Jimmie Durham. Sound an Silliness

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.

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