Jimmie Durham, Untitled 1993–2012. Tate. © Jimmie Durham.
Using wit and humour, Jimmie Durham's art subverts the foundations of modern western culture
Durham began his artistic career as a response to the civil rights movement. He was an organiser for the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1970s. As an activist, he fought against the racist policies and social injustices inflicted on Native American people in the United States. His art and writings are inspired by this commitment. Using assemblage techniques and the poetics of language, Durham's art playfully upturns the political and intellectual foundations of Western culture. These include the separation between the natural and the human-made worlds, and the linear narratives of time and history.
Most of the works in this room were first shown as part of Durham's installation at the 1993 Whitney Biennial in New York. He presented a series of sculptures that resemble guns and surveillance devices, alluding to modern methods of control and domination. These were crudely assembled using found objects and materials he had collected in his then-studio in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Durham then affixed texts with passages from Western literature. He described the final works as looking 'like a science fiction-type weapon as much as anything.’
The wall-mounted sculptures are reunited here with a floor-based work from the installation. They are displayed alongside a more recent work, Alpine Ibex, part of a series of sculptures made as an homage to animal species native to Europe.
Rudolf Stingel, Untitled 1993
Untitled was first exhibited at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 as a part of Aperto '93, a section of the Biennale devoted to new tendencies in art and emerging artists. It consists of a wall 5.2 x 9 m in area, entirely covered with orange Savannah custom colour carpeting. Viewers are invited to mould and sculpt the 1.5 cm thick pile of the carpet, facilitating an experience of the work that is both tactile and visual. One in a series of carpet-based works made by Stingel in the early 1990s, Untitled challenges the limits of the materials traditionally used to create a painting. Stingel’s practice engages in a formal and conceptual analysis of the medium of painting. By employing such unlikely materials as carpeting, Styrofoam, and aluminium-coated panelling, he presents three-dimensionality as symbolic of painting itself. The interactive quality of the carpet works is integral to the artist’s conception of a painting, as he explains in his statement that, ‘[he allows] painting, but not by [his] assistants who carry out [his] concept but by a public that inscribes its own individual response in a material way into the work’ (quoted in Rainer Zittl, ‘The Trickster’, in Bonami, p.35).
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artworks in Jimmie Durham
Art in this room
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled
1993