>>REVIEW
NEW URK
Jimmie Durham
Runs until March 26
Walter Phillips Gallery
(The Banff Centre)
Banff is a town full of gem and rock shops, and tourists flock from around the world to ogle the overgrown stones we call the Rocky Mountains. It’s fitting that rocks figure prominently at the Walter Phillips Gallery’s Jimmie Durham exhibition, New Urk, since, as the artist says, a stone "stands for all things structured: architecture, monumentality, and belief."
A busted urinal, a boulder-sunk boat and a pile of shoeboxes topped by a smoothed stone make wise artworks in the show, the title of which connotes slang pronunciations of "new work" and, maybe, "New York." This is the artist’s first solo North American show in more than a decade, and his first solo show in Canada ever.
Durham, of Cherokee heritage and now living in Berlin, has serious cachet in the art world. He’s shown at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Whitney Biennial and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, but his art is utterly disarming, genuine and without flash. These are remarkably understated groupings and graftings of objects that could prove challenging to the commercial art world because of their fugitive, soon-to-fall-apart materials, and to a certain degree because of their very frank assessment of where we as artists and citizens sit. From the look of things, we are very small specks from a much larger narrative.
Your Face And Science is an antenna attached to a bicycle mirror with red hockey tape and thread. The piece includes a handwritten note detailing the artist’s understanding of photons: "...even though by striking objects such as one’s face or one’s shirt they can cause skin cancer or colours to fade, photons are not exactly real as I understand it...." Durham points to the rather speculative understanding any of us have of simple scientific principles and the possibility that these explanations are pure bull, while simultaneously pointing out that the photons, which enable us to recognize our faces in a mirror, could be imaginary or construed as our own carefully guarded identities.
One especially amusing video includes footage of Durham at work in his studio and carrying out meetings. At the moment a curator – or pretty much anyone – is about to speak, the artist hits fast forward for us, erasing their meddling addenda.
Pretty Paint on Blue Granite looks like what it sounds like – a chunk of rock covered in a pinkish lavender coat. It also looks like a reference (or jab) at stone-man extraordinaire Anish Kapoor.
A smashed urinal that appears to have been assaulted by a sculpted stone head lying directly beneath it adds to the ever-growing list of works that comment on Marcel Duchamp’s seminal Fountain.
Many of these pieces include text, and Durham’s words really shine in New Urk. Tales both subtly complex and charming pop up. A Forest Begins with a Single Acorn relates the life story of an eroded, baguette-shaped piece of wood. A Proposal for Brazil is an archivist’s nightmare of paper and polished stones pasted to foam core, featuring text that calls for a mass boycott of the Sao Paulo Biennale with the aim of forcing Brazil to treat their aboriginal peoples as fully human, equal citizens.
It is with the aim of affecting the world that the artist constructs his work. Durham says "the purpose of art is to help people interpret their world so that they may be better able to change it in positive ways." |
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