Mourning in contemporary art
twelve o’clock, November 17, 2021 – 10:08 PM
At 81 he died in Berlin. He had chosen the effervescence of Naples
from Natasha Festa
He had chosen Porta Capuana, the former Bourbon woolen mill between beauty and ugliness, to fully experience the last years of his life. He who was born in Arkansas in 1940 and had a home and studio in rigorous Berlin had wanted to take root in the chaos that truly convinced genres stars. Jimmie Durham, artist, performer, essayist and poet, considered one of the most influential names in contemporary art, who died today in Berlin. In Naples with his wife, the artist Maria Thereza Alves, he had bought a piece of the former wool factory entrusting its reinvention to his friend Antonio Giuseppe Martiniello and together they transformed it into a contemporary art center.
He lived there secluded and much loved, the epicenter of a critical attention that has always given him an exclusive role. That of revolutionary master of sculpture and civil rights activist. TO Royal Palace Naples dedicated a solo show to him in the Doric room. He called himself Cherokee and he was in the soul, beyond the lack of official membership of the trib. In the 1960s and 1970s he was committed to the civil rights of African Americans and Native Americans. He received in 2017 the Premio Robert Rauschenberg. In 2019 the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at Venice Biennale of Art. An important part of him remains at Porta Capuana, a genius loci of adoption.
In my real life I am a poet, he said. And in fact everything in the multifaceted art of the great American performer who died today in Berlin, from the revolutionary sculptural constructions that made him famous to the battles for civil rights, permeated with profound poetry. In 1985, he told in an interview with Domus in 2019, the year in which the Venice Biennale paid tribute to him with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the American Poetry Society had awarded his Columbus Day with 5,000 dollars (1985 , West End Press, Albuquerque), for him, after so many years and so many awards, that was still the most important goal. First of all, because I was recognized as a poet, he explained. And then for the money, which allowed us to rest assured.
Yet, in over sixty years of a career spanning the two continents, Durham has experimented with all the languages of art, working on the deconstruction of concepts and stereotypes typical of Western culture, using painting, sculpture, performance, drawing, sculpture. , video. A complete intellectual, he remembers today Pierpaolo Forte who met him at Mother Museum of Naples of which he was president, a man who spoke with matter, listened with an instinctive and faithful animism, an indispensable figure.
Growing up in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, while his father was traveling in search of work, he began to make his way into the art world in the 1960s with theater, entertainment, literature. The first exhibitions in Austin in 1965 before moving to Switzerland to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Then his return to the USA, where he worked for the American Indian Movement, devoting himself passionately to the civil rights of Native Americans. In the 80s in New York he resumed his artistic activity focusing above all on the visual arts, without ever leaving poetry. And again Mexico and Europe, where he arrives in ’94 and where he stops to live with Maria Thereza Alves, a partner in art and life, dividing his time between the two houses in Berlin and Naples.
Many exhibitions of his works all over the world, from the Whitney Biennial to Documenta IX in Kassel, from the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London to the Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. and Monaco, the FRAC in Reims, the Serralves Foundation in Porto, the MAXXI in Rome, the MADRE in Naples, the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice, as well as the Venice Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale. In 2017, the retrospective Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, curated by Anne Ellegood, opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the Remai Moderno in Saskatoon.
And if the Biennale remembers him today with affection and admiration, from the Madre, who in 2017 awarded him the Matron for Lifetime Achievement, comes the memory of the president of the Donnaregina Foundation Angela Tecce with the artistic director Kathryn Weir and all the staff who underline the deep relationship established with the museum, but also with the whole neighborhood. Sick for some time, Durham worked tirelessly until the last moment: he contemptuously refused his age and continued to live without prudence, recount Forte and the numerous Neapolitan friends who will reach Berlin for the greeting.
November 17, 2021 | 22:08
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