- Venue
- Matts Gallery
- Location
Imagine an ‘open studio’ event. The artist has generously opened the doors to his private workspace to let you peek inside at him and the various unfinished works in progress. But once inside the studio you are forced to sit down and be quiet. Alongside you the artist carries on with his work, methodically sawing bits of wood and stripping branches. He pants with the effort. He says nothing. He is oblivious to the fact that you are there and that you are watching his every move. No: Scratch that. He must know you are there. How could he not? He plainly just couldn’t give a damn about you.
This is the scenario that greeted visitors at "Talking and Working with Jimmie Durham" at Matt’s Gallery on Saturday. My point is this. Within an open studio event, any public performance or space in which the artist is present as active participant, there is an exchange. One where the artist puts themselves and their ideas on display and you hold up your part of the transaction by turning up, being interested and enabling the artist to showcase themselves and their wares. It is a reciprocal transaction in which the artist achieves the desired interaction with the public and the visitor’s sense of entitlement and their role as valued destination for the work is assured. This is not to say the relationship between artist and audience is always easy. The artist can utilise the mutual exchange as location for his or her experimental ideas in any number of troubling ways. But as member of an invited audience you always know that you are a fundamental part of the transaction. After all, even the worse kind of experiment needs participants to test upon. Right? Well, not so with ‘Talking and Working with Jimmie Durham’.
Inside his half built installation at Matt’s Gallery Jimmie Durham isn’t sharing. Durham isn’t talking and he certainly isn’t reciting poetry or singing. Durham is silent. Durham tinkers and bores holes in bits of wood. Durham doesn’t need his audience. Durham doesn’t want us there. I suspect Durham might even hate us. Over the next forty-five minutes Durham continues to bore. It is agony. My mind wonders off, to anywhere but here. Dur-ham. Dur-ham. Dur-ham. I can hear the blood pulsing in my ears. Dur-ham, Dur-ham, Dur-ham. Cowhide-covered drum beats sound out across the American plains.
One hour later, I’m still wondering. Is Durham’s refusal to engage with the audience his rejection of our desire for the Live? This seems too simplistic. Does Durham’s silence deliberately set him up as our object of study, a museum or world fair exhibit, highlighting the consumption of native cultures whilst insisting that he will not play ball like a performing seal-lion or a ‘real Indian’? Luiseño American Indian and artist, James Luna, embodied a similar critique in his ‘Artifact Piece’ of 1987 in which he enclosed himself inside a glass museum case at the Museum and Man, San Diego. Visitors arriving to see an ethnographic museum presentation of Native American cultures were shocked by the living, breathing, "undead" presence of the loin-clothed Luiseño artist on display. Is my disappointment with "Talking and Working with Jimmie Durham" that this ‘Native‘ will not perform?
This last thought sticks. Sat watching Durham I am reminded of visits to the Gorilla’s at London Zoo. The Gorilla slowly goes about his daily life, picking up branches, chewing nits, not caring that we are watching him from outside the cage. He seems oblivious. However, the key difference between Durham and a Gorilla is that with a Gorilla you are rewarded with a rare look-back, a sad acknowledgement that might say ‘I’m stuck in here-can you help me’? There is no such recognition from Durham. His total disregard for the audience turns the tables on the power relation between zoological exhibit and spectator and denies us as equal participant in the encounter. As with Luna’s ‘Artifact Piece’ Durham’s visitors become the ones on-show, forced into examining themselves and their own motivations. The cage that once housed Durham the Gorilla is revealed to be one that contains us, the audience on the inside, and Durham on the outside looking in.
What does Durham get out of this? What does he give back? And why did we stay? For my part, I stayed for the promised action, the ‘revealing and intimate presentation of ideas’ that was described in the gallery’s literature. I stayed in the belief that Durham might just be about to say something (anything), start to sing or begin to chop a different piece of wood (Please God!). I don’t know if Durham did any or all those things on the three other sessions of "Taking and working with Jimmie Durham". I don’t want to know and Im not going back to find out. It was torture. If you stuck out the whole two hours I dont pity you, the Coyote Trickster’s joke is on us all.
Rachel Lois Clapham is a writer with ‘Writing From Live Art’, a Live Art UK initiative.
