Also incorporating elements of writing and performance, Jimmie Durham’s practice most often takes the form of sculptures in which diverse everyday items and natural materials are assembled into vivid forms. The process of production –what Durham terms “illegal combinations with rejected objects”– can be seen as an embodiment of the subversive attitude that suffuses his works.
In the Arsenale each sculpture, fashioned from combinations of furniture parts, slick industrial materials or used clothes, approximates the scale of the titular animal –yet the resulting forms are not portraits of the beings, but rather poetic entanglements that challenge the traditional Enlightenment notion of the separation between humans and nature.
In the Central Pavilion Durham showcases Black Serpentine, a large eponymous slab of rock surrounded by a stainless steel frame –a half-tonne mass defiant in its implacable fortitude.
