Jimmie Durham

What is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban?  Roberto Fernandez Retamar

1992 was the quincentenary of the mythohistorical event of the first contact between Europeans and the individuals living in the Western Hemisphere.  In other words, the 500^th anniversary of Columbus discovering the New World and its inhabitants. It could be argued that this encounter was the most dramatic and unexpected in all of human history; that it precipitated the greatest genocide in all of human history is of no doubt. Although that encounter was inevitable (some boat full of Italian, Spanish or Portuguese marauders was bound to bump into the New World at some point), the astonishment, the shock, the mystery, and the fear of that first contact are irretrievably lost to the past. Yet the dissonant echo of that collision has produced a half-millennium’s worth of cultural decimation, proclamations, misrepresentations and endless buckets of blood. The cultural/historical accounts of these events that have not been lost or deliberately forgotten are inevitably related in the language of the victor.

Language and representation are inextricably related in all relations of power, be they individual or collective; in Jimmie Durham’s Caliban works these relationships are portrayed with humor and fury, simplicity and depth. One of Columbus’ many legacies is the conceptual/linguistic paradigm he constructed for the natives he encountered in the New World. In Columbus’ worldview they could be savage beasts or generous and docile primitives; there could be no grey area between the two perspectives. Lurking in the corners of Columbus’ unconscious lay the demonic shadows of the medieval imagination, an internal landscape populated with monsters and demons.  The European soul, estranged from god, obsessively dreamed of a return to Eden. In his journey into the unknown, it was pre-established what sort of world Columbus must find, either one populated by the marvelous and monstrous beings as witnessed by Marco Polo and described by Mandeville or one inhabited by pre-Christian beings, child-like in the utopic innocence, who could be brought to salvation through ‘the word’. The former ultimately leads to extermination, while the latter requires a complete religious, historical, aesthetic and linguistic conversion. Either way, what was found was soon to be lost.

 

Columbus did not recognize the language of the people he encountered as a system with its own integrity, therefore he misapplied his own linguistic structure. As a free agent of European culture he embarked on what Tzvetan Todorov has called ‘an extended act of nomination’.  Columbus and those that followed him negated the indigenous language, replacing it with the foreign tongue (and structure) of Europe. Upon the people of the Carib was sutured the identity of the anthropophagus, the bestial man. During the Medieval period and the Renaissance, the Wild Man was prominent in the European imagination, featured in woodcuts and travel books, alchemical tracts and emblems. Situated on the margins of civilization these language-less (and therefore barbaric) man-eaters, symbolized all that European man feared and for which he ironically waxed nostalgic. The Wild Man is the man without history unfettered by cultural constraints.

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest written in 1608, we find Caliban, the Wild Man,  (Caliban is Shakespeare’s anagram for the cannibal).  Caliban is in an impossibly conflicted relationship with Prospero, his master, the owner and keeper of the books. It is within this relationship that the struggles of language, representation of the ownership of history and identity are played out in Elizabethan verse. In 1992 Jimmie Durham reinvented and re-embodied Caliban; together they became a constellated figure, both fictional and living, producing a work that is both contains elements of fantasy biography and autobiographical truth.  In the process, Durham’s Wild Man becomes the symbol, and his predicament becomes the metaphor for the defining the lingering paradoxes of being indigenous in the narrative of American history.

 

In The Tempest Prospero is the highly refined aesthete, the artist/alchemist who could be a stand-in for Shakespeare himself. Prospero enslaves Caliban but gives him ‘language’, a more than equitable trade in Prospero’s eyes, ‘Thou dist not, savage; know they own meaning, but wouldst gabble like; a thing most brutish’. Caliban, on the other hand, feels differently about the contract, ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t/is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/for learning me your language’. Caliban knows he is caught in the web of history, in the despotic embrace of Prospero’s language. With the negation of his own tongue, Caliban’s subjectivity is also destroyed; he is unable to represent himself. He is compelled to learn Prospero’s linguistic structure to make himself understood, but by using the colonial language of the master he inevitably negates his own identity and is forced to assume the identity of Caliban. His only defiance can be to curse his teacher/colonizer.

Durham has stated, ‘I think there is no time; I think it is a funny invention; there is a duration of things. If a piece of history of a people doesn’t get resolved, it’s not history in the sense of historical conflicts, it’s the present…when something gets resolved then it’s past, until it’s resolved then it is the present, it’s always the present’. In choosing to re-embody Caliban, Jimmie Durham admits that things have not changed much. Durham is Caliban; he was christened Caliban the day he was born, just as all of his family and ancestors have been since the moment of first encounter. In utilizing this mis-recognition as a motif, Durham can accomplish several things, he can splice himself into the 17^th century as artist/appropriator/time bandit who somersaults through linear time, kidnapping Shakespeare’s Caliban to resuscitate him and make him speak at the end of the 20^th century. Durham, thus, moves Caliban’s dilemma from the margins of cultural discourse, a mere footnote in English Literature, to the center of the West’s unresolved conflicts with native people. Caliban’s forced impersonation of himself is shaped into a mirror in which is reflected our own distorted and uncomprehending selves.

 

Durham’s Caliban works are primarily in the form of diary entries and pencil drawings, some with pigment and small groupings of sculptures of brass and mud, with occasional additions of patina and found objects. They, like many of Durham’s works, are humble in form and material, child-like and somehow incomplete. The diary entries are marked in number by strokes on the top of the page, (Chapter I, Chapter IIII, Chapter IIIIIIII, etc.); not using roman or Arabic numerical systems Caliban could be feigning ignorance, illustrating his primitive nature or simply being logical. The tone of voice used in the entries is disarmingly self-effacing; one might think that Caliban has lost his will to defy Prospero, although there are a few passages that hint at the violence behind the relationship. ‘One time Prospero was going to spank me because I was playing with mud. When I resisted I caused him to accidentally hit me in the nose’. The image itself is paint and dirt on paper. In addition to the text we see droplets of red in a random pattern that begins to form a kind of monkey-faced figure. The elements suggest various hierarchies (social, material, biological); the mud brings associations of the child and of earth, both with which Native Americans are associated. The supposed accidental violence suggests that the victim is complicit in the accretion of deceptions that become his history.

In Chapter IIIIIII Caliban proclaims he is going to be an artist; he writes, ‘I don’t know what I look like, since Dr. Prospero came there’s nothing here that reflects me. I don’t know what my nose looks like, for example, I can’t touch it because Dr. Prospero says it’s not nice to touch yourself’. Thus he sets out on his impossible quest to draw his nose and by extension, his entire identity. Durham’s Caliban is a slapstick image of the savage attempting to render himself without reflection, extrapolating from the blurred lines of his own nose. Caliban’s earnest but failing attempts to draw his own nose are both hilarious and heartbreaking. He makes silly drawings filled with angles and arches, wobbly lines and grimacing mouths tight with concentration. Caliban tries so hard to be a good student! How is he to know himself, ripped as he is from his historical and cultural context? Caliban is an invention and he knows it; he can only define himself in relation to his inventor Prospero. But by employing the language of his inventor he digs himself deeper in a hole of signification in which he is trapped. This is Caliban’s paradox.

This is Durham’s paradox as well, especially vis a vis the art world. How can Durham make images and objects with any faith when their reading will be predetermined by his identity as a Native American? Especially when that identity is essentially a false one; ‘I want to say my own things to the world, and so, of course, given history, part of “my own things” is that you don’t let me say anything’. Every utterance then is met with its own choking, every gesture met with its own negation. The threat exists that each drawing Caliban makes of himself erases that which was. In one drawing Caliban rests; in pencil are some shaky vertical lines below which read, ‘left nostril, right nostril, I breathe out, I breathe in’. Tentative lines represent the breath; the text, an accumulation of marks, communicates a humble proclamation and allows Caliban a brief respite from his existential crisis. He breathes, he makes marks, he observes himself. He is human.

The sculptural and assemblage pieces in this series continue Caliban’s attempts at self-portraiture. A pair of noses mounted on wood juxtaposes a hammered brass nose and one fashioned of mud. The mud nose looks as though it is a rivulet of blood coming from the more refined brass nose. With amazing concision Durham brings together a cluster of ideas and associations. The mud nose refers back to a list that Caliban made with Prospero’s instruction to pair all things light (good) and all things dark (bad). On a very basic level this brings up the inherent racism within the English language itself and how in adopting the colonizer’s tongue the colonized must inevitably degrade themselves. Durham also reiterates Caliban’s inferiority complex via the reference of how the West has always measured cultural sophistication in terms of the tools and the metals utilized (the stone age, the bronze age, etc.). Durham’s use of the nose as a symbol has other associations as well; the sense of smell is associated with the more animal-like characteristics of human behavior representing a privileging of the senses over language. But as Horkheimer and Adorno have noted in The Dialectic of Enlightenment,  it is also the sense of smell, of all the senses, ‘which is attracted without objectifying (and) bears closest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become the other’.

 

 

Caliban finally completes an image of himself and he makes a gift of it for Prospero. It is a mask; the skin appears to be made of cracking earth, the eyes asymmetrical, brown and yellow, seemingly from different species. The mask attempts an uncertain smile over which hovers a button nose. Caliban’s inscription reads like a high school student writing to his favorite teacher who just barely passed him in the final exam, allowing him to graduate. Caliban’s success becomes a travesty of representation, an absurd demonstration of language internalized; he is mud, he is animal, he is dark and ugly, yet he does have that cute button nose. In Caliban’s unfinished skin we find the contemporary crisis of identity.

This notion allows for the serious playfulness that characterizes Durham’s work in general and the Caliban series in particular. Caliban’s quest for identity is really a search for a proper mask to wear in his dance with Prospero. Caliban is lost, so is Prospero, though for him to admit it would mean to overturn the civilized/savage binary that gives him power. It is Caliban’s task, then to teach Prospero about his own inauthenticity, and the paradoxical naturalness of this artifice. By drawing and redrawing versions of himself, Caliban draws a road map through the wilderness of representation, and it is a road that continually interrupts the belief in stability of history and identity. ‘Perpetually incomplete’ is a good way of describing Durham’s works; there is neither beginning nor end in any linear fashion. There are slippages of logic and even the formal presentation seems to imply things left undone. But this condition of perpetual incompleteness, this permanently unresolved state, asks profound questions concerning the nature of time and history and what we humans do when we encounter one another in the dark.

 

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Jimmie Durham, Phaidon Press