exhibition
05 February 2016 > 02 June 2016
Jimmie Durham. Sound and Silliness
photogallery
2007 | video SD, loop
Courtesy Jimmie Durham and kurimanzutto, Mexico
Poetry and theatre are important forms in many works that are typical of Jimmie Durham’s art. In the 1960s, the artist became active in theatre, performance and literature, promoting the civil rights movement in the US.
The idea of acting was therefore very much an early form of expression, sometimes in the form of live performances, at others as the reciting of poems, silly pranks, or performing actions in front of a video camera.
A Proposal for a New International Genuflexion in Promotion of World Peace is a performance in which the artist plays the part of the leading actor in a silent movie. It is a reverential gesture, a mimed genuflection with a kiss and a bow, inviting us to imagine a new gesture to promote world peace, beyond all forms of ethnic geography.
2013 | mp3
Courtesy Maria Thereza Alves, Jimmie Durham and RAM radioartemobile
As part of the eleventh Nuit Blanche in Paris (4-5 October 2013), under the artistic direction of Chiara Parisi and Julie Pellegrin, RAM radioartemobile presented (Q.i. Q.i.) Les Oiseaux, at La Gaîté Lyrique, the municipal theatre of Paris. The playlist – which consisted of twentyfour sound works created by artists and composers of different generations – was inspired by the theme of birds, which take their “voice” to every corner of the world, and by their flight as a means for carrying messages.
On this occasion, Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham present I rondoni di Porta Capuana. Set in a city in Italy, the work was recorded near the ancient Porta Capuana gate in Naples, close to the Capuana castle, an important crossroads and commercial hub, and the heart of cultural life since the early twentieth century.
I rondoni di Porta Capuana reproduces the song of little migratory birds, which can be heard in the evenings on the marble arch where they usually nest. Their chirping makes a concert that gently mingles with the background hum of the city.
2005 | video SD, loop
Courtesy Jimmie Durham and kurimanzutto, Mexico
The work, which is also known as Kinetic Sculpture, was first shown in November 2005 at the former fruit and vegetable market in Pescara, as part of the sixteenth edition of Fuori Uso, the contemporary art festival held in abandoned sites around the city.
Fleur de pas mal is an idea the artist has been reflecting on since he came to Europe in the mid-nineties, and it examines the various ways in which stones can be used as film props, instruments and tools for transforming matter, and as moving objects. A static scene is disturbed by the sudden incursion of a stone into the visual field. The artist drops a heavy stone into a bucket of paint – the paint splashes out, colouring the air all around, like the explosion of a bomb or the blossoming of a flower. By making a slow-motion recording of the actual time involved in creating the work, the artist shows how a simple gesture can lead to an aerial painting.
2006 | mp3
Courtesy Jimmie Durham and RAM radioartemobile
In the Deposizione exhibition at RAM radioartemobile in 2006, Jimmie Durham showed a carpet made of three hundred wine glasses broken by an obsidian stone, which was then placed on top of an aluminium ladder. With this action, the artist returned to one of the key themes in all his work, which is that of the transformation of matter. When it breaks the glasses the obsidian stone changes the shape and the utility of the objects by transforming them into something else.
As he himself says: “You can’t destroy matter – you can only eliminate its function and form. […] when I talk of shattering wine glasses, I don’t mean that they’re destroyed, but rather that they’re transformed by a beautiful black stone.”
Here at the exhibition, we do not just hear the transition of matter (the glasses) in an audio work, for we also see a representation of objects removed from the inertia of everyday life: this is why the work is to be considered as an “anti-monument” to the waste that is so much a part of Western civilization.
Gallery 5
curated by Hou Hanru and Giulia Ferracci
MAXXI is inaugurating its 2016 exhibition season with a show devoted to Jimmie Durham (US, 1940), artist, poet and political activist who for the second time will be presenting his art in a public museum in Rome. Known for his lyrical, at times Duchampian, ironic and ethical art, Jimmie Durham is a man whose talent is boundless, extending to the most diverse idioms, from drawing to writing, from unexpected assemblages to complex sculptures, from performance to video and architecture through to the thematic nucleus focussing on the narrative of a nation and on the links between political power and religious beliefs.
At MAXXI Durham is presenting two audio works and two videos, respectively recorded and filmed in Italy. It is his intent to tune his works to the museum space in the manner most fluid and efficient as possible in order to allow the public to enjoy to the full the sinuous curves offered by the architecture.
The works Domestic Glass (2006) and I rondoni di Porta Capuana (2012), created together with Maria Thereza Alvez, were both presented by RAM, Radioartemobile, the first in 2006 within the ambit of the exhibition Deposizione, the second on the occasion of the White Night in Paris, in the (Q.i. Q.i.) Les Oiseaux playlist; the two works touch on certain issues central to the artist’s poetic, engaging the spectator in a powerful immersive experience. The videos, in the centre of the room, are relatively brief and as Durham says “silly”. Fleur de pas mal (2005) is the action filmed in slow motion of a large stone falling into a container full of paint. A Proposal for a New International Genuflexion in Promotion of World Peace (2007) is instead a hymn to peace which the artist mimes as the protagonist in a silent film.
*A Proposal for a New International Genuflexion in Promotion of World Peace, 2007. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico.
A PROPOSAL FOR A NEW INTERNATIONAL GENUFLEXION IN PROMOTION OF WORLD PEACE
I RONDONI DI PORTA CAPUANA
FLEUR DE PAS MAL
DOMESTIC GLASS
Cataloghi della mostra
Exhibition catalogue
2016
Jimmie Durham. Sound and Silliness