ in P’urhépecha, a language without any known relatives, spoken bysome 100,000 people in the Mexican state of Michoacán. I agree with Durham that it iscommendable for any language to have a concise word for such an important activity, and Iassume that it is the stone that is teaching itself how to fall.

Another recent work, The Names of the Team of Scientists Who Submitted an Article on theHuman Chromosome 14 in Nature Magazine, February 2003 (2003), offers unusually directevidence of Durham’s interest in science.16 He celebrates the joint effort of 99 scientists inFrance and the US to exhaustively chart one part of the human genome (the adverbs thatcome to mind are ‘painstakingly’ and ‘selflessly’ — but perhaps they reveal only how narrowlythe art world views the rest of the world) by writing their names on three panels and joiningthese with screws and pieces of plastic wire. The resulting piece poses as a delightful andsophisticated bricolage (but then again these adjectives only remind us of how narrowly therest of the world views art). Once again Durham plays with the artful fusion of object andimage and word and action; this time to indicate what ‘the production of knowledge’ mightmean beyond the shop talk of academic art teaching.17

Durham’s political approach to belief and knowledge is perhaps most clearly articulated in hismuseums, a work format he has occasionally used since showing the acerbic On Loan fromthe Museum of the American Indian at Kenkeleba Gallery in New York in 1985. The museumsallow him to ironically honour the conventions for organising and displaying objects that werecreated for the nineteenth-century public museum, while at the same time articulatingunapologetically tendentious views on certain regions or countries. His lightness of touchmight suggest that he is making up his facts to be entertaining. In reality, Durham is asinformed and rigorous and intellectually consistent as some academics, but his tone and modeof address are those of a ‘friend of knowledge’ rather than of ‘someone who knows’.18

Maquette for a Museum of Switzerland, which premiered at Art Basel in 2011, doesn’t ignorethe activities that stereotypically define the Confoederatio Helvetica, such as banking or time-keeping, but revolves around the reprinted black-and-white plates from an oldanthropological study of carnivalesque Swiss peasants’ masks with grotesquely but stylishlyexaggerated facial features, usually considered ‘folk art’. In the handwritten labels (this is thepretence of the ‘maquette’: edits might still be deemed necessary before the museum ispresented to the public with properly printed legends) the creator and curator looks further.He discusses the pre-Christian significance of this culture, which was once at the very centreof Celtic Europe.

The almost-worldwide phenomenon of reading the patterns in the entrails of beasts andbirds had a parallel in reading the convoluted patterns in brains, which in turn were echoedby the lines in a human face. Many of the images of masks presented here are of that type —making the face into a map which might show the lair of the beast. Others present versionsof the ecstatic ‘crazy man’; Lällekönig the disrupter. […] They also often transform into the‘wild man’, ‘Sylvester’, who is the spirit of the forest itself. […] It is easy for any of thesecharacters to become aspects of the ‘animal man’, who is Pan to the Greeks but ‘Enkiddu’ tothe Akkadians. The lost ‘savage’ part of Gilgamesh […] That which he needs in order to feelcomplete.19

To this Durham adds some illustrations from children’s books, showing how the churchdemoted the Spirit of the Forest and turned him into an innocuous fairytale figure — muchlike the Redskin has been treated in popular literature and by the film industry, he might add.But of course he doesn’t. This museum is about Switzerland.

Against Metaphor

If wood and plastic and paint and words are Jimmie Durham’s preferred tools for going



against the grain of European monumental architecture and belief systems, which are justextensions of the state and its will to control us, then stone embodies his opposition tometaphorical thinking. Many artists have tried to transplant the metaphor from language tovisual practice. The idea that one thing can be substituted for another without unbearableconfusion appears to be invalid outside human language.20

Although Durham doesn’t necessarily subscribe to ‘classical’ European ideas about theanimate being clearly distinguishable from the inanimate, his art demonstrates that inorganicsubstances respond particularly badly to metaphorical thinking. For him, the differencebetween words and images and objects is one of degree rather than of kind. They are able totalk to each other, and his works are set up to encourage such conversations, but this doesn’tmean that anything goes. Durham writes that he wants to free stone from ‘the heavy weight of[…] metaphor’.21 The problem starts, as Durham emphasises by using this metaphor, when wetry to replicate the lightness of language in a fundamentally different material. It becomesdead weight. Durham likes to carve stone, if it is hard enough and doesn’t yield too easily, andhe likes to find and use stones that have already been shaped. I have already briefly discussedhis ‘stonings’. It is important, he has told me, to distinguish between using stones as tools andregarding them ‘as stones’.22

The latter approach, which tries to look beyond the technological and architectural idea ofstone, is, not surprisingly, much harder to get right. Durham is well aware that it might nolonger be possible to see stone ‘as itself’. Our thinking was thoroughly instrumentalised duringthe Stone Age, as it were. A Stone from Metternich’s House was first realised as an action inVienna in 1996. Durham tells the background story:

The name Vienna comes from the Celtic ‘wind ofona’, which means ‘white stone’, or ‘whiteFeuerstein’. I went to an old monastery in Plasy, Bohemia (Czech Republic), to establish a polefor the Centre of the World. Metternich, the German who had become foreign minister ofAustria in 1809, had bought the monastery and made it into one of his summerhouses.Metternich once said that Asia begins at the Landgasse in Vienna. I brought a stone from themonastery to Vienna, to Ludwig W ittgenstein’s house.23

After duly noting the Celtic origin of so many things in this part of the world, Durham alludesto one of his core concerns: his repeated attempts to find the centre of the world and to makeEurasia a workable psycho-geographic term for positioning his own self. This quest wasreflected in exhibitions such as ‘The Centre of the World’ at Middelburg, the Netherlands in1995 and ‘The Centre of the World at Chalma’ at Pori, Finland in 1997, and perhaps even moredecisively during his trip to north-eastern Siberia in 1995. He fashioned one of the first of hisStaffs to Mark the Centre of the World from a young birch tree and left it outside a shoppingcentre in Yakutsk, capital of the Republic of Yakutia, which is some five times larger thanFrance. A small mirror is attached to these staffs, to remind those who chance upon it thatthey are the centre of their own world. Literally, not metaphorically.

There is a black-and-white photograph of Durham in the dauntingly cerebral version of aViennese mansion that Wittgenstein designed for his sister, taken just as he lets go of a stoneabove an empty little free-standing vitrine of typical German-make. Does he use thisBohemian ‘stone guest’ as a tool, an agent of destruction? No, I would argue that he has justfreed it from any human influence and abandoned it to its ‘stone-ness’. It is in the stone’snature to obey the laws of gravity, for which Durham can hardly be held responsible. In thevideo Smashing (2004), this logic is reversed. Durham is convinced that a stone he has foundis a stone tool. Again, it is best to let him explain:

I find these tools all over Europe. […] They are made by humans, they are not naturallymade, they are not made by accident. […] You can’t mistake a piece of flint that has beenworked by a human with a piece of flint that has just been broken naturally.24

This time the task is to return the ‘tool-ness’ to the stone, to free it from the forced inactivity ithas suffered for so many centuries. Smashing was recorded during a summer course for artstudents in Como, Italy in 2004. Durham sits behind a desk and uses his tool to smash allkinds of objects — large and small, hard and soft, valuable and trivial — that the studentsdeposit in front of him. For each object smashed Durham signs a receipt. The violence ofdestruction is tempered by the orderliness and the lack of passion of its executor, in thetimehonoured fashion of the state apparatus. The text piece Prehistoric Stone Tool from thesame year turns the tables on the perpetrator, as the stone reveals an ill will of its own:

This simple flint hammer was made almost 40,000 years ago in the area of the river Seineclose to present-day Paris. Of course, knowing so little of the lives and culture of people whoproduced this tool, it can only be conjecture as to its use. However, we can HEY! OW, OW,AIEE! STOP! STOP! WHY ARE YOU HITTING ME? PLEASE! STOP! OH NO! STOP! OUCH!25



It wouldbe

presumptuous to attempt a conclusion here, since I have only been able to examine a fewsamples from Durham’s overwhelmingly rich production. I will opt for a final illustration ofthe non-metaphorical instead: the granite boulder, its friendliness enhanced by painted facialfeatures, sitting in a pink rowboat in the river Wear in Sunderland in northern England, astone’s throw from Durham Cathedral (yes, there is a connection: County Durham bordersScotland, and Durham counts Scottish ‘internal colonisers’ of the Cherokee among hisancestors). The title of this project from 2005 is The Second Particle/Wave Theory, a nod tothe foundational paradox of science. Neither ‘particle’ nor ‘wave’ can fully characterise thenature of nature, more precisely of its smallest constituent parts. Everything is simultaneouslystable and in flux. Durham introduces a complexity of his own, on a vaguely annoyingintermediate level where things are not small enough to be negligible nor large enough to be ofcrucial importance. The stone in the boat becomes ‘particular’ and the engulfing river tide‘wavular’.26 He stages a cartoonish situation that is both sharp-witted and mind-numbinglymild. Neither impressive nor believable, to use his own words. Exactly what he says he wantsto achieve.27 The accompanying book offers a generous choice of meaningful detours, which,as a matter of fact, might be another way to characterise the uncharacterisable art of JimmieDurham.

Brian Foster of S’underland writes that the stone in the boat looks like Mr. Potato Head.Well, there is a very good reason for that: protective camouflage. Potatoes camouflagethemselves to look like stones. The hope is that any worm or grub passing by will think: ‘Oh,nothing to eat here, just a field of boulders.’ So it’s not me copying Mr Head, it is potatoescopying stones.28

Footnotes1. Jimmie Durham, statement for the exhibition ‘A Shadow in Athens’ at Stigma Gallery,

Athens, 2003. ↑

2. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (trans. J. Glenn Gray), New York: Perennial,1976, p.4. ↑

3. Ibid. ↑

4. See J. Durham, A Certain Lack of Coherence (ed. Jean Fisher), London: Kala Press, 1993.↑

5. During that period, his work was included in Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992. ↑

6. Conversation with the author, 27 September 2011. I am curating his retrospective, ‘JimmieDurham: A Matter of Life and Death and Singing’, at M HKA, Antwerp, 24 May—18November 2012. ↑

7. ‘Julie Talks with Jimmie Durham’, Kitsch, students’ journal published by the TrondheimArt Academy. Trondheim, 1996. Julie is the artist Julie Berthelsen. ↑

8. J. Durham, ‘Gilgamesh and Me: The True Story of the Wall’, in Jan Foncé (ed.), On takinga normal situation and retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings ofconditions past and present (exh. cat.), Antwerp: M HKA, 1993, unpaginated. ↑

9. Ibid. ↑

10. Ibid. ↑

Jimmie Durham, Prehistoric Stone Tool, 2004, wood, paint, stone, 75 × 85cm.Photograph: Fulvio Ricchetto. Courtesy the artist and Galleria FrancoSoffiantino, Turin



11. Rudi Laermans, ‘Two Conversations with Jimmie Durham’, A Prior, no.9, 2004, p.173. ↑

12. J. Durham, Between the Furniture and the Building (Between the Rock and a Hard Place)(exh. cat.), Munich: Kunstverein München, 1998, p.93. ↑

13. ‘Julie Talks with Jimmie Durham’, op. cit. ↑

14. Jimmie Durham, ‘Ropa Vieja (Spring Collection)’, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, 29April—27 May 1995. ↑

15. Richard William Hill and Beverly Koski, ‘Jimmie Durham: The Center of the World IsSeveral Places’, FUSE, vol.21, no.3, 1999, p.27. ↑

16. The reference is to ‘The DNA Sequence and Analysis of Human Chromosome 14’, Nature,vol.421, 6 February 2003, pp.601—07 (by all the authors whose names are cited byDurham). ↑

17. ‘Look here, then: the area where intelligence is most easily observable is the area whereinwe often think it does not exist. [We think that] we have there instead only skill andcleverness. So often, with, it seems, little consistency, we have a complex and subtleworking definition of intelligence as having to do with only those areas of human life thatare not normally seen as “endeavour”. Our “intellectual” or “artistic” side. Or, to put itanother way, the side that has to do with “understanding” and the contemplation of thehuman condition.’ J. Durham, ‘Second Thoughts’, in Giorgia Kapatsoris and Charles Gute(ed.), Jimmie Durham, Milan and Como: Edizioni Charta and Fondazione Antonio Ratti,2004, pp.21—22. ↑

18. Much in the same way that a philosopher, perhaps, does not presume to possess wisdombut agrees to be called a ‘friend of wisdom’. ↑

19. Wall text for Jimmie Durham, Maquette for a Museum of Switzerland (2011). ↑

20. See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language, London: Routledge, 1990, pp.144—75. ↑

21. J. Durham, ‘A Shadow in Athens’, op. cit.: ‘Since moving back to Europe in 1994 I havebeen working with stone in various ways, trying to free it from the heavy weight ofarchitecture and of metaphor.’ ↑

22. Conversation with the author, 14 January 2012. ↑

23. Quoted from The Libertine and the Stone Guest, Durham’s English manuscript for DerVerführer und der steinerne Gast, the book that was published in German for the projectat the Wittgenstein House. Ulli Lindmayr (ed.), Jimmie Durham: Der Verführer und dersteinerne Gast, Vienna and New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996. ↑

24. J. Durham, ‘Stones Rejected by the Builder’, in G. Kapatsoris and C. Gute (ed.), JimmieDurham, op. cit., p.121. ↑

25. This text is an integral part of the piece Prehistoric Stone Tool, 2004. ↑

26. J. Durham, The Second Particle Wave Theory (As Performed on the Banks of the RiverWear, a Stone’s Throw from S’underland and the Durham Cathedral) (exh. cat.),Sunderland: Walter Phillips Gallery Editions, 2005, p.17. ↑

27. J. Durham, ‘A Shadow in Athens’, op. cit. ↑

28. J. Durham, The Second Particle Wave Theory, op. cit. ↑

KREUGER, Anders - Stone as Stone, An Essay About Jimmie Durham

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