On the 22nd of December 2022, the Neapolitan Madre Museum of Contemporary Arts inaugurated an extensive retrospective exhibition dedicated to Jimmie Durham (1940-2021), which was the first to review his complete corpus after his death less than two years ago. The over 150 works brought together from collections all over the world include iconic pieces, as well as some early works never previously presented publicly. The surprising variety of artistic mediums and genres is indicative of the breadth of Durham’s interests and research.
How to encompass and navigate through a multidimensional body of work conceived over the period of fifty years by an artist who throughout his entire career constantly defied all categorizations, remaining extremely sensitive and responsive to current cultural affairs?
I had the opportunity to interview the curator and former artistic director of the Madre Museum, Kathryn Weir, whose approach to the exhibition parallels Durham’s artistic strategies based on close investigation, research, decoding, deconstruction and reconstruction.
Marta Wróblewska: Could you explain your curatorial choice of the exhibition title ‘Humanity is not a completed project’, drawn from one of Jimmie Durham’s works?
Kathryn Weir: The print ‘Humanity is not a completed project,’ from which the retrospective takes its title, is displayed in the first room of the show, which forms a sort of prologue and features Durham’s large sculptural work ‘Gilgamesh’ (1993) and one of his last works ‘Tree’ (2021). The Epic of Gilgamesh occupies an important place in the artist’s inquiry into notions of an initial separation between culture and nature. This origin story narrates the establishment of the city Uruk, the cutting down of the forest and the creation of a wall separating humanity from the rest of nature. Durham’s work expresses this through the violent act of thrusting a metal axe into a giant wooden door. Tools and technologies that have been linked to the idea of an arrow of human civilizational progress have also been turned to massive violence in war, genocide and ecocide; Durham underlines this undecidability in what might rather be seen as the loops and spirals of human history.
The exhibition as a whole forms a kind of temporal spiral; after this prologue, it traverses through Durham’s work related to the last five hundred plus years of the history of European expansion and industrial development, that presented as its justification a particular idea of human progress. It unfolds the artist’s project to relativise as culturally specific the universalising and teleological notions of the human characteristic of European modernity. Sections of the show presents Durham’s affectionate and humourous critique of modern European art history, and his exploration of found materials and language in order to open ways forward. It finishes with the work ‘In the air long before archaeology’ (2008), a large scaffolding structure that carries above visitors’ heads an assemblage of human and non-human debris.
MW: The exhibition has been conceived in a highly articulated manner that creates connections across the main thematic sequences which unfold consecutively in a chronological order and other times in narrative ways, unexpectedly reappearing and intertwining with one another in order to reflect the artist’s net of concepts and strategies that grew together and thickened over the years. Could you expand on your curatorial ideas and strategies that find ways of communicating Durham’s complex and intellectually demanding art to a broad museum audience?
KW: The show creates links across time periods within thematic sequences, combining elements of chronology with a narrative approach and including references to the artist’s experiments with spatial strategies in key historical exhibitions. I identified important ongoing lines of research that emerge and then recur throughout Durham’s protean and multi-layered work, and that offer interpretative frameworks for the audience.
The opening sequence lays out Durham’s critique of notions of authenticity, identity, truth and nationhood, and draws parallels between the artist’s deconstruction of European imperialism and his investigation of the representation of First Peoples in the United States. Durham’s works relating to working conditions and the co-option of individuals and groups within communities resisting exploitation bring forth an analysis of ‘globalisation’ as a process of primitive accumulation through dispossession. The subsequent section of the show presents the artist’s exploration of the semiotics of architecture, particularly monumentality as linked to religious or secular power. This was articulated in relation to a broader historicization of the way in which artistic expression had been channelled into naturalised media and genres in Europe. Finally, the exhibition culminates in an exploration of Durham’s investigative processes and of his generative attention to materials, including his deeply playful love of language. He really sought to create new material languages and to tell stories in relation to found elements. This section also underlines how Durham’s practice ran down lines of epistemological research, showing how art can combine language and matter to establish an experimental dialogue. Art was no different to science in the artist’s approach to investigating the composition of matter and the limits of knowledge; he said, ‘My work is based on the idea of science as curiousness, as a new way of seeing things, inquiry without preconception which leads to change and innovation. That is what science means to me: a lack of predefined ideas, an acceptance of discovery, an unexpected vision of reality. This perception of scientific research is important to me.’
The visit to the show is accompanied by curatorial texts as well as poems by Durham that, as well as being presented as works in the exhibition, can throw light on works in other media. A room by room visit of the exhibition is available on the Madre Museum’s website, in English and Italian.
MW: Durham was very engaged in both the process of creating and exhibiting his works. The show at the Madre Museum was organised one year after he passed away. You managed to involve in it numerous institutions and individuals with whom he was personally connected during his life. What were the challenges regarding its arrangement without the presence of the artist?
KW: The production of the show was made more complex by vastly increased shipping costs over the last years, as well as by having to juggle particular import-export difficulties with works including materials from animals. On the other hand, I had the immense pleasure to be in dialogue with artist Maria Thereza Alves, who was Jimmie Durham’s partner for over 40 years and was extraordinarily generous with ideas and information in the process of conceiving the retrospective. While preparing the exhibition, the assistant curator Pietro Scammacca and I were also supported by the vast network of friends and colleagues that remains so closely tied to Durham.
MW: You paid special attention to giving proper visibility to Durham’s ideas regarding different religious and political dogmas running through European history, as well as his critique of museum practices that replicate stereotypes. Can art be in fact a powerful enough tool to influence the institutional status quo?
KW: A section of the exhibition presents Durham’s precise analysis of the processes through which the reification of identity serves the interests and co-options of capitalism. The installations presented in this section, ‘On loan from the Museum of the American Indian’ (1985) and ‘Museum of European normality’ (2008, with Maria Thereza Alves), are key examples of Durham’s critical mobilisation of the languages of ethnography and museology as a strategy to ironically interrupt their enforcement of reductive certainties and normalising procedures. This section also features previously unseen photo collages, drawings and text from a work the artist presented for his graduation in 1974, entitled ‘God’s own drunks.’ This work reveals how Durham’s critique had already been crystallised and brought into sharp definition during his period as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva from 1969. There he compared his previous observations of narratives of national and ‘minority’ identity, indigeneity and authenticity in the United States with a study of ‘Swissness’ in the context of the modern alienation from longstanding cultural heritage, discussing in particular the effects of the tourist industry on the Swiss ‘folk’ art of mask making. This is indicative of how Durham explored from early days in his practice the role that art can play in the critical decoding of the naturalised images and symbols that underpin dominant cultural systems.
MW: Retrospective exhibitions provide an opportunity to take a step back and reevaluate a body of work. What are the ‘possible futures’ mentioned in your curatorial text regarding Durham’s legacy for younger generations of artists and for contemporary art in general?
KW: Durham’s legacy is important, he anticipated in his practice many experiments, tools, strategies and debates that are at the central to artistic practice today. Beyond this, he was fundamentally interested in the creation of new collaborative models and established, together with Maria Thereza Alves, the design collective LABINAC that aims to critically apply research-based methods to contemporary design. In Naples and Berlin, I’ve met a series of young artists who are taking part in the project with great passion and are helping to explode outdated barriers between design, ‘craft’ and ‘fine’ art. Another project envisioned by Durham and Alves that is indicative of their joint interest in knowledge sharing, relationship building and empowerment is the educational project ‘CANTIERE,’ an informal and horizontal school for young artists that I hope will soon begin to unfold in Naples.
Jimmie Durham: humanity is not a completed project
Curated by Kathryn Weir
22.12.2022-8.05.2023
Museo Madre
Via Luigi Settembrini, 79, 80139 Napoli
