ABSTRACT
Artist, poet, essayist, and activist Jimmie Durham’s five-decade career investigates European and American worldviews and institutions in the contexts of politics and culture. In 2014, Durham published a short essay about his longstanding and ongoing art making with wood. Durham’s language in the essay is descriptive, concrete, chiefly realistic, and humorous when a bit fantastic. He first recounts a natural history of the earth, focusing on how trees around the world enrich other beings, and then sets forth a history of his involvement with different types of wood, emphasizing their communicative properties. Durham’s essay appears in the Italian contemporary art publication Mousse Magazine, and it features photographs of several artworks with wood the artist produced, including those exhibited in 2012 at Naples’ luxurious Palazzo Reale. This perspective rarely appears in art world discourse and practice: typically, it is a given that an artwork, exhibition, or essay merits time and energy.
