Jimmie Durham

2005

Drawing, 51 x 72 cm (x 4).
Materials: pencil, ink, paper

Collection: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris.

Charts is a series of four drawings where pseudo-scientific graphs gain organic forms together with absurd titles and labels. These comical and childlike elements subvert the primary function of a chart and manage to humanize it as well as deprive it of its usual authority.

“I often think about a division that is the classical division in Western philosophy and culture: the physical versus the mental, the ideal versus the material, intellectual versus sensual. What I am trying to work out is my own theory so that I will not feel so stupid, because I always embarrass myself being unable to make the division. Maybe I am trying with my work to challenge the dichotomy that these things are physical and those things are mental, and that you cannot combine the two.” [full text here]

In one of the drawings, Durham plays with the words Start/Stop and Star/Top in the same way as in his monumental installation Something (Perhaps a Fugue or an Elegy).