JIMMIE DURHAM: WAITING TO BE INTERRUPTED. SELECTED WRITINGS 1993–2012

Durham’s primary format is storytelling, central to which is the ability to communicate experience. Edited by Jean Fisher, Selected Writing is the second, long-awaited collection of the artist’s texts, produced and released in a twenty-year span. If the forms of address in the texts aim for simplicity, the use of language—peppered with puns and neologisms and digressions into multilingual etymologies—demonstrates a complexity that persistently defers our demand for easy interpretation. As Durham frequently implies, his subversion of textual logic is intended to liberate words as material from their entrapment in thoughtless conventions (blind belief), just as his play with found materials is intended to free art from its capture in the deathly inertia of monumentalism—its connection to architexture.