Jimmie Durham and his metonymic banquet
DOMINÓ CANÍBAL. First round: Jimmie Durham and his metonymic banquet at PAC MURCIA 2010. www.pacmurcia.esPAC (Proyecto de Arte Contemporáneo de Murcia 2010) is a project by the Dept of Culture & Tourism of the Region of Murcia featuring the exhibition DOMINÓ CANÍBAL, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, together with other initiatives aimed at fostering international contemporary art and the visibility of artists from the region.
“Jimmie Durham makes the first move in Dominó Caníbal, taking over the exhibition venue —the former Verónicas church in Murcia, Spain— and questioning the division between inside and outside in the Western sacred space: both a religious temple and an exhibition hall.
Durham has taken over the nave of the former church and turned it into a repository for a heteroclite collection of objects, residues and things: a communal grave, a subversive classification or a residual map of the world. The crux of the operation lies in introducing “the profane” in its deepest etymological meaning into the religious and aesthetic temple: everything that remains “before the temple”, in other words what is “before” the feast or is excluded in order to invest the sanctum with its spatial purity. Pieces of cement, wire, refrigerators, barrels, bits of glass and residues of “the sacred”, speak of the space of the exhibition hall in an attempt to connect the interior of the church with all that it threw out in order to be sacralised, which is to say, transforming it into a kind of “temple of confusion”.
The result is an invasion that disturbs the Western notion of transcendental spatiality defined by a negation of chaos, of the living and the contamination of the world. If this bricolage contains a map of the world excluded by religious artifice, it is because it resists all representation and metaphor, in other words, any device that understands “meaning” as a rejection of immanence. One on hand, the project is the result of a process of research into the concrete: the inventory Durham gathered throughout the period of one month in the city of Murcia and its surrounding area, excavating in its industrial archaeology and the layers of culture and violence that compose it, and establishing an ongoing conversation with its inhabitants. The driving idea is in fact to bring to the surface “everything” excluded from the temple, not only in the accumulated mass of deposits, but also because each and every thing introduced into the church brings with it all that is associated with it, that substitutes for it and that involves it through proximity and contact. Technically speaking, we could say that Jimmie Durham’s installation is a huge metonymic banquet.
In the greater view of Dominó Caníbal, a year-long project which will see another six artists intervening, destroying, resignifying and devouring the banquet that he has created here, Durham’s installation and opening move in the game is like 28 double sixes or having desecrated the temple with the corpse of everything. Jimmie Durham’s challenge to Cristina Lucas, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Kendell Geers, Tania Bruguera, Rivane Neueschwander and Francis Alÿs throughout 2010 at Sala Verónicas in Murcia might well be summed up by a monstrous mandate: “Bring that stuff in Here!” Which is to say, keep on contaminating this false paradise.”
Cuauhtémoc Medina, Curator.
Opening: January 25th 2010, 8:00 pm. Sala Verónicas, Murcia.
Cuauhtémoc Medina and Yaiza Hernández (CENDEAC director) in conversation with Jimmie Durham, January 22nd 2010 at 6:30 pm. CENDEAC, Murcia.
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PAC MURCIA is rounded off by a programme of residencies for artists from Murcia at GlogauAir in Berlin and Casa Vecina in Mexico City, as well as a cycle of conversations with the artists organised jointly with CENDEAC plus the OFF PAC programme of exhibitions in galleries and art centres in Murcia and Cartagena throughout 2010.
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