An Afternoon With Jimmie Durham

Two days after mentioning to my assigned professor (my "Private Tutor") Sam Fisher, head of the BA department here that I was interested in doing some work in galleries, I received a note in my pigeon hole from another student saying that he had just quit his position at Matt's Gallery in the East End and that I should get in touch with them as they would probably need somebody to fill his spot, I wrote an email straight away, and got a phonecall back, and was told to show up the next day at 2:30 pm. It turns out that the artist whose show was being put up was giving a talk that night at Goldsmiths, but I couldn't attend b/c I had free tickets to see the BBC symphony play minimalist compositions at the Royal Festival Hall, which was awesome....anyways....
The gallery is near the Mile End tube stop, a fairly short journey, almost straight to the north of where I am in New Cross. I realized while on the train that I had forgotten my map, but was sure that I could visualize the location from looking at a map earlier, which prooved to beonly partially true. I looked very lost and I swear the droves of Lebanese women in the neighborhood --that felt a little like Howard meets Humboldt park--could see my heart pounding through my jacket. Finally found the gallery, which is in a warehouse with a big door and a very, very little sign that read the name, rang the bell, talked with the gallery owner Robin about who I am and why I was there, and felt very strange. Robin is one of those people who you cant tell if they're just highly uncomfortable, highly hard of hearing or highly pretentious. He favors long pauses after responding to his questions and his left eye twitches a lot. We waited for a while for the artist to show up...with a posse of assistants and managers? Talking a mile a minute in Russian and German on their Blackberries? Carrying in loads of materials??? Not at all. T-h-e Jimmie Durham finally rang the bell (looks quite a bit older and longer hair than in this picture, wearing a very baggy purple shirt only buttoned half way, some friendship-ish bracelets on his wrist, a black headband around his forehead) with a woman who I later discovered was his partner. He has a gold tooth that shows when he laughs, which he kind of did a lot, in a very wise-ish, friendly, "im at peace with the world" sort of way. He invited me into the space, invited to put down my things, to have a cup of tea, to tell him about what kind of art that I make. I felt 10x more comfortable talking to him, and I did not have tea, but we did have a nice talk. He took a bunch of folded/crumpled white papers out of his back pocket and showed them to me. They were all sorts of writings from the past 400 or so years that spoke of American Indians--largely in very racist ways. The only ones I pretended to read was one from George Washington's private diary and a song from Annie Get Your Gun that Jimmie found very funny. I asked him about the relationship between the writings and the room of {incoherent junk} that we were standing in, and he said that there was none. The words are just important and everything else is just there to maybe make people think about them, that he didnt have a plan, he was just putting this whatever stuff wherever......this made me very confused, more on that later....The room that we were in was big and blank, lots of concrete and big, old, metal windows across one wall that look out onto a canal and some new condo construction. Inside the room were various things, that Robin had collected per request for Jimmie, that Jimmie had found in the trash, and lots of wood. My task was laying on the ground waiting for me--about 30 pieces of broken glass bottles that I was to sand with that really fine, black sandpaper, so that people wouldn't hurt themselves. Um hum. Believe it. It was probably one of the scariest things I've ever done, but turned out to not be so dangerous really, I didn't even cut myself once! Meanwhile, Robin, Jimmies partner Maria, and a carpenter from Toronto moved in and out of the space past me and my sanding and worked on this platform that they were screwing laminate flooring onto. Everything in the room was in disarray and not in their final positons: a pile of huge branches in one corner, a large picture frame against the wall, a few scattered chairs and benches, non-dangerous broken glass sitting haphazardly on the floor and windowsill....
Jimmie probably only worked, for the entire 4 hours that I was there, for no longer than 45 minutes. He was interrupted by brief mobile phone calls, tea and cookies, chatting with me and the guy from Toronto, etc. We had a tea break together towards the end of the afternoon and Robin was asking him about how his talk went at Goldsmiths. He said he thought it went fine. That he tried to explain the difference between "belief" and "art"...how "belief" is putting on a show, makinng something false, "art" is grappling in the dark and hoping that something important--that art--comes out of it. I don't know if it was the Earl Grey or the intense 5 o'clock sunlight but I was so interested and shocked and confused that my head was just spinning at this point. I couldn't comprehend where I was, that I was sitting with this man who is like an artist and is like um famous and shows work at the Tate Modern and the Saatchi Gallery and the biennials, and he is telling me that everything, that his art is just nothing really, the ideas are real, but what he makes is just a random guess. It wouldn't have phased me so much if I wasn't so intrigued by him and how absolutely obtuse and abstract his art is. *note: he also makes various figural sculptures, and writes and is an activist-or was-for American Indian issues. And told me at one point that no, he didnt always do installations, in the 60s and 70s he just made sculptures because people could buy them and he needed groceries.
I need to go take my damp laundry out of the dryer, but look him up, look at his art....
It was somethin, that's for sure, and hopefully they'll need more help there before the show goes up in November.
and if this ain't livin I don't know what is