a matter of life and death and singing

JIMMIE DURHAM a matter of life and death and singing

24.05–18.11.12 www.muhka.be

NL

m hka persdossier jimmie durham a matter of life and death and singing een kwestie van leven en dood en zingen 24.05–18.11.12 Public Talk Berlijn Jimmie Durham in gesprek met Bart De Baere (directeur M HKA) Donderdag 26 April 13:00 Wien Lukatsch Gallery Public Talk Antwerpen Jimmie Durham in gesprek met Dirk Snauwaert (directeur WIELS) Dinsdag 22 mei 20:00 Cinema Zuid Antwerpen Gratis toegang mits reservering via www.cinemazuid.be PERSPREVIEW woensdag 23 mei 11:00 PRIVATE VIEW woensdag 23 mei 19:00 OPENING woensdag 23 mei 20:30

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INHOUD TENTOONSTELLING OVER JIMMIE DURHAM OVER ZIJN OEUVRE PUBLICATIE CURATORS ESSAY DOOR JIMMIE DURHAM LIJST MET WERKEN BEELDMATERIAAL PERSINFORMATIE PRAKTISCHE INFORMATIE PARTNERS & DANKWOORD

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TENTOONSTELLING Mijn werk zou als ‘interventionistisch’ kunnen worden beschouwd omdat het zich afzet tegen de twee grondvesten van de Europese traditie: Geloof en Architectuur. Het verzet zich tegen de koppeling van kunst en cultuur, tegen het ‘standbeeld’, tegen de monumentaliteit. Ik wil onderzoekend zijn, en dus niet ‘impressief’, niet geloofwaardig. — Jimmie Durham, 2003 Het M HKA kondigt met trots de eerste grootschalige retrospectieve van het werk van Jimmie Durham aan. Deze kunstenaar werd in 1940 in de VS geboren en vestigde zich in 1994 definitief in Europa. Hij geldt als een van invloedrijkste hedendaagse kunstenaars en is tevens een vooraanstaand essayist en dichter. Zijn kunst en zijn ideeën oefenen een grote invloed uit op kunstenaars, curators en theoretici, niet het minst uit de jongere generatie. De titel van de retrospectieve werd eerder al gebruikt voor een van Durhams eerste solotentoonstellingen in New York in de jaren 1980. Een kwestie van leven en dood en zingen weerspiegelt zijn ernst en zijn intellect, zijn esthetische en politieke engagement, zijn inventieve verzet tegen de architectuur en andere symbolen van de staat. Het maakt allemaal deel uit van Durhams compromisloze betrokkenheid bij wat hij het ‘denkproces van de mens’ noemt. Durham gebruikt alle componenten van wat nu beeldende kunst wordt genoemd: het object, het beeld, het woord, de actie. Hij spijkert, kleeft of schildert beelden en woorden op objecten die soms ‘live’ voor een publiek worden gemaakt, een proces dat ook op video wordt vastgelegd. Zijn werk is ‘beeldhouwkunst’ in de breedste zin van het woord: materiële verschijningen in de ruimte. Zijn materialen gaan van hout en steen en been tot plastic buizen en gedrukte tekst. Daarnaast gebruikt Durham ook tekeningen, schilderwerken en video, en hij schept zijn eigen musea, soms in samenwerking van zijn partner, de kunstenares Maria Thereza Alves. Durham’s retrospectieve toont meer dan 100 werken uit zijn hele carrière. Omdat veel van zijn ideeën en beelden in verschillende vormen terugkeren in verschillende stadia van zijn loopbaan, opteert de tentoonstelling voor ‘ensembles’ van werken die niet noodzakelijk chronologisch zijn georganiseerd. Anders Kreuger, één van de curators van de tentoonstelling: “We hebben altijd de ambitie gehad om een zo uitgebreid mogelijke retrospectieve samen te stellen, inclusief het vroege werk van de kunstenaar. Dat werd wel opgenomen in de monografie die Phaidon in 1995 uitgaf, maar was nooit in een overzichtstentoonstelling te zien. Zo was de tentoonstelling Pierres rejetées in Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2009 enkel gewijd aan recent werk.” Bij de tentoonstelling From the West Pacific to the East Atlantic die in Brussel had moeten doorgaan maar die in 2003 uiteindelijk alleen in Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille en het Museum Voor Actuele Kunst in Den Haag plaatsvond, was dan weer een publicatie voorzien die nooit uitgegeven werd.

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Anders Kreuger: “Daarbij vergeleken zal deze tentoonstelling de meest volledige zijn. Voor zover dat qua ruimte kan, willen we een zo goed mogelijk overzicht van de werken tonen, het zullen er tussen de 120 en 130 zijn. Daar willen we een zekere chronologie in aanbrengen, maar tegelijk willen we – doorheen die chronologie – ook de verbanden tussen de werken laten zien. Zo zijn er bijvoorbeeld ensembles ‘Dead animals and other spirits’, ‘Against architecture’ en ‘Against belief’ of ‘Stone as stone’ en ‘Stone as tool’. Een aantal sleutelensembles zoals Approach in

tentoonstelling

Love and Fear voor Documenta IX (1992), Architexture in Galerie Micheline Szwajcer in Antwerpen (1994), Stones at Home in Christine König Galerie in Wenen (2000) of Le ragioni della leggerezza in Galleria Franco Soffiantino in Turijn (2004) worden gereconstrueerd. Daarnaast tonen we The museum of European Normality, een ensemble dat Jimmie Durham samen met Maria Thereza Alves maakte voor Manifesta 7 in Trento. Het zijn ensembles die zijn denken reflecteren, maar ook zijn methodologie. Ook zijn identiteit als schrijver komt aan bod, bijvoorbeeld in sculpturen waarin tekst verwerkt is, in de tekst-werken die soms bijna essays op zich zijn of in zijn boeken die ingezien kunnen worden in de tentoonstelling. Het wordt een heel ‘dense’ tentoonstelling, maar dat correspondeert ook met wat hij doet ... Veel van zijn tentoonstellingsprojecten waren ook heel ‘dense’.” Het hele project is gebaseerd op diepgaand onderzoek en de aanleg van een uitgebreide gegevensbank, de M HKA Ensembles. Dankzij de genereuze geste van Jimmie Durham om ons toegang te verlenen tot zijn persoonlijke archief, ontwikkelen we niet alleen een bijzonder inzicht in zijn oeuvre en methodiek, maar zijn we ook in staat om gestaag een heus kennis- en studiecentrum op te bouwen. Naast wat er in de tentoonstelling zelf te zien zal zijn kunnen we zo in een documentatieruimte en via mobiele applicaties een bijkomende schat aan informatie ontsluiten: teksten van en over Durham, essays, brieven, films en documentatie over kunstwerken die uiteindelijk niet in de tentoonstelling werden opgenomen. Jimmie Durham. Een kwestie van leven en dood en zingen loopt van 23 mei tot 18 november 2012. Curators: Bart De Baere en Anders Kreuger

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OVER JIMMIE DURHAM I want to think about art. I want art to be a part of humanity’s thinking process, not humanity’s ‘feeling’ process. We already have enough emotions, enough feelings, but we don’t have enough thoughts. — Jimmie Durham, 1996

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Jimmie Durham wordt in 1940 geboren in de VS. Hij maakt zijn eerste artistieke aanzetten binnen het veld van theater, literatuur en performance in progressieve Afro-Amerikaanse kringen in Texas in de jaren 60. Hij werkt onder andere samen met de Afro-Amerikaanse dichteres Vivian Ayers en doet een performance met Mohamed Ali. In 1968 verhuist hij naar het op dat moment zeer internationale Genève, waar hij zich inschrijft aan L’École des Beaux-Arts. Hij maakt in die periode werk dat soms performatief, soms sculpturaal is. Met drie andere beeldhouwers vormt hij de groep Draga die onderzoekt hoe beeldende kunst meer geïntegreerd kan worden in het publieke leven. In 1973 keert hij terug naar de VS om hier een functie op te nemen binnen de American Indian Movement en tot 1980 is hij vooral politiek actief. Hij richt mee de International Indian Treaty Council op, is betrokken bij de bezetting van Wounded Knee in 1973 en wordt uiteindelijk vertegenwoordiger van de indianen in de Verenigde Naties — de eerste officiële vertegenwoordiger van een minderheid daar. In 1980 keert hij terug naar de kunst. Als essayist blijft hij zich niettemin bezighouden met de beeldvorming rond native Americans en ook zijn beeldend werk uit deze tijd thematiseert en reflecteert dit, al heeft het tegelijk een bredere reflectieve kwaliteit en beeldende werking. Typerend hiervoor zijn de werken met dierenschedels. Durham krijgt een zekere bekendheid binnen de kunstscene van New York, maar ondervindt dat zijn werk gezien wordt als ‘Indiaanse kunst’ en niet aanzet tot fundamentele discussies, noch politieke, noch artistieke. In 1987 laat hij de VS dan ook achter zich en gaat hij in Cuernavaca, Mexico wonen – hier blijft hij tot hij in 1994 opnieuw naar Europa verhuist. Het is een periode waarin hij internationaal veel tentoonstelt. Zo maakt hij in 1988 Pocahontas and the Little Carpenter voor Matt’s Gallery in London, heeft hij in 1992 een tentoonstelling bij Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York en reist Original Re-Runs a.k.a. A Certain Lack of Coherence in 1993 van het Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in Londen naar de Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussel en Kunstverein Hamburg. In 1992 nodigt Jan Hoet hem bovendien als één van de sleutelfiguren uit voor Documenta IX in Kassel. Hij maakte er een groot ensemble onder de titel An Approach in Love and Fear, bestaande uit verschillende sculpturen en teksten. Een aantal van deze werken maken vandaag deel uit van de M HKA collectie en zullen tijdens de tentoonstelling opnieuw te zien zijn. De essays die Jimmie Durham ondertussen blijft schrijven en publiceren in tijdschriften zoals Art Forum, Art Journal en Third Text en boeken worden in 1993 gebundeld in de publicatie A Certain Lack of Coherence, a collection of his essays die verschijnt bij Kala Press. Sinds Jimmie Durham zich in 1994 definitief van de Amerika’s afkeert en in Europa komt wonen, verzet hij zich vooral tegen twee grote fundamenten van de Europese traditie: geloof en architectuur. Een ander thema dat sindsdien veel in zijn werk opduikt is zijn visie op Europa, dat hij Eurazië noemt — zichzelf ziet Jimmie Durham als een ‘thuisloze Euraziatische wees’. Binnen Europa woont hij achtereenvolgens in Brussel, Marseille, Rome en nu afwisselend in Berlijn en Napels. Zijn werk is te zien op verschillende belangrijke plekken internationaal: de Biënnales van Venetië in 1999, 2001, 2003 en 2005; in Marseille, Den Haag en Gateshead (England) (in de retrospectieve From the West Pacific to the East Atlantic); op de Sidney Biennial in 2004;

in Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (in de retrospectieve Pierres rejetées… [Stones Rejected…]) … Nu, in 2012 heeft Jimmie Durham een uitgebreide retrospectieve in het M HKA waar ongeveer 120 van zijn werken getoond zullen worden. Durhams grootschalige installatie Building a Nation (2006) was dit jaar te zien in Kasper Königs laatste tentoonstelling in het Museum Ludwig in Keulen Before the Law die op 22 april afloopt en de kunstenaar neemt dit jaar ook deel aan dOCUMENTA(13).

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OVER ZIJN OEUVRE Ik ben een dwaas in mijn liefde voor eender welk materiaal. Dat moet duidelijk zijn voor wie mijn werk ziet. Dat is noch de oorsprong, noch het doel van mijn werk, en niet de methode. — Jimmie Durham, 2012 (catalogus) Jimmie Durham is één van de invloedrijkste kunstenaars van vandaag. Al twintig jaar staat zijn werk wereldwijd in de belangstelling. Het is diepgaand en toegankelijk, politiek en persoonlijk, en zowel ‘van het moment’ als dat het de gangbare tendensen overstijgt. Het raakte in de loop der jaren verschillende generaties en Durham beïnvloedt kunstenaars, curators, theoretici en kunstliefhebbers met zijn tentoonstellingen en boeken, maar ook door middel van zijn activiteit als leraar. Durham gebruikt in zijn werk alle onderdelen van wat wij onder visuele kunst verstaan: het object, het beeld, het woord, het gebaar, hun verbindingen. Beelden en woorden worden vastgenageld, gelijmd of geschilderd op objecten, die voor een publiek ‘levend’ kunnen worden gemaakt. Durham tekent en schildert; werkt met video en, af en toe, met fotografie. Hij doet performances, maakt installaties en creëert zijn eigen musea, soms in samenwerking met zijn partner, kunstenaar Maria Thereza Alves. Gewoonlijk staat zij ook achter de camera wanneer er (al dan niet bewegend) beeld nodig is. En toch kan veel van Durhams werk worden beschouwd als ‘beeldhouwwerk’ in de ruimste zin van het woord: materiële verschijningen in de ruimte. Het materiaal gaat van hout en steen en been tot plastic buizen en vellen handgeschreven of gedrukte tekst.

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PUBLICATIE Samen met de Zwitserse uitgeverij van kunstboeken JRP | Ringier geeft het M HKA een publicatie uit bij de tentoonstelling Jimmie Durham. Een kwestie van leven en dood en zingen. Het rijk geïllustreerde boek geeft een overzicht van Durhams lange carrière als kunstenaar. De talrijke foto’s van Durhams werk zijn samengebracht rond verschillende concepten en ideeën zoals die binnen zijn oeuvre opduiken: de werken uit dierenschedels bijvoorbeeld in ‘Animal skulls and other figures’, de zelfportretten en video’s van performances in ‘Self-portraits. Performance. Surveillance’, de reeks palen die hij maakte om verschillende plekken ter wereld te markeren en de Europa-gelinkte werken in ‘The center of the world. Eurasia’, de tegen architectuur gekante werken in ‘Against architecture. Against belief’, de werken gemaakt met stenen in ‘Stone as stone’ en ‘Stone as tool’, de werken waarin hij verschillende soorten materialen gebruikte zoals loodgieterspijpen in ‘Plumbing and other objects’ … Daarnaast omvat de publicatie drie essays die het werk van Jimmie Durham kaderen: Verslag aan Molly Spotted Elk en Josephine Baker van de hand van de kunstenaar zelf, waarin hij zijn werkwijze schetst aan de hand van een soort dagboekschets van verschillende projecten; De Vragensteller — materiële en verbale scherpzinnigheid van Guy Brett over de scherpzinnigheid en geestigheid van het werk van Jimmie Durham; en De kwaadwilligheid en welwillendheid van levenloze voorwerpen – de anti-architectuur van Jimmie Durham van Richard William Hill over de anti-architectuur van Jimmie Durham. De inleiding is van de hand van curators Bart De Baere en Anders Kreuger. Jimmie Durham | A Matter of Life and Death and Singing Redactie Anders Kreuger uitgever JRP | Ringier 160 p. ISBN 978-3-03764-289-4 taal Engels met een Nederlandse tekstbijlage prijs € 32,00

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CURATORS Anders Kreuger

Anders Kreuger (°1965 in Zweden) is sinds 2011 als curator verbonden aan het M HKA, het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerpen. Van 2007 tot 2010 was hij Directeur van de Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, en van 2007 tot 2011 curator van de tentoonstellingen bij de Lunds konsthall, beide in Zweden. Van 2007 tot 2010 maakte Kreuger deel uit van het Programmatie Team voor de Europese Kunsthalle in Keulen. In 2003–2004 doceerde hij aan de MA Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, London. Sinds 1999 is Kreuger werkzaam als free lance curator, schrijver, editor and conferencier. Hij schreef tal van teksten en realiseerde tentoonstellingsprojecten in Noord – Oost- en West-Europa, Rusland en de Verenigde Staten. In de jaren 1990 was Anders Kreuger directeur van de NIFCA, the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, in Helsinki, Finland, en van de Nordic Information Office in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Bart De Baere

Bart De Baere studeerde archeologie en kunstgeschiedenis. In 2002 werd hij directeur van het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerpen (M HKA). Sinds de fusie met het Centrum voor Beeldcultuur in 2003 omvat het M HKA een component film en is het mede-uitgever van het tijdschrift Afterall. Hij was voorzitter van de Vlaamse Raad voor Cultuur, die de regering adviseert over het cultuurbeleid. Van 1999 tot 2001 was hij adviseur voor cultureel erfgoed en hedendaagse kunst voor de Vlaamse minister van Cultuur. Daarvoor was hij voorzitter van de Vlaamse Museumvereniging. Van 1986 tot 2001 was hij curator in het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Gent (nu S.M.A.K.) waar hij verschillende tentoonstellingen organiseerde, zoals This is the show and the show is many things. Hij organiseerde en was commissaris van diverse happenings in het buitenland, zoals Documenta IX in Kassel. Als adviseur voor de stad Johannesburg was hij betrokken bij de oprichting van een biënnale in Zuid-Afrika. Hij was lid van de internationale adviesraad voor het netwerk van Soros Centres voor hedendaagse kunst in Oost-Europa.

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ESSAY DOOR JIMMIE DURHAM Report to Molly Spotted Elk and Josephine Baker Molly Spotted Elk and Josephine Baker both started their lives in the U.S. and went to Europe as soon as possible, both as artists.* One of my favourite books is Nikos Kazantzakis’s autobiography Report to Greco.

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It was minus fifty-nine degrees centigrades. and my boots bought especially for the trip were not good enough. Some guys looked at my feet, went away and came back with black felt boots my size. They were more like thick, stiff socks, with no soles of rubber or leather—nothing but the felt. We all got into two vehicles and drove out into the forest for about thirty minutes to a spot where we were to have a picnic. My new felt boots kept my feet perfectly warm in the snow, which was formed into small sand-dune-like patterns, orange–gold on one side, turquoise–purple on the other; painted by the low-riding sun. The guys got a fire started very quickly and began to roast chunks of horsemeat. The smell of the wood, meat, the forest itself, was pleasure close to the point of something I guess is ecstasy—except that a strong intake of breath made our noses want to freeze on the inside. After the meal I borrowed a hand-axe to cut a thin birch sapling for a work I would do in the city of Yakutsk, where we were staying. I had to take off the leather mittens they’d given me, and wear only my wool gloves. The axe was sharp and the small tree fell with five quick chops. Frostbite on the tips of two fingers, still no feeling but tingling in one 18 years later. The whole operation was not four minutes. Temperature that low is quickly dangerous. The guys had put some vodka in the snow, and when we tried to have some with our meat it would not pour—frozen. A story was told about a Russian who gulped down a glass of syrupy frozen vodka and immediately died. Quiet laughter all around. I was with Marketta Seppälä, a Finnish curator, and her husband Yrjö Haila, an environmental scientist who knows practically everything about birds. We took a walk in the forest, found an old Siberian Jay’s nest that had fallen. It was tightly made of felt like my new boots. But the felt was made of lichen, spiderweb, small feathers. Sixty below zero and the Siberian Jay does not migrate, we learned. The people of the semi-autonomous Republic of Yakutia are the Evenks, the Evens and the Yakuts themselves, who are Turkoman and arrived in horse camps only about a thousand years ago. Traditionally these three groups have not got along well with each other in this very hard, vast and beautiful country. In the winter it gets sixty below. In the summer it can get above fortyfive and swarming with clouds of biting flies and mosquitos. It is Taiga forest delicately sitting on permafrost. At times, for different reasons, a small area of permafrost melts and all the trees collapse into the mud. When it re-freezes into a field cleared in the forest it becomes a perfect settlement for a group of Yakuts, with their horses. When I was born my mother had no milk—too many children already, I suppose. I could not tolerate the milk of cows and goats, but people said that horses’ milk would do the trick. In Yakutia they make an alcoholic drink, kumiss, from horses’ milk. We were served boiled horse noses every day, and breakfast was my favourite: raw liver that melts in your mouth frozen and sliced very thin—a fresh liver sorbet. (It was stored on the front porch, near where water was stored as blocks of ice.) The stout little horses had no barns nor shelter, but lived outside, as did the dogs. The country is more than five times the size of France with no railroad. So no Gulags. The people we met, from all three groups, were all scientists, specializing in the various fields of earth sciences and those meteorological. They have their own academy of sciences, but must tolerate also an outpost of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Yakutians are expected to join

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the Russian Academy, and do. Though invited, the Russians refuse the Yakutian Academy. They had not thought one way or another about their older tradition and ways. They had not been defeated in heroic rebellions. They had not, as we have done, squandered fortunes in law cases in courts set up against them, nor wasted their young in education to become lawyers themselves in a legal system established against them. They became scientists. Studied and defended themselves and their land thereby. For wanting some freedom from Moscow, and for daring to become scientists, they have been constantly persecuted, imprisoned. Yet—astounding—yet for the most part they still agree with the idea of some sort communism. They, as Siberians— so many groups, tribes, cultures, histories—would like to see the continuation of a union of soviet states. But without Russian dominance. For them the Russians are like the Americans to us: loud, arrogant, infantile and completely destructive. The ways that they have found to live in this situation: when I returned to Brussels where we had moved I thought that I had met wise people for the first time in my life. Yakutia had actually called to me from the sky. Maria Thereza Alves and I had moved to Europe in 1994 after living in Mexico for eight years. (She is from Brazil, but did not want to live there.) She went directly to Europe as we left but I had to go to Tokyo for a project with Fram Kitagawa. Afterwards he got me a first-class ticket on Japan Airlines from Tokyo to Dublin, where I had a residency in the Irish National Museum of Art. In the very front of the plane I had clear daylight all the way across the Eurasian continent. (until, I guess, about the time we crossed over north Germany into the Belgian territories.) I listened for hours and hours, drinking whiskey, to Beethoven’s 6th symphony. Crossing the Siberian northern forest was endless. I really did not have an idea of it before: Many hours into the flight I saw a river below. Bigger, it looked, than the Amazon, snaking through a thick green forest. I had no idea of such a river in Eurasia. Nor of such a forest. In Brussels I looked at books about Siberia, and a globe. (If there were personal computers in the 90s we did not know it.) I saw an illustration of an animal called a “raccoon dog.” It resembles a North American raccoon but is also different, just as the people I later met looked and acted like my people but different. I found the river on the globe. It is the Lena River. Flows just north of Lake Baikal in Irkutsk through all of Yakutia into the Arctic ocean, with a huge delta in the Tundra. (Taiga is permafrost forest and Tundra has more snow, less vegetation.) I said to Maria Thereza that I had to go there. I had to see that river, wanted to see a raccoon dog. A few weeks later I received a letter from Marketta Seppälä inviting me to accompany her and Yrjö there. We celebrated the change from ’94 to ’95 in Yakutsk. I made a pole to mark the center of the world in Yakutsk from a small piece of one-way mirror glass I’d found on the street in Brussels, tied by steel cable to the pole I’d cut in the forest. I had been watching television in my hotel room, as all the Yakutians did constantly. They watched an American show called Baywatch, brought to them by Coca-Cola, a drink they did not know. I left some coins and a small object by the tree that guards the entrance of the town, which was full o f chewing gum, cigarettes, handkerchiefs, T-shirts, coins and bills, small objects, bottles of water and soft-drinks. The television in my room showed an animated cartoon with a caped hero called Mighty Mouse. There was an innocent young country mouse girl who had been hypnotized by a cat. The next day I lay in the snow in the position of the hypnotized mouse and Yrjö took a foto. Here is a sort of footnote: Ilya Kabakov was assigned to northern Alaska for the same project, Ultima Thule. Instead of going there he stayed warm in New York and exchanged letters with Pavel Pepperstein about an old woman they knew in Moscow who claimed she had been to Alaska. Maria Thereza gave me a paperback of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, by José Saramago. I had not heard of him before, but the story is set in Lisboa, for which I have a special love. It is such a good book that I wrote to many friends advising them to read it. The first project after Dublin was a show about architecture that I did with Galerie Micheline Szwajcer in Antwerp. I tried to make a little de-construction of the European tradition of complicity of the most criminal sort between architecture and art. Mário Teixeira da Silva, of Modulo Gallery in Lisboa came to see it and asked if I could come there and do a show. He arranged an artist studio where Maria Thereza and I could live and

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work. It was in a park in an old part of town.; with drug addicts and their dogs, as well as a very good cheap restaurant with outdoor tables. Businessmen came there to eat and so did the druggies’ dogs, who were unfailingly courteous about their begging of table scraps. I was completely charmed by the groups of businessmen who would share a large bowl of cherries for dessert. Are there groups of businessmen of any other nationality who will order a bowl of cherries? Saramago’s book is infinitely quotable. I wrote to him asking if I could use passages in my artwork. He agreed and I spent the next four weeks walking around Lisboa with the ghost of Ricardo Reis. In our neighbourhood there was much trash, ordinary litter and debris from old buildings. I have always thought that some of the most interesting shapes come from broken ceramic toilet bowls and such like. They are strange bones from impossible beasts. But I have had no interest using these shards to show that fact. I try not to make clever art of that type. On the beaches I gathered stones and parts of seashells, plastic objects. I bought mysterious tools and material in hardware stores. I found on the street an X-ray photo of a broken ankle. With all of these things I looked for combinations that could act on their own, speak on their own, and not depend upon past histories nor resemblances. Each sculpture was given a quotation from The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Reis was one of the pseudonyms of Fernando Pessoa. A fictional author but by Saramago’s logic Reis himself does not know that. When Pessoa dies Reis returns from Brazil to Lisboa, to live nine more months. Just as, according to Saramago, we live nine months before we are born, we live nine months after we die. Even if we were not very real to begin with. This takes place in Lisboa just as the foul-smelling reign of the dictator Salazar begins. I am a fool in my love of material of any sort. It must be obviously true to observers of the works. That is neither the beginning nor the end—not the point—of my work and not the method. My ridiculous body is sufficient evidence that I am of the natural world and therefore have no need to try to join it. I do walk around appreciating it, however. My mind, not always ridiculous, is proof enough that I am of the human (and other life-forms) social world, so have no need to try to join that either. It is something else that we do: constant acts of construction, perhaps. I might say that one or another sculpture by me is my direct response to Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. But few acts are direct responses. I read the book socially. It looks as though reading books were private—almost anti-social. Even if you are the very first person to read the book, it is made, and you are reading it—as an editor, maybe, to prepare for a large audience— you are reading it socially. No matter what the writer claims, she did not write it for herself, nor exclusively for you. It is written and read publicly, socially. Moreover, I have said in several lectures that I make my work for the smartest people. I do not know them, and it has nothing to do with formal education or social standing. They can be anywhere. If I make my work comfortably, for people like me, it is like friendly bar-talk. Fun, important for friendship, ultimately superficial and useless to the world. I’ve noticed that if an artist thinks she is smart (of course I have a specific person in mind writing this), the work will have the stupid signs of intelligence and will talk down to us lesser folk. Might impress some people for some time… When I see bad art it is almost always bad not because of carelessness or lack of talent but because of the smugness of the artist congratulating herself on how smart she is. The bad taste lasts a long time! Something good gives courage and energy. A bad film can depress me for days. Here is something frustrating: I love material and I love to work. I can be happy and intent a long time working. Work is generative; makes more work. But at the end I will not like the pieces I’ve made. They will have not enough thought in them. Or worse, not good thought. If I think first, plan the piece mentally only, they often bore me once they are made. Too much of a gesture instead of a work. So many poets have written that poetry “comes” to them. Happily, that happens to me with sculptures also. In 1995 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev invited me to participate in a group event to celebrate the founding of Rome. For no reason I know about I decided to make a large interesting pile of trash.

essay door jimmie durham

Carolyn needed a maquette for the catalog (or a drawing, which I can seldom do). I had no studio in Brussels but Maria Thereza had rented a space which I was able to borrow. The result is a miniature pile of interesting garbage that pleased me much. Carolyn still has it. The actual trash pile I made in Rome was so interesting that we needed a security guard to keep local people from taking parts they needed. The year before that Carolyn and Iwona Blazwick had curated an exhibition in Antwerp by a very long title that begins with the words “On Taking a Normal Situation…” That show was for me the beginning of my continuing investigation of European traditions. A text with some drawings was the main work but there was an almost-large sculptural element made of the length of PVC pipe, a giant door with the doorknob on the edge, and an axe. Both works were manifestations of the ur-primitive character Enkiddu from the Gilgamesh epic, which describes in the first written words the story of the first city—of civilization. In New York I had earlier used Shakespeare’s Caliban as a similar alter ego to investigate the colonization of the Americas. It has been more than a year past since I begin thinking about writing for this book. It seemed a good idea to more or less describe however briefly everything I’ve done since returning to Europe in ’94. It is not possible even to list the shows. I decided early on, perhaps partly by the expedient of not saying no, to do anything anyone asked. I have done that ever since. It has so far been an excellently beautiful time, with shows, teaching, conferences and public events, writing. Constantly busy, and moving from city to city. Those two years in Brussels when I had no money, no studio—it is not a brag that I worked on three or four projects at the same time, all the time. I saw it as a privilege. We moved then to Marseille and stayed two years, would’ve stayed longer but was invited to Berlin through a D.A.A.D. grant, and ended up staying eight years there before moving to Venice to teach, to Alexander Calder’s studio in France, and finally after being luxuriously homeless for almost two years, to Rome. But I’m getting ahead of my account, and will return to the time in Brussels. In Mexico Maria Thereza and I began to collaborate on video works: In New York in the early 80’s I did many performances, at the La Mama Theater, Franklin Furnace, Dance Theater Workshop, Exit Art and other places. It proved impossible to get them recorded. If you do not speak to the camera, the camera ignores you. Maria Thereza had a camera and we hit upon the idea of me performing only for it. Never having had a television I naively thought that we might then sell our performance videos to television. We first made two videos for the future show at Galerie Micheline Szwajcer:The Man Who Had a Beautiful House, and The East London Coelacanth (more or less in connection to a book I had made of the same title with Bookworks in London, more or less in connection with a show at ICA London). We like the process, and we like collaborating. We had done several performances together, in Mexico, Spain, London and Ghent. But collaboration is difficult for us unless there is some clear way for each to contribute. With Maria Thereza directing and operating the camera, me acting silly in front of it, clarity of work is easy. Still in Brussels, still ’95 Lex Ter Braak invited me to Middelburg in the Netherlands, soon after I’d completed a show at l’Ancienne Poste in Calais. I made one very long sculpture that encircled the Middelburg space, wrote a poem and made a video—our first in Europe, with Lex as bell-ringing assistant. In the video a stone attempts to answer the telephone. The telephone is on the ground, looking very similar to Joseph Beuys’s “earth telephone.” This, I’m sorry to confess, is simply one of those coincidences that so often happen. I was not commenting on Beuys’s telephone. At that time I did not know of it. A month or so later we were invited to Lille specifically to make videos. I suppose we stayed four or six weeks there, thinking only of videos. We lived and worked at M.A.J.T., and our neighbour had a cat named Jimmy, who became my assistant.

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People seemed to like the work I did in Middelburg, but not many people liked the Calais show. How can I defend it? Of course I cannot; first because it is now many years in the past and none of you will have seen it. Secondly, if people do not like your work there is no possible defence.

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I remember a time in the 80s when David Hammons showed his bust of Jesse Jackson as a blue-eyed white guy, entitled How Do You Like Me Now? in Washington D.C. Local black people took offense, deciding that Hammons was doing bad against Jackson. He remained so beautifully silent! For my part, it may seem like vanity that I still worry about the reception of a work so long ago. I see it as a duty to myself. Art, as any communication, happens socially, not individually. Not like a painting by Pablo Picasso being “so far ahead of its time” that people do not catch on. By what system would I not want to worry, not take myself seriously as a social constructor? As I see it, only the system wherein we are all sitting drinking in the bar, saying not much more than that we are all OK, with maybe a ghost story once in a while to wake us up. If something does not work I need to know why, and I do not automatically blame my talent or vocabulary. I tend instead to try to inspect the circumstances and the audience. Very often I conclude that the environment, the silly little bar, is not conducive to either me being sufficiently intelligent nor the friends being sufficiently receptive to something outside the comfortable bar-talk. I hardly exist without you. It seems, then, that I must have your better attention. This happens so often coming from the U.S. Some famous guy gets on TV or writes an essay in Time Magazine: “Movies [or art, or theatre or books] are for entertainment. If it’s not entertaining, it’s useless.” Everyone nods their heads at his wisdom. Stupid fool. What does it even mean? Why does he need to be “entertained”? Why does he demand a lap dance from us? What does he want me to want to happen with him? Leaving Mexico, moving to Belgium, I had to quit a five-pack-a-day cigarette addiction, and was in a continuous flux of weird states of being, as Maria Thereza can attest to. Once we were both down to the rocks and bones and spent the day in the large, almost-wild park in Brussels. As I walked among the trees and grass, saw the butterflies and heard the cicadas, like the Greek guy Antaios, my strength began to return. I ate all the herbs I could find. I breathed. It is not romanticism, friends, not sentimental. Simple biology,which for us includes mentality. I knew the politics—never lost the consciousness that I was in a park in a European city. I ate the fresh blossoms hanging from the Linden trees. What a marvelous partner for Europeans, Linden trees! Much medicine is made from them. I’ve written poems about them, made art with their wood and about them. The show in Calais was connected to a show in Rheims, where traditionally French kings were crowned, at an old hospital. In the park in Brussels I saw how I was healed, and began to think about the “natural” world in connection with the up-coming show in Rheims. The show in Calais was about machinery, because the lace-making machines there are the ancestors of computers (They operate by a system of “punch cards,” with patterned holes which instruct the machine: “Yes/Not Yes.”) The show in Rheims would be about how trees assisted the Enlightenment. Traditionally Linden wood has been used both as charcoal sticks for drawing and as wood blocks for making woodcuts. The scientist Vesalius, blessed be his name, looked at cadavers he dissected and drew what he saw. (In this instance of drawing what he saw he is like my main man, Albrecht Dürer.) Guts, livers, pancreases, hearts, oesophagi, and other organs too numerous to mention. He then made woodcut prints of these observations and published them, instead of each physician or surgeon developing theories based on fantasy instead of observation—no more “vapours,” no more “wandering” uteri. He drew and published the reality for the first time. The wood used for the woodcut block was Linden. Before the Rheims show I had spent an eventful week in the Czech Republic, in Plasy close to Pilsen, where the best beer in the world is made. With other artists from all over, I lived in an old monastery where the monks had made secret concoctions from Linden ash, for medicine. At some point the monastery was taken over by Metternich, whose descendants, Nazis all, lived there until after the Second World War. I wanted to make a Pole to Mark the Center of the World at Plasy, so I went into the forest and cut a small Linden sapling. I stripped off the bark, rolled it up and took it home to Brussels, to use in the Rheims show. The show had the titleThe Anatomy Lesson. How strangely cylindrical we all are. The bark of a small willow tree can be removed as a hollow

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cylinder, and I bet if I had been careful I could’ve done that with my Linden sapling. Like skinning a snake. Except that we fork at the end (I cannot wear a pant, but must have a pair of them sewn together. We are just as cylindrical as a tree, with fewer branches…) we are all similar. The show in Rheims was an old hospital full of sleeves, arms, metaphorical cylinders. Full of PVC pipes and plumbing. Full of weird physicality. I tried to make it look a little bit as though some alien being had tried to sort things into a kind of order after a bombing. The space is so big that there was a great luxury to play. It is there that I found an old refrigerator and threw cobblestones at it every morning for about ten days, to change its shape. Maria Thereza and I had found ourselves living in Belgium more or less by accident. There were many friends there, and we lived in St. Gilles where there were good Portuguese restaurants. But we were unable to get permits to stay. In those days the police in St. Gilles were really crooked and racist. This was not noticed, of course, by the Belgians. In the middle of the year ’96 we moved to Marseille. Walking home at night from a restaurant on our first day there we noticed a strange smell in the air—vaguely familiar but I could not identify it. As we got closer to home the smell became stronger. Finally, “Teargas!” I said. There had been a conference of Jean Le Pen’s party and the police had used teargas to disperse students who demonstrated against the conference. Leaving Belgium I had just done a show in Lund, Sweden at Anders Tornberg Gallery, living for a month in Anders’s house and using the gallery as a studio. I met Gertrud Sandqvist there, who took me to see the new Art Academy in Malmö that she was opening. I began teaching there the next year. More or less at the same time Ulli Lindmayr invited me to do something in the house that Wittgenstein had designed and built for his sister in Vienna. As an architect Wittgenstein was a disciple of Adolf Loos, only more severe, of course. The house is beautiful, every detail controlled so much that it gives an impression like that of a drunken man pretending to be sober. A crazy house pretending to be not crazy. It seemed a perfect place to continue the attack on architecture I’d started with the show at Galerie Micheline Szwajcer. There was a small book, published only in German, that I saw as part of the project. I had done a similar thing at a show in Exit Art in New York in 1989, with a book as part of the exhibit. Only now, however, preparing for this retrospective, do I realize that I have never made a separation between writing and making sculptures. They maybe do not come from the same impulses and do not have the same purposes. Yet for me they do not bother each other. In 1997 Sweden invented a new organization for residencies for artists and I was invited to Stockholm from Marseille. Maria Thereza came and we stayed for three months of warm, sunny weather and light far into the night. There was room and time enough to concentrate and make more videos. In Marseille our studios were on the fifth floor of a high old cigarette factory. It became increasingly difficult for me to climb up. I decided that it was simply because the time of my life was expiring. Then I broke my navel. It is too deep, having been cut wrong when I was born, so that the stomach muscle is weak around it. I developed a painful hernia—a tear in the muscle. To keep it from becoming worse I put a glass marble in my navel with a lot of padding and taped it up. That is the way I worked in Stockholm. Afterwards I returned to Antwerp to do a second show with Micheline Szwajcer and had too much pain. A doctor there agreed to do the necessary surgery but found that I also had pulmonary Pneumonia. That is why I could not easily climb the stairs in Marseille. Now I will switch tracks: my method of living, not working. The world loves me. It is really as though there is an entity that I think of as the world. Everything altogether, in other words. It is like a big, stupid, friendly dog that loves me. It has always been true that if I am out, in a desert, for example, and am in need of a piece of string I need only start looking and will soon be provided with string. If the first piece of string I find in the desert is not quite right I need only say “thank you, but not quite right,” and continue looking. More string will arrive. Maria Thereza is witness that this always works. You might well ask, then, why I have always been so poor; why can’t I just say that I need money and look for it? Well, in fact I can and do,

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but I have not known how to say I need an excess of money, anymore than I might say I need much more string than I have things that want to be tied. Because of that friendship I have with the world I am extremely sensitive to it. I am not the only person who hears voices, feels spirit in stone and wood. (Please stay with me, this really is leading somewhere.) Isabel Carlos invited me to participate in her Sydney Biennale. I contacted Cheryl Buchanan, an aboriginal friend I had met thirty years earlier when she came out to our treaty conference in South Dakota in ’74. She agreed to be my guide and sponsor. Partly because of the incredible troubles she has suffered, but mainly because of some hyper-sensitivity to the land itself, I was overly-emotional for the entire month in Sydney. A strong sadness came over me; difficult to control. Sometimes, in my case like so many others, because of history, one finds oneself in situations where some activism is necessary. I find myself once again in one of these situations. In this instance the activism amounts to publicly speaking out, and writing. When I lived in Geneva a Mapuche Indian from Chile and an Aymara from Bolivia and I started an organization for international support for Indians of the Americas. I also had close friends in various African liberation organizations. I knew Kurds and Roma. Returning to the U.S. I was assigned to work at the United Nations in New York. Practically every week I received letters from people in prison asking help. From Ainu prisoners in Japan, Maoris, Aboriginals, Sami and Inuit from Greenland. I could not help, and we needed to concentrate on the specifics of European colonization in the Americas to be of any effect at all, so I ignored the letters. A couple of years ago I was invited to make a permanent new work as part of the first Sami courthouse in Norway, in the town of Tana on the Tana River. I stayed a month making it, again perfect sunny warm weather, but the sun never once went down. I spoke with many people, again learned much that I’d not before thought of. Again saw how racism had made people (local Norwegians) dirty and stupid, proud and arrogant. The opening of the new courthouse, and of my work, was attended by the king and queen of Norway, who received a strong lecture from the Sami judge. One is embarrassed in the presence of people who have something wrong with them: incontinence, extreme neuroses, etc. I am always embarrassed around people who agree to be subject to a king or queen. You see that events and experiences have made me consider the world-wide situation of “Indigenous Peoples.” On every continent we are oppressed, and at best at the whims and mercy of the nations founded against us. What, might I say, refusing romanticism, makes us different? We are stateless peoples. Stateless with no wish, no possibility to make our own nation-states. This is where I live and work. Not in Rome or Berlin; in Eurasia at a time of growing national xenophobia. People often ask if there are possibilities to combine activism and art. I think they want my works to carry political slogans… As I say in schools, art is an intellectual endeavor. Surely we can trust intellect? Teaching is also part of my art practice, not separate. Besides teaching in Malmö for nine years I also did special workshops and tutoring before that time (and during that time) at schools in the Netherlands, England and Denmark. Living poor in Mexico I would often go for a week or two of lectures and studio visits to art schools in the U.S. I would take along five or ten pastel drawings and sell them to other teachers for one hundred dollars each to augment the teaching fees, and saw this also as part of the social side of art practice. Angela Vettese invited me to live and teach in Venice for six months. In almost all of these situations I’ve made permanent friends. Talented young artists who I had nothing to teach and who I have been consistently unable to help, with residencies, shows or grants. I do not know why I am so un-influential. There is nothing to impart in teaching. No actual instruction, except of course the practical things like how to use a certain tool. In that case the instruction goes both ways because the young artists know computer stuff and other mysteries. I would always rather participate in a group show than have a solo show. The talk with other artists is good for me. Teaching is part of that phenomenon. The social discourse about art is part of the practice of art.

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Supplement A Talking about how things happened in the past is always about choosing some version of facts and memories. There is no completed version. I am also never sure of the motives; why do interviewers ask such questions as, “How did you begin to make art?“ What answer would provide information about what? In about 1964 I met a most excellent guy named Tommy Geist, on some construction site where we both were working. He was a descendant of those thousands of Germans who had immigrated to Texas in the last half of the 19th century. Politically and religiously conservative, these people were not especially racist, as were the earlier English and Irish immigrants. Tommy took pride in the stereotype of the hardworking, clever German peasant. He could do anything that involved hands and brains working together: he made his own guns, bows and arrows, hunting knives and machines of different kinds. He and I were both woodcarvers. I had learned loyalty to the Case brand of pocket knives from my father and uncles. Tommy taught me that Hoffritz made better knives. For a while he stayed in my apartment in Austin. I had been making art-like things for a couple of years. Not just carving but paintings (I had not yet heard that artists used special paints made for them—I used different colors of house paint) and assemblages. I did not know the word “assemblage,” of course, I was just gluing and nailing things together. In those days I assumed that I also could do anything. I worked as a mechanic at the power plant of the university, but was making some jewelry and stuff at night. A couple, John and Trulah, asked if I could make their wedding rings. I said, “Of course.” Gold, I remember, was thirtyfive dollars an ounce. I bought some and took a night class in lost-wax casting at the student union. (I was not a student but they did not care.) Someone asked if I could mat and frame a picture they had bought. “Of course,” I said—not even knowing what it meant exactly. Tommy gave me a wood-carving gouge and mallet. It was so amazing! The way it allowed me to shape large pieces of wood! Through friends I had met a rich Spanish man, José Rubi, and his wife, Rebecca. She asked if I would make a sculpture of a bull for his birthday. With my new gouge I made it from oak, with iron legs that were pieces of re-enforcing bars from a construction site. José did not like the piece because it did not look like the bulls in Spanish bullfight posters. Rebecca paid me sixhundred dollars anyway—very much money. In those days I had a girlfriend who was a graduate student in theater. (I had earlier been active in community-based theater.) We often went together to concerts and public events at the university and met once an exchange couple from Geneva. I saw that I could live by making art, so I sold my car and got a Hapag Lloyd freight ship in New Orleans and made port some weeks later in Le Havre. It was not possible to stay in Geneva without a visa, so Maurice Graber, the friend who I’d met in Austin and with whom I was staying, got me enrolled as a student in the École des Beaux Arts, therewith a visa. Much of this story has been recounted elsewhere. It is included here just to round-out the directionlessness and planlessness of my life so far. When asked when I first realized I was an artist I reply honestly that such realization does not apply in my life. I like to move about, to see what is happening, and to participate. Maria Thereza Alves and I met in ’78 when she worked as a volunteer in our offices at the United Nations. We met, then, in a political context in which we were both activists. After I left the Treaty Council and my position in the American Indian Movement we had no money at all and both had to find jobs. Me, once again as a construction laborer, but my back had become quite bad for such work. (I was then past forty years old.) Maria Thereza enrolled in art school and also began the Brazilian Information Center. Soon she was the representative of the new Workers Party of Brazil to the U.S., and was often in Washington and meeting with U.S. labor leaders. My intention was to write a history of American Indian struggles of the 20th century. The book of poems, Columbus Day, was also in progress and we were active in small ways for the next few years in New York in various coalitions and support groups for struggles in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Puerto Rico. For awhile I worked with the women’s organization of the American Indian Movement in connection with an international conference on water. I was not being an artist—I was not not being an artist. When I left Geneva I went to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, then various cities in the mid-west where we had legal

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trials. The Hoffritz pocket-knife was still in my pocket and I was constantly carving small pieces of bone or wood, making jewelry and such. When someone admired what I was working on I gave it to him or her, as I had done as a child. I was making a large Bowie knife for Russell Means, from a section of a car spring. It would have had a deer antler handle and a buffalo tail sheath. It never got finished and at some point I gave the blade away. In New York I was playing with the odd things I might find, including animal skulls. I was to depressed over our political situation to write. Once in Mexico I said to Maria Thereza that, if anything, I was a professional bum. Although even now if I’d had any formal education I would want to be a biologist. I’ve been a little hesitant over the years to speak of these things because maybe people would think I’m not as serious and committed to my work as some professional artist such as, for example, Gerhard Richter might be. But, well, I am quite serious. I do not see art as a profession even though I have been lucky and happy with my luck at once-in-awhile being able to live by concentrating on art.

Supplement B It is now difficult for younger artists, maybe, to understand how tight and silly the art systems were only twenty years ago. When people began looking at the hidden art histories of the 60s and 70s, didn’t we all feel kind of liberated? By the time of the mid-90s we could see that the structures and definitions of art were only nonsense. And certainly against art. Now we see that anything can be art—if the artist is good enough. It may look as though there is more bad art now, but the truth is simply that there is more art. And most art has always been bad. Most books are bad, most movies. Most restaurants serve bad food. This, sadly, is not a new trend, it’s just the state of things. The first show I did at CIRCA Gallery in Geneva was called Little Black Things. Nothing was as big as my hand and all the pieces were for sale for minus one centime each. Jaqueline Vauthier brought a museum director from France to see it. He wanted to buy the entire installation but could not. The price was wrong. I was not willing to make a deal with him. Last Year, 2011, Friedrich Meschede invited me to make an outdoor work for a sculpture park in Cologne. A year earlier I had happened upon a timber depot in the port of Nantes. Thousands of really giant hardwood tree trunks were laid out, having come from African and Pacific forests. I thought to buy one and just lay it in the park. It turns out that many also come into the port of Hamburg, so we found one closer to home than Nantes. We bought an African Mahogany tree trunk, not as large as some, because of weight. It is almost two meters in diameter, but only about six meters long, maybe eight. Supposedly this is all legal wood, but even so—what strange thoughtless bravery to cut down such a tree. They are then used mostly to make luxury yachts for the growing crowd of billionaires out there. I did not want to change the tree trunk, nor even to show this kind of information; thinking that it could exist still powerfully on its own, bringing questions to the minds of some people.

Supplement C Don’t worry, this is quite short—just a story about our beautiful studio in Berlin that I must tell you: For four years we had a studio in the Grunewald forest in Berlin. It was the last building on a small street, so the forest was our garden. It was part of a building commissioned by Hitler for his favorite artist, Arno Breker, in 1940, the year I was born. Before Maria Thereza and I there had been Breker himself, then the Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell. No one else. The main work-room was a seven-and-a-half meter cube with a line of four meter windows showing the forest on two sides. There were two bathrooms; upstairs a small room and Maria Thereza’s darkroom. We had a table outside and had meals there in good weather, shared with a squirrel family we had made friends with, three kinds of forest mice and many birds, including a robin who had convinced me to work for him turning over logs and stones. We fed about a ton of birds a ton of food every day all year long. In the evenings wild boars would visit, the occasional fox and badger. ROME AND BERLIN, 2012

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*Jessica L. Horton, “Playing in Paris: Hand-Painted Posters from the Studio School” in Places to Stand: Native Art Beyond the Nation, dissertation-in-progress, Department of Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester, NY, 2012.

LIJST MET KUNSTWERKEN Alfabetisch gerangschikt volgens titel

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A Dead Deer, 1986, collection of M HKA, Antwerp A Fountain in Case Your Roof Leaks, 1996, courtesy of Christine König Galerie, Vienna A Mushroom from the Grunewald Forest, 2006, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Wien Lukatsch, Berlin A Piece of Concrete Wearing a Stone Mask and a Necktie, 1999, private collection, Amsterdam A Piece of Granite Shaped like a Camel’s Head, 2006, Dommering Collection, The Netherlands A Sculpture in Two Dimensions, 2004, video ca 30”, courtesy of the artist, Berlin A Staff to Mark the Center of the World, Gwangju Biennale, 2004, courtesy of Christine König Galerie, Vienna A Stone Asleep in Bed at Home, 2000, collection of MAC, Marseille A Stone Bra for the Venus of Milo, 1998, collection of Dora Stiefelmeier, Rome Affliction, 2004, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Almost Spontaneous #4, 2004, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris Arc de Triomphe for Personal Use (Prague Version), 2004, collection of Ellipse Foundation, Lisbon Arc de Triomphe for Personal Use (grey version ), 2007, Collection of Museum Ludwig, Köln Articles 2 and 3 from the 1986 Pinkerton’s Agency Manual, 1989, collection of Piet Vanrobaeys, Belgium Barrière Rouge en Perspective, 1996, courtesy of the artist, Berlin Black Walnut, 2003, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Charts, 4 drawings, 2005, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris Collected Stones, 2002, video compilation 24’13”, courtesy of the artist, Berlin Confessional Hair and Dirt on Canvas Piece, 2006, collection Hunting, the Netherlands Corbel, 1994, private collection, Antwerp Cortez, 1991, collection of S.M.A.K., Ghent Decorative Stones for Home, 2004, private collection, Milan ‘Do you say I’m lying?, 1995, collection of Ellipse Foundation, Lisbon Eleven Stone Parts, 1998, collection of Dora Stiefelmeier, Rome Eurasia, A Scent, 1997, courtesy of the artist, Berlin Europe, 1994—2011 (with Maria Thereza Alves), digital files, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Christine König Galerie, Vienna Footnote, 1989, private collection, Belgium Fruit Table, video, 2001, courtesy of the artist, Berlin Garçon, Garou, Gargouille, 1994, collection of FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou Grunewald, 2006, video 13’35”, collectie M HKA Head, 2006, collection of Maurizio Morra Greco, Naples Here’s a Peanut Shaped Like a Bird, 2006, private collection, Amsterdam Himmelfahrt, 1992, collection of M HKA, Antwerp Home Becomes Further Away, 2006, courtesy of the artist, Berlin OF kurimanzutto, Mexico City Homage to David Hammons, 1997, collection of Karel en Martine Hooft, Belgium Jesus. Es geht um die Wurst, 1992, collection of M HKA, Antwerp Ketchup and Mustard, 1997, collection Andrea and Johannes Teiser, Germany Labyrinth elements, 2007, courtesy of the artist, Berlin La Malinche, 1988–1991, collection of S.M.A.K., Ghent Les faux tarots des franc-plombiers, 1994, collection of l’Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne New York Gitli, 1985, collection of Ines and Philippe Kempeneers, Belgium Norwegian Construction Lumber No 2, 2007, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galleri Opdahl, Berlin Notwithstanding, 1998, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Wien Lukatsch, Berlin Painted Self-Portrait, 2007, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Christine König Galerie, Vienna Pallas Athena, 2008, collection of Dora Stiefelmeier, Rome Paradigm for an Arc, 1994, Collection of FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims Pocahontas’s Underwear, 1985, collection of Ellipse Foundation, Lisbon Prehistoric Stone Tool, 2004, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galleria Franco Soffiantino, Turin Rabbit, 1990, private collection, Antwerp Racoon( Skunk), 1989, private collection, Antwerp Red Foot, 2007, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris Resurrection, 1995, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Wien Lukatsch, Berlin Rocks Encouraged, 2010, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Sound Work 1, 2011, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Sound Work 2, 2011, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Sound Work 3, 2011, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Sound Work 4, 2011, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Sound Work 5, 2011, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Sound Work 6, 2011, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Sound Work 7, 2011, mixed media, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Second Life, 2010, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Gallery Sprovieri, London

lijst met kunstwerken 21

Self-Portrait as Rosa Levy, 1995/2006, digital file, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Christine König Galerie, Vienna Self-Portrait Pretending to Be a Stone Statue of Myself, 2006, digital file, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Christine König Galerie, Vienna Self-Portrait Pretending to Be Euroman, 2008, digital file, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Christine König Galerie, Vienna Self-Portrait Pretending to Be Haim Steinbachas Played by Haim Steinbach, 2008, digital file, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Christine König Galerie, Vienna Self-Portrait Pretending to Be Maria Tereza Alves as Terminator, 2006, digital file, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Christine König Galerie, Vienna Self-Portrait Pretending to Be Maria Tereza Alves, 2006, digital file, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Christine König Galerie, Vienna Self-Portrait Pretending to Be My Mother as Played by Isabel Perera, 2006, digital file, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Christine König Galerie, Vienna Self-Portrait with Black Eye and Bruises, 2006, digital file, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Christine König Galerie, Vienna OF Collection IFEMA - Departamento de Contabilidad, Madrid Shrouds and Swaddling Clothes of Decommissioned Saints, 1996, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Smashing, 2004, video 92’, Courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris Snake Eyes!, 2006, collection of César Reyes, Puerto Rico Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid, 2003, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Something (Perhaps a Fugue or an Elegy), 2005, collection of Maurizio Morra Greco, Naples St. Frigo, 1996, collection of DGArtes/SEC , Lisbon Still Life with Architectural Elements, 2000, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Perhaps Mr. Palomar, 2003, collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb A Stone Rejected by the Builder 1, 2006, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Wien Lukatsch, Berlin A Stone Rejected by the Builder 2, 2006, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Wien Lukatsch, Berlin Suggested Proposal for a New Architecture No. 1, 2004, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galleria Franco Soffiantino, Turin Suggested Proposal for a New Architecture No. 2, 2004, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galleria Franco Soffiantino, Turin Suggested Proposal for a New Architecture No. 3, 2004, private collection, Milan Sweet Light Crude, 2008, Courtesy of Raymond Azibert, Carcassonne, the artist, Berlin, and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris The Bluebird of Happiness and the Miner’s Canary, 2008 , collection Hunting, The Netherlands The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1989, collection of Dieter and Birgit Broska, Germany The Fountain of the Two Birds, 1997, courtesy of Collection of FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille The Four Directions, 1996, private collection, Sweden The Man Who Had a Beautiful House, video 7’27’’, 1994, courtesy of the artist, Berlin Museum of European Normality, 2008 (with Maria Thereza Alves), courtesy of the artist, Berlin The Names of the Team of Scientists Who Submitted an Article on the Human Chromosome 14 in Nature Magazine February 2003, 2003, collection of Harrie Kolen, The Netherlands The Piece of Wood, 2005, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City The Pursuit of Happiness, 2002, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and and Zerynthia, Rome The Road Not Taken, 2007, Reinking Collection, Hamburg The Tower Was Equipped with a Glass Savety Shield, 2006, Courtesy of Christine König Galerie, Vienna The Two Johns, 1988, collection of Robin Klassnik, Matt’s Gallery, London The Vitrine of Childish Delights, 2001, EVN collection, Austria These Polished Stones Are from Brazil, 2005, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and kurimanzutto, Mexico City They Almost Fit, 2006, collection of Anselm Franke, Berlin Three Pretentious Rocks, 2001, collection of Jone Kvie, Sweden I found these pieces of glass just outside what I believe must be the Villa Borghese, in Rome, 1997, collection of Andrea and Johannes Teiser, Germany Tlunh Datsi, 1985, private collection, Belgium Tocetea, 2003, video 26”, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris Tower, 1992, collection of M HKA, Antwerp Treff, 1992, collection of M HKA, Antwerp Two Legs of Wood, 1988, collection Andrea and Johannes Teiser, Germany Types of Murder Weapons, by Maigret, 1993, private collection, Brussels Types of Pipes, by Magritte, 1993, private collection, Brussels Un example, 1994, private collection, Antwerp Une Machine Désire de l’Instruction Comme un Jardin Désire de la Discipline, 1996, collection of Ellipse Foundation, Lisbon Untitled (Amenemope, an Egyptian Soldier, 1370 BC), private collection, Belgium Untitled (Armadillo), 1991, collection of M HKA, Antwerp Untitled (Radio), 2005, private collection, Vienna Untitled (Squirrel), 1991, private collection, The Netherlands Element from The Little Carpenter, 1987, private collection, Geneva Untitled, 1971, private collection, Geneva Untitled, 1970, Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico Untitled, 1972 - 2012, Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City Untitled, 1991, collection of M HKA, Antwerp Untitled, 1970, private collection, Geneva Untitled, 1970, private collection, Geneva Untitled (Zipper), 1993, Collection of Stella Lohaus, Antwerp Various Elements from the Actual World, 2009, courtesy of the artist, Berlin White Marble, Green Stone, Red Stone and Lavender Granite, 2004, courtesy of the artist, Berlin, and Galleria Franco Soffiantino, Turin You Cannot Book a Judge under Cover, 2006, collection of Maurizio Morra Greco, Naples

BEELDMATERIAAL WWW.MUHKA.BE/PERS

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beeldmateriaal

persinformatie M HKA Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen Leuvenstraat 32 2000 Antwerpen T + 32 (0)3 260 99 99 E [email protected] www.muhka.be

Voor meer informatie en foto’s, raadpleeg www.muhka.be/pers

Of contacteer Kathleen Weyts, Hoofd Publiekswerking & Communicatie E [email protected] T +32 (0)3 260 80 97 M +32 (0)485 795 332

Externe perscontacten BELGIË, FRANKRIJK, USA Mevr. Gerrie Soetaert E [email protected] M +32 (0)475 47 98 69 DUITSLAND KOMED Mevr. Ursula Teich E [email protected] M +49 (0) 173 520 4894 GROOT-BRITTANIË, USA, NEDERLAND Mevr. Rhiannon Pickles E [email protected] M +31 (0) 6158 21202

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praktische informatie Openingsuren DI→WO & VR→ZO 11:00→18:00 DO 11:00→21:00

Toegang €8 Reductietarieven: €4 (+ 60 jaar, groepen vanaf 10 pers., werkzoekenden, leden NICC, Antwerpenaren, lerarenkaart Klasse, Knack Club) / €1 (-26 jaar) / gratis (-13 jaar, BIG-kaart, Vrienden van het M HKA, ICOM, VMV, begeleiders van andersvaliden) Op donderdagavond (18:00>21:00) is de entreeprijs €1 voor iedereen

Reservaties MA→VR 9:00→12:00 en 13:00→17:00 T + 32 (0)3 260 99 90 E [email protected] www.muhka.be

Openingsuren bibliotheek D→VR 11:00→17:00 T + 32 (0)3 260 99 98

Openingsuren M HKAFE DI→WO & VR→ZO 11:00→18:00 DO 11:00→21:00 (keuken 12:00→6:00)

Openbaar vervoer Station Antwerpen-Berchem: tram 8 of bus 30 Station Antwerpen-Centraal: bus 23 Station Antwerpen-Zuid: tram 4 of 24 www.delijn.be / www.nmbs.be

Eigen vervoer www.antwerken.be gratis parkeergelegenheid

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partners Het M HKA is een initiatief van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap en wordt gesteund door Provinciebestuur Antwerpen, Stad Antwerpen, Nationale Loterij, Azko Nobel Decorative Coatings-Levis, Cobra, [H] ART en Klara. Jimmie Durham. Een kwestie van leven en dood en zingen wordt gesteund door Evens Stichting en Sd Worx De retrospectieve in het M HKA omvat meer dan 120 werken uit alle creatieve periodes van Jimmie Durham. Het is een groot project, waarbij we hebben genoten van de toewijding en generositeit van veel verschillende partners, zodat we enkele mensen uitdrukkelijk dank verschuldigd zijn. Speciale dank gaat uit naar bruikleengevers van de tentoonstelling, waaronder niet alleen de kunstenaar zelf, openbare instellingen in Vlaanderen, Frankrijk, Portugal en Kroatië en privéverzamelaars in heel het Europese en Amerikaanse continent, maar ook de galeries waar Durham mee werkt. Kurimanzutto in Mexico-Stad, dat hem vertegenwoordigd, is heel nuttig geweest bij onze research en om ons te helpen bij het opzetten van de tentoonstelling. En zo ook de andere galeries: Galerie Christine König in Wenen, Wien Lukatsch en Galerie Opdahl in Berlijn, RAM radioartemobile in Rome, Franco Soffiantino Arte Contemporanea in Turijn, Galerie Michel Rein in Parijs, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer in Antwerpen, Galerie Lumen Travo in Amsterdam, Galerie Sprovieri en Matt’s Gallery in Londen, Módulo—Centro Difusor de Arte in Lissabon, Galerie Batagianni in Athene.

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