Sound and Silliness

“Sound and Silliness” – a new exhibition project by Native American artist Jimmie Durham at Rome’s MAXXI – combines sounds, images and texts to retune the museum’s spatial perception.

Jimmie Durham’s artistic development has featured a mass of concepts and expressions, declined in many different ways that revolve around the demolition of common imagery and the construction of an alternative “normality”.

Teaching people to see differently and look beyond the prevalent passive conventions is the greatest lesson of a 50-year career that has adopted several forms and roles. Political activist, sculptor, performer, poet, essayist, writer and teacher, Durham has always championed the transformative force of art.

The Cherokee artist, who opted to live and work in Naples a while back, has accustomed us to unexpected operations that prompt us to reconsider codes and possible interpretations, placed as we are before an open and mobile language that triggers the suspicion that the world organisation and set-up as we know them are not final. He shows that a possible task of art is to show the world from different angles, demolishing the barriers between nature and culture, visual and scientific thought. This process instils a meaning in his work and shapes a personal grammar that is constantly changing, giving rise to an artistic production drawing on a range of media, from drawing to architectural models and from ready-mades to video and sound installations. While this activism reveals the paradoxes in the Western culture, it also highlights the links between political and religious power.

Jimmie Durham, Sound and Silliness, MAXXIJimmie Durham, Sound and Sillness, MAXXI — Jimmie Durham, Sound and Silliness, MAXXI

Durham’s artistic work is always accompanied by a direct commitment to defending the civil rights of ethnic minorities and he has been a leader of the American Indian Movement since 1973. Durham’s experience of cultural and political resistance promotes a nomadic and mixed-race knowledge based on non-conformist forms and languages, reaffirming the right to opposition and antagonistic vitality.

“Sound and Silliness”, curated by Hou Hanru and Giulia Ferracci, confirms this existential and artistic energy. The title of the exhibition project is a reflection on the meaning of our actions and the immaterial dimension they produce. As the artist says, at times the fact that the frivolity is serious but in a fun way gives us the light-hearted courage to look at life’s big picture. The title is an invitation to not take ourselves too seriously and to be more aware when dealing with human issues. To lend form to this evocative dimension, Durham has written a poetic composition developed via the immaterial power of four works that resound and dot Gallery 5 in the museum.

They are video and sound works conceived and produced in Italy between 2005 and 2013, installed as a single work open to public involvement and redesigning the museum space simply but attractively. I rondoni di Porta Capuana (2013) is a sound work produced with Maria Thereza Alves and recorded at an old Naples gateway, a major crossroads, commercial hub and heartof cultural life since the early 20th century. The nearest square now has one of the highest multi-ethnic densities in the Campania capital. Underscoring this coexistence in urban space, with an alienating effect, the artist has recorded the song of the small migratory birds that populate the monument’s marble arch, producing a concert that mingles with the city noise and the thousand tongues that animate the square beneath Porta Capuana. The sound of the work also filters through to other parts of the museum, creating a further crossover with the life of the community that animates everyday life in the museum.

The dialogue between sound and visual intensifies in the relationship with Fleur de pas mal (2005). Also known as Kinetic Sculpture, the work forms part of Durham’s reflection – when he arrived in Europe in the mid-1990s – on the different uses that can be made of stones, as film props, instruments and tools, to transform matter and become dynamic. A static scene is unexpectedly interrupted by a stone entering the field of vision and ending its travels in a bucket of coloured paint. Filmed in slow motion to underscore the explosion of colour, it shows how a simple gesture can create a dynamic and aerial painting, filling the space with something new. The artist stresses the operational dimension of the work and shifts the attention to the object’s ability to create new fields of force and tensions in space that transcend the physical and formal dimension of the object.

Domestic Glass (2006), a sound transcription of a performance by Durham, is also an elaboration on the concept of transforming the form and function of matter and reproduces the soundtrack of the artist’s performance when he broke 300 wine glasses with a black obsidian stone. The work is another subtraction from the inertia of everyday life producing, with echoes of Duchamp, an “anti-monument” to the waste of goods that is part of Western civilisation. Ending this small selection of works is A Proposal for a New International Genuflexion in Promotion of World Peace (2007). In this video, Durham is the main character in a silent film. Via a reverential action, a mimed genuflection with a kiss and a bow, the artist invites us to come up with a new gesture to promote world peace that transcends all ethnic geographies.

Completing the exhibition are display cases containing texts, reflections and poems by the artist, which constitute further resonance in an exhibition that must be experienced as a single immersive and captivating environment, open to multiple interpretations and possible narrations.

Ongoing experimentation with languages, manipulating everyday gestures and uncovering the paradoxes of Western civilisation are some of the most obvious keys to a complex work that Jimmie Durham manages to convey via the construction of an expanded field of signification open to public involvement. His extraordinary artistic experience and the wealth of his means of expression make it an original and timely model of the construction of imagery and stories.

Sound and Silliness

“Sound and Silliness” – a new exhibition project by Native American artist Jimmie Durham at Rome’s MAXXI – combines sounds, images and texts to retune the museum’s spatial perception.

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