Europe through the 'eyes of the Coyote': an analysis of Jimmie Durham's work

Abstract

The proposed contribution reconsiders a recent moment in the career of the artist Jimmie Durham, who has made transnational nomadism a life and operational practice. More specifically in the exhibition "God's Children. God's Poems" held in 2017 at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, Durham presents a series of animal sculptures realized in his typical bricoleur style, inviting the viewer to reflect directly on the ways in which European populations have hunted down and nearly exterminated numerous species, now on the verge of extinction. In the era of the Anthropocene, where the dominant action and narrative are the human ones, the history written by the winners appears incontrovertibly marked by an anthropocentric paradigm. What voice can the animal, relegated to a role similar to that which the philosopher Gayatri Spivak would have defined as "subaltern", play in the critical conformation of a Western and European cultural identity? The essay aims therefore to highlight the relationship between the artist and the dynamism of European culture and to analyze the ways in which some recent experiments in the visual arts can question an aspect that is only apparently marginal, concerning relations of appropriationism and exclusion determined by European thought.