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 Jimmie
Durham
Anders Kreuger
A Stone from Metternichs House in Bohemia, 1996, production shot for action in Der
Verfhrer und der steinerne Gast (The Libertine and the Stone Guest). Installation view,
Wittgenstein House, Vienna. Photograph: Marco Fedele di Catrano. Courtesy the artist and
M HKA, Antwerp
Some Beginnings
My work might be considered interventionist because it works against the two foundations
of the European tradition: belief and architecture. My work is against the connection of art
to architecture, to the statue, to monumentality. I want it to be investigative, and therefore
not 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 is
profoundly affirmative. Why should we believe when we can strive for knowledge through
action and reflection? Why should we build when there are more flexible and responsive
ways to be in the world?
But Im getting ahead of myself. In 1951 Martin Heidegger, who repeatedly spoke in favour of
belief and architecture, wrote: Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking.
2
In
Heideggers text this becomes a stepping stone for interesting speculations about the future
and cyclical time, but it immediately leads to other questions. Who are we? Western
civilisation? The Germans? Philosophers who dont wish to apologise for what they did before
the War? And can I avoid identification with this crowd despite my enjoyment of Heideggers
insistence on thinking about thinking?
Precise and necessary words wear out much too fast when they are taken over by
policymakers, managers and communication officers. The art world is no exception. In the last
year or so I have felt a bit queasy each time Ive wanted to apply the notion of thinking to
artists and their work. I couldnt help remembering that our name for this beautiful activity
risks encountering the same fate as knowledgeproduction, namely to be loved to pieces by an
increasingly self-conscious industry of practise-based fine arts PhD programmes. But I
wouldnt be able to speak of Durhams 45 years of work as an artist and writer and activist and
educator if I had to avoid this word for fear of being too much of the moment. Durham
doesnt trade in received wisdom; his next move can never be predicted. Nor does he make a
fetish of what is to come. In his essays and interviews and lectures he has repeatedly defended
the intellectual fundaments of art-making. For him intellectuality is whatever you are
thinking about.
3
And nothing seems to prevent Durham from thinking right now about the
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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 for
what 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 also
a 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 he
illustrates the European tendency to ascribe our own shortcomings to everyone. We have so
thoroughly monopolised the we that we dont even notice when others are ahead of us. Most
thought-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 who
were, for instance, subjected to colonial rule could never allow themselves the luxury of
mystifying thinking to the point of making Heideggers phrase appear plausible.
Born in 1940 in (or, as he says, under) the State of Arkansas, Durham left school at sixteen
and joined the US Navy. In his mid-twenties, in Texas, he emerged as an artist and poet. In
1969 he moved to Geneva, where he enrolled in the cole des Beaux-Arts. In 1973, the year of
the occupation of the symbolic site of Wounded Knee, where a massacre of Indians was
perpetrated by the US Army in 1890, Durham moved back across the Atlantic. He became a
political organiser with the American Indian Movement. He also became Director of the
International Indian Treaty Council and its representative to the United Nations. At the end of
the 1970s the American Indian Movement disintegrated, and Durham turned his attention to
art again, exhibiting in New York and publishing numerous essays. Many of these were
collected in the anthology A Certain Lack of Coherence, which appeared in 1993.
4
He was
based in Cuernavaca, Mexico between 1987 and 1994, when he moved back to Europe.
5
Since
then 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 continued
to write and is a sought-after teacher and lecturer.
But these are not the right beginnings for an essay about Jimmie Durham. He can be
described as a sculptor, if we accept that a sculptor today uses all the components of visual
art: object, image, word and action. Durham may nail or glue or paint the image and the word
onto the object, or he may make his objects or images in front of an audience. His art turns
viewers into participants by being both seductively light and dangerously unknowable. His
writing combines the opinionated with the seemingly frivolous. It is integrated into the
artworks 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, however
quaint they find it. One of the fundaments of Heideggers we, and its predecessors all the way
back to Socratess talk shows, is our conviction that asking questions is polite (because
otherwise we would only talk about ourselves); that knowledge, and indeed thinking, would
not be possible without questioning; and that the quality of the question matters more than
the results it helps us achieve. A contradictory and powerful set of beliefs. But Durhams 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 and
violent. Perhaps we should remind ourselves that the goal of the Inquisition was not to find
out the truth but to produce confessions. Surely we would do much better to observe the world
around us actively and listen carefully to what others choose to tell us. A more suitable
beginning of my essay might have been this quote from Durham:
I dont want to consciously put things in my work that are from my background. But I dont
want to consciously take them out either. I just want to be an intellectual; and I happen to be
a Cherokee. But it doesnt mean that you are a different kind of intellectual, and I want my
artwork to be an intellectual project. I dont 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 humanitys
thinking process, not humanitys feeling process. We already have enough emotions,
enough feelings, but we dont have enough thoughts.
7
Against Monument
Durham says he is against arts connection to monumentality. But his own oeuvre doesnt
necessarily 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 thrown
together from whatever materials were available. This has allowed him to perfect his own art
of the possible, based on unprejudiced attentiveness to his immediate surroundings, wherever
they might be.
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Contingency is a visible feature not least in the works that mark his second transfer to Europe
in the early 1990s. They have the wit, the economy and the grandeur from within to challenge
Durhams own understanding of the monumental as an imposition on people by an
overbearing state. His use of wood, which has featured prominently in his work since the
1960s, 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 and
southern climate zones of the North American continent:
I have lived in the city most of my life, so that now I often think Ive lived in the city all of my
life, even though I am originally from the forest and have acute memories of those emerald-
and-tortoise-shell days. It is as though Ive always lived in both places, sylvan and civil;
perhaps the Wall has actually contributed to the unity of my duality when I visit the Wall
am 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 Durhams texts, often used to critique
the triumphalism of the oppressive city/state. That is the subject of Gilgamesh, a sculpture
from 1993 for which Durham also wrote the text quoted here, titled Gilgamesh and Me: The
True Story of the Wall. The sculpture stages the meeting of an unpainted wooden door, a
sturdy 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 to
itself, but also a re-presentation of the ancient Gilgamesh epic. The text focuses on the wild
man, the necessary other for the king who cut down the forest to build the city Wall.
9
Enkiddu Wildemann, Durhams Akkadian-German alter ego, shows his counterpart
Gilgamesh that his Wall must necessarily be considered as a door also.
10
Thence the shape of
the accompanying artwork.
Durhams views on architecture and belief are, I
think, tightly bound to his reading of history as a
pattern of movements that must be continuously
reinterpreted. He has not given up hope that we
might learn something if we call up those
movements of people from the past. Why else
would he tear a sheet from an old historical atlas,
showing the complex population flows in Europe
from the fifth to the ninth centuries, and pin it to
the wall of his studio in Rome? The so-called
Migration Period left few built monuments, but it
created the patterns (the ethnic make-up, the
double-bind of promised liberation and social
oppression by state and church) that we consider
to be European normality. The apparently
haphazard movements of Germanic and Slavic and
Finno- Ugrian and Turkic tribes was prompted by
contingencies that have mostly been forgotten, and
they created new contingencies that still shape
events throughout the continent but are
nevertheless poorly understood. This map was part
of Durham and Alvess installation Museum of
European Normality, first shown at Manifesta 7 in
Trento in 2008.
Paradigm for an Arch is an assortment of
seemingly discarded objects laid out to form a
Romanesque arch. It was created for Durhams solo exhibition Architexture' at Galerie
Micheline Szwajcer in Antwerp in 1994, and prefigures the many versions of Durhams Arc de
Triomphe for Personal Use (19962007). They are lightweight structures in wood or metal
that we can put up and pass through wherever and whenever celebration is called for, but they
also subvert the function of the triumphal arch, personalising and democratising a concept of
glory usually reserved for the state. These portable monuments might also be read as a
therapeutic attack on the overbearing superego, if they werent so celebratorily ironic. The
Paradigm instead wants to cure us of our awe for the glorious arch by laying it down on the
floor 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, on
pieces of paper, and next to them he arranges pieces of wood and plastic and other materials
to 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. Durhams translation from word and
stone and wood into materials that we feel free to despise, such as PVC plumbing tubes, is also
noteworthy.
Jimmie Durham, Gilgamesh, 1993,
wood, iron, PVC, axe, metal details, door
300 140cm, tube 355 63cm.
Photograph: Christine Clinckx. Courtesy
the artist, Stichting Beeldende Kunst
Middelburg/De Vleeshal and M HKA,
Antwerp
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I love plastic of any kind; I like the shape of pipes, tubes [] This plastic tube, I like it very
much in the artistic sense, in the art-world sense. Its very unheroic, unmonumental. A
plastic tube is not comical, its not strong enough to be comical, but it is never serious. Even
the biggest piece of plastic PVC pipe wont be serious. It will always be plastic tubing, it
doesnt lend itself to being phallic at the same time. You think it would become phallic, but it
never does or only in a silly way, and then it can be a little more humorous. So I like the
passivity of it, the non-heroic side of it.
11
Will the choice of the less-than-noble plastic or other unloved materials undo the
monumental? And is undoing the same as overcoming? Rhetorical questions, hardly suited for
polite American Indian society, but perhaps useful for talking about Durhams Public
Monument for the Birthday of Rome (1995). For this work he collected various pieces of
rubbish that appealed to him as objects halfway out of use and installed them on a site
overlooking Rome, as a formless sculpture. Its form and content so appealed to passers-by
that they had to be prevented from subtracting from it by a specially contracted security
guard. So the anti-monumental should not be confused with the anti-aesthetic. The situation
offered 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 artists tools. They
require the right hands.
In the mid-to-late 1990s Durham devoted much energy to refining his practice of stoning, or
letting stones impact on diverse objects. Works such as the stoned television sets of
Resurrection (1995), the stoned refrigerator St Frigo (1996) or the short videos later compiled
under the title Collected Stones (1995 2002) have become icons of this period in Durhams
work. The longer essays he wrote at the time are also important sources for his thinking, in
which stones are prominent. In Between the Furniture and the Building (Between the Rock
and a Hard Place), published in conjunction with an exhibition at Kunstverein Mnchen in
1998, we read about a grand scheme. There are nine large pieces of carved granite sitting in a
quarry on the west coast of Sweden. Intended to become part of the Arch of Peace planned by
Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer for post- War Berlin, they were never shipped. Durham wishes
to turn them into actors in a film:
The film will not be a documentary, although it will kind of document itself. It will be a
feature-length film (about 90 minutes) of high artistic merit, and therefore commercial in
some sense; even if not a summer blockbuster. Well get one of those barges that have no
engine, and after taking the stones by truck through the forests to the harbour, load the
stones onto the barge and tow them across the Baltic in the direction of Rgen Island and
Berlin. Then well 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, because
they will have been transformed into light and cellulose (the film). But theyll 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 Durhams intentionally inconclusive face-off with monumentality
that 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 Indian
Movement Durham gained experience of real politics: something not many other leading
contemporary artists can claim. I have already quoted from the interview he gave to the
Greenlander artist Julie Berthelsen in 1996. In response to her question about religion, he
said:
I dont like any religion at all. I dont like the idea of it and I hope we get rid of it. I think its
also a modern invention. I think religion isnt very old and that religion, as we know it, is an
invention of the state, in every case. [] The bush people of the Kalahari desert, they have no
state or religion. I dont think it makes them primitive but rather its a proof of their
sophistication. They have never invented a state. They must be a superior people.
13
This uncompromising attitude has found a direct expression in some of Durhams artworks.
In Shrouds and Swaddling Clothes of Decommissioned Saints (1995) he let clean garments
soak 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 from
earlier that year.
14
What if these very fibres had been used for swaddling the newborn and
cloaking the newly deceased? And what if these people at both edges of life were
decommissioned saints?
The Pope has been decommissioning a lot of saints, which I think is a nice idea. His problem
is that hes making new saints. All the fascists in the world are now saints. I took two baskets
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of clothes, white shirts and things they were all white that I made dirty with a little bit
of 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 discarded
garments special or precious to Durham. They lie forever tossed into cheap laundry baskets, a
gesture of calculated unkindness towards a sign system that has justified countless crimes, not
least against the peoples of the New World. Since the sixteenth century the Americas have
been counted on to continuously swell the ranks of the Catholic Church and protect it from the
dangers 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 to
advance 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 high
up into a plastic bucket filled with red, blue and yellow paint, in the hope that the splatters
might meaningfully stain a series of wooden panels. The results dont quite meet those
expectations (the paint stains had to be peeled off the clear plastic covering on the floor and
stapled onto the panels afterwards), but some kind of learning appears to be going on. The
title means I teach myself in Purhpecha, a language without any known relatives, spoken by
some 100,000 people in the Mexican state of Michoacn. I agree with Durham that it is
commendable for any language to have a concise word for such an important activity, and I
assume 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 the
Human Chromosome 14 in Nature Magazine, February 2003 (2003), offers unusually direct
evidence of Durhams interest in science.
16
He celebrates the joint effort of 99 scientists in
France and the US to exhaustively chart one part of the human genome (the adverbs that
come to mind are painstakingly and selflessly but perhaps they reveal only how narrowly
the art world views the rest of the world) by writing their names on three panels and joining
these with screws and pieces of plastic wire. The resulting piece poses as a delightful and
sophisticated bricolage (but then again these adjectives only remind us of how narrowly the
rest of the world views art). Once again Durham plays with the artful fusion of object and
image and word and action; this time to indicate what the production of knowledge might
mean beyond the shop talk of academic art teaching.
17
Durhams political approach to belief and knowledge is perhaps most clearly articulated in his
museums, a work format he has occasionally used since showing the acerbic On Loan from
the Museum of the American Indian at Kenkeleba Gallery in New York in 1985. The museums
allow him to ironically honour the conventions for organising and displaying objects that were
created for the nineteenth-century public museum, while at the same time articulating
unapologetically tendentious views on certain regions or countries. His lightness of touch
might suggest that he is making up his facts to be entertaining. In reality, Durham is as
informed and rigorous and intellectually consistent as some academics, but his tone and mode
of 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, doesnt ignore
the activities that stereotypically define the Confoederatio Helvetica, such as banking or time-
keeping, but revolves around the reprinted black-and-white plates from an old
anthropological study of carnivalesque Swiss peasants masks with grotesquely but stylishly
exaggerated facial features, usually considered folk art. In the handwritten labels (this is the
pretence of the maquette: edits might still be deemed necessary before the museum is
presented 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 centre
of Celtic Europe.
The almost-worldwide phenomenon of reading the patterns in the entrails of beasts and
birds had a parallel in reading the convoluted patterns in brains, which in turn were echoed
by 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 versions
of the ecstatic crazy man; Llleknig 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 these
characters to become aspects of the animal man, who is Pan to the Greeks but Enkiddu to
the Akkadians. The lost savage part of Gilgamesh [] That which he needs in order to feel
complete.
19
To this Durham adds some illustrations from childrens books, showing how the church
demoted the Spirit of the Forest and turned him into an innocuous fairytale figure much
like the Redskin has been treated in popular literature and by the film industry, he might add.
But of course he doesnt. This museum is about Switzerland.
Against Metaphor
If wood and plastic and paint and words are Jimmie Durhams preferred tools for going
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against the grain of European monumental architecture and belief systems, which are just
extensions of the state and its will to control us, then stone embodies his opposition to
metaphorical thinking. Many artists have tried to transplant the metaphor from language to
visual practice. The idea that one thing can be substituted for another without unbearable
confusion appears to be invalid outside human language.
20
Although Durham doesnt necessarily subscribe to classical European ideas about the
animate being clearly distinguishable from the inanimate, his art demonstrates that inorganic
substances respond particularly badly to metaphorical thinking. For him, the difference
between words and images and objects is one of degree rather than of kind. They are able to
talk to each other, and his works are set up to encourage such conversations, but this doesnt
mean 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 we
try to replicate the lightness of language in a fundamentally different material. It becomes
dead weight. Durham likes to carve stone, if it is hard enough and doesnt yield too easily, and
he likes to find and use stones that have already been shaped. I have already briefly discussed
his stonings. It is important, he has told me, to distinguish between using stones as tools and
regarding them as stones.
22
The latter approach, which tries to look beyond the technological and architectural idea of
stone, is, not surprisingly, much harder to get right. Durham is well aware that it might no
longer be possible to see stone as itself. Our thinking was thoroughly instrumentalised during
the Stone Age, as it were. A Stone from Metternichs House was first realised as an action in
Vienna in 1996. Durham tells the background story:
The name Vienna comes from the Celtic wind ofona, which means white stone, or white
Feuerstein. I went to an old monastery in Plasy, Bohemia (Czech Republic), to establish a pole
for the Centre of the World. Metternich, the German who had become foreign minister of
Austria 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 the
monastery to Vienna, to Ludwig W ittgensteins house.
23
After duly noting the Celtic origin of so many things in this part of the world, Durham alludes
to one of his core concerns: his repeated attempts to find the centre of the world and to make
Eurasia a workable psycho-geographic term for positioning his own self. This quest was
reflected in exhibitions such as The Centre of the World at Middelburg, the Netherlands in
1995 and The Centre of the World at Chalma at Pori, Finland in 1997, and perhaps even more
decisively during his trip to north-eastern Siberia in 1995. He fashioned one of the first of his
Staffs to Mark the Centre of the World from a young birch tree and left it outside a shopping
centre in Yakutsk, capital of the Republic of Yakutia, which is some five times larger than
France. A small mirror is attached to these staffs, to remind those who chance upon it that
they 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 a
Viennese mansion that Wittgenstein designed for his sister, taken just as he lets go of a stone
above an empty little free-standing vitrine of typical German-make. Does he use this
Bohemian stone guest as a tool, an agent of destruction? No, I would argue that he has just
freed it from any human influence and abandoned it to its stone-ness. It is in the stones
nature to obey the laws of gravity, for which Durham can hardly be held responsible. In the
video Smashing (2004), this logic is reversed. Durham is convinced that a stone he has found
is 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 naturally
made, they are not made by accident. [] You cant mistake a piece of flint that has been
worked 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 it
has suffered for so many centuries. Smashing was recorded during a summer course for art
students in Como, Italy in 2004. Durham sits behind a desk and uses his tool to smash all
kinds of objects large and small, hard and soft, valuable and trivial that the students
deposit in front of him. For each object smashed Durham signs a receipt. The violence of
destruction is tempered by the orderliness and the lack of passion of its executor, in the
timehonoured fashion of the state apparatus. The text piece Prehistoric Stone Tool from the
same 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 Seine
close to present-day Paris. Of course, knowing so little of the lives and culture of people who
produced 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
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It would
be
presumptuous to attempt a conclusion here, since I have only been able to examine a few
samples from Durhams overwhelmingly rich production. I will opt for a final illustration of
the non-metaphorical instead: the granite boulder, its friendliness enhanced by painted facial
features, sitting in a pink rowboat in the river Wear in Sunderland in northern England, a
stones throw from Durham Cathedral (yes, there is a connection: County Durham borders
Scotland, and Durham counts Scottish internal colonisers of the Cherokee among his
ancestors). The title of this project from 2005 is The Second Particle/Wave Theory, a nod to
the foundational paradox of science. Neither particle nor wave can fully characterise the
nature of nature, more precisely of its smallest constituent parts. Everything is simultaneously
stable and in flux. Durham introduces a complexity of his own, on a vaguely annoying
intermediate level where things are not small enough to be negligible nor large enough to be of
crucial 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-numbingly
mild. Neither impressive nor believable, to use his own words. Exactly what he says he wants
to 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 Jimmie
Durham.
Brian Foster of Sunderland writes that the stone in the boat looks like Mr. Potato Head.
Well, there is a very good reason for that: protective camouflage. Potatoes camouflage
themselves 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 its not me copying Mr Head, it is potatoes
copying stones.
28
Footnotes
1. 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, Jimmie
Durham: A Matter of Life and Death and Singing, at M HKA, Antwerp, 24 May18
November 2012.
7. Julie Talks with Jimmie Durham, Kitsch, students journal published by the Trondheim
Art Academy. Trondheim, 1996. Julie is the artist Julie Berthelsen.
8. J. Durham, Gilgamesh and Me: The True Story of the Wall, in Jan Fonc (ed.), On taking
a normal situation and retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings of
conditions 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 Franco
Soffiantino, Turin
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 8/8
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 Mnchen, 1998, p.93.
13. Julie Talks with Jimmie Durham, op. cit.
14. Jimmie Durham, Ropa Vieja (Spring Collection), Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, 29
April27 May 1995.
15. Richard William Hill and Beverly Koski, Jimmie Durham: The Center of the World Is
Several 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.60107 (by all the authors whose names are cited by
Durham).
17. Look here, then: the area where intelligence is most easily observable is the area wherein
we often think it does not exist. [We think that] we have there instead only skill and
cleverness. So often, with, it seems, little consistency, we have a complex and subtle
working definition of intelligence as having to do with only those areas of human life that
are not normally seen as endeavour. Our intellectual or artistic side. Or, to put it
another way, the side that has to do with understanding and the contemplation of the
human 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.2122.
18. Much in the same way that a philosopher, perhaps, does not presume to possess wisdom
but 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 have
been working with stone in various ways, trying to free it from the heavy weight of
architecture and of metaphor.
22. Conversation with the author, 14 January 2012.
23. Quoted from The Libertine and the Stone Guest, Durhams English manuscript for Der
Verfhrer und der steinerne Gast, the book that was published in German for the project
at the Wittgenstein House. Ulli Lindmayr (ed.), Jimmie Durham: Der Verfhrer und der
steinerne Gast, Vienna and New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996.
24. J. Durham, Stones Rejected by the Builder, in G. Kapatsoris and C. Gute (ed.), Jimmie
Durham, 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 River
Wear, a Stones Throw from Sunderland 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.