Jimmie Durham: God’s Children, God’s Poem

Jimmie Durham (born 1940) is an artist, political activist, and writer living in Berlin and Rome. Material is his contribution to the Documenta 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts publishing project. We live in a world of our own construction …, and I want to look at that strangeness in the framework of material, the artist Jimmie Durham says. Taking the form of notes from a series of lectures given in Venice, Durham explores our relationship to the world through materials, whether they are concrete substance such as wood, oak, petroleum, or plastics, or abstract, theoretical matters such as math, prime numbers, or computing. His notebook breathes life into the notion that our knowledge of the world comes from the way we are constructed. We construct the world as we are constructed. By using wood and petroleum as his focal points, he leads us through the history of the construction of Venice, to a sculpture and its built-in mistake, and finally to how the tissue in fish is filled with so much plastic that a scientist friend no longer eats the animals.