JIMMIE DURHAM

My PhD research at Middlesex is centered on a longstanding interest in the art and writing of Jimmie Durham. Durham is a Cherokee artist from the United States who has lived and worked in Europe since 1993. I am particularly intrigued by the strategies Durham has used to evade the romantic essentialisms that are often used to confine indigenous identity and curtail our agency.

Durham’s work in the 1980s developed as a form of resistance to the various ways in which Native Americans have been represented, often satirizing pop, ethnographic or museological methods of categorization and display. He was especially concerned with the ways in which romanticism tended to fix “Native identity” in an idealized past from which any form of agency or initiative to engage with contemporary reality could only be read as in-authenticity or cultural contamination. As a veteran of the fractious infighting of the American Indian Movement, Durham was particularly sensitive to the extent to which ethnic nationalism was producing notions of Native identity that also unselfconsciously clung to a very similar static and romantic notion of Native tradition. Durham’s art from this period is characterized by the juxtaposition of industrial materials and various sorts of detritus that, through their coming together often begin to take on a life and agency of their own. This ascription of agency to supposedly inanimate objects (what John Ruskin described pejoratively as the pathetic fallacy) became a powerful way to derive social and political meanings from discarded or neglected objects. This is the work that Durham is best known for in North America, and for which he is most often cited in survey texts. This work also dominates the important monograph on his art published by Phaidon in 1996.

In Europe, Durham’s art and writing has focused primarily on a critique of monumental architecture, revealing the extent to which the built environment dictates our experience and links particular notions of history and nationalism with associations of permanence, weight and stability. Durham’s main strategy has been to take his use of the pathetic fallacy to its limit, projecting a variety of forms of agency onto architecture’s most inanimate, stable and monumental material: stone. This investigation will propose a trans-cultural theory of agency that attempts to account both for the coming together of cultural sources of Durham’s enterprise in artistic projects such as surrealism and situationism and traditional Indigenous North American ideas and perspectives that, while not literally adopted in Durham’s work, provide frameworks for agency and for reading meaning in spatial contexts. These include the spirit of the Trickster, and the conceptual models of animism and the mnemonic landscape. It also hope to explore the extent to which this model of agency is produced inter-subjectively, through a dialogue with the European art world that draws on Durham’s longstanding interest in the problem of agency in the face of stultifying histories, but is particularly addressed to the European context.

Richard William Hill