An important collection of poems by Jimmie Durham.
Artist, poet, performer, essayist, and activist, Jimmie Durham is one of the most radical and unpredictable figures in international art of the past fifty years. His work unsettles established categories within European and North American culture and deconstructs codified images and symbols, revealing the mechanisms that sustain dominant cultural systems. With sharp humor, Durham introduces fractures into language and systems of knowledge, opening up unexpected spaces for thought. PoesiePoems presents a selection of poems drawn from the author's three collections—Columbus Day (1983), Poems That Do Not Go Together (2012), and Particle/Word Theory (2020)—here appearing for the first time in Italian translation by Sacha Piersanti, and enriched with previously unpublished texts and drawings from the artist's archive.
For poetry readers, an opportunity to discover a unique and surprising voice; for the art public, a chance to explore the linguistic and poetic dimension of an artist who redefined the boundaries of visual language and contemporary thought.
Jimmie Durham (1940-2021) is one of the most influential artists, not least for younger generations of artists and curators. Of his art he said that it “works against the two foundations of the European tradition: Belief and Architecture.” Sculpture, seen as the coming together of object, image, and word, was fundamental to his practice, but he was also a poet, essayist, and educator.
Durham's life as an artist began in the mid-1960s in Texas. In the early 1970s he worked in Geneva. In the late 1970s he was a political organizer with the American Indian Movement, Director of the International Indian Treaty Council and its representative to the United Nations. In New York around 1980 he turned once again to art. Between 1987 and 1994 he was based in Mexico, and thereafter in Europe, or, as he prefered to say, in Eurasia.
