metropolis m

The artist and activist is presenting his largest retrospective exhibition in years at the M HKA in Antwerp. Bart De Baere, Michael Connor and Valerie Smith discuss his oeuvre on the basis of their favourite work.When Jimmie Durham left the forum of the United Nations for the open road of the fulltime artist, he began to act outside an ideology that formalizes and controls organized debate, outside the administrative bounds of what is commonly accepted as the proper legal platform for political fights. In much of Durham’s work, in particular Building a Nation, this very question of the failure of the law, the state, or an authoritative entity ‘speaking for the public good’ is tackled and challenged by using alternative means of accountability.To begin to understand how Durham takes up this task, one must compare his conviction that ‘architecture is not organic, not part of evolution; it is an invention of the State, a program of the State’ with the sprawling arid landscape of hammered old wooden boards on an open skeletal structure that is the ten-meter-long architecture of Building a Nation. The seemingly ad hoc way in which this work is constructed is deceptively disarming. We see before us a container of sorts – a horizontal arrangement of workstations. There is nothing remotely solid or stable here to suggest that we have entered the classical halls of those who preside over and decide our nationhood. Rather, Durham’s rendition is the architecture of the spider web, in which the nation builders, captains of industry and lawmakers alike, are enveloped and devoured.Visitors to Building a Nation can access the work at different points. The freedom to choose how to enter the work is a key aspect. Its permeability speaks against the importance of the grand portal, the gate, or a single point of entry and perspective, in deference to a choice of ingress and egress. This porosity is echoed in the considered manner in which the work was constructed: bit by bit, organically. The various elements of the work were partially assembled in front of a public to convey that we, as viewers, must not take for granted (i.e. gloss over) or forget the intentional aspect of the creative process, to which memory and history are intrinsic. In that spirit, niched among the collected cast-offs and dump finds, we are periodically jerked into focus by the violence of words from prominent members of the North American establishment, posted broadside-fashion like eviction notices throughout Building A Nation. The law, in the case of the United States, both in its early history and, unfortunately today, has failed humanity in its zeal for individual interests and enterprise. Because the law is biased, one must find justice through it, through the production of a ricochet effect. Durham reverses the role of the gatekeeper and the man who eternally waits by the gate in Franz Kafka’s famous parable Before the Law. The proclamations and deeds of US statesmen are held accountable by exposure, by the simple fact of Durham’s having put them on display. Beside each statement in the installation is a mirror or a reflective surface. As we examine ourselves examining the words of infamous men, we are reminded of our own stories of prejudice, which we all have, and how it takes only one to ignite a social and political wildfire. Durham reminds us, too, of the complexity of human thought. In Kafka, one never really knows where the Truth lies, who is the victim, who is the victimizer, or which side we are on. So, too, in Durham’s Building a Nation. We are not allowed to walk through the work thinking that we are above it or outside of it. We are it. It is precisely on this point that we are invited to ponder the distance that is between the individual and politics, the arbitrary division of our private/public lives, how to be political, how to be active, and how political decisions affect our existence.Both Kafka and Durham play with the burden of morality until their stories become a form of militancy to shake up the submissive and complacent corners of their different worlds. Storytelling, in all its manifestations, is for Durham a way to examine the serious universal problems he sets before himself, and irony is a way of releasing it out into the public domain.Valerie Smith is curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin