ART : Money Can’t Buy This Guy’s Love : Why does artist Jimmie Durham short-circuit his own fame and fortune? It’s simply a matter of his own personal politics

The ultimate in politically correct art would, of course, be art that refused to participate in the money-driven art market in any way whatsoever. What that means is that you, the consumer/art viewer, would never even hear of it.

This brings us to Jimmie Durham--an artist most people probably haven’t heard of. A Cherokee Indian who’s lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico, since 1986, Durham will show his work in Los Angeles for the first time beginning Saturday at the L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice, after having shown regularly for the past eight years in New York.

The artist, also a writer, poet, political activist and performer, lived in New York from 1975 to 1986 and was featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Durham was also in last year’s Documenta international exhibition in Kassel, Germany, has exhibited frequently in Europe for the past eight years, and will be the subject of a retrospective opening next month at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels.

However, Durham’s ambivalence toward the capitalist structure of the art arena is such that he keeps short-circuiting the machinery that might conspire to make him rich and famous.

When a Paris museum wanted to buy two pieces out of a show in 1972, he responded that the work was for sale for “minus a penny”; that meant the museum would take the piece and he would pay it a penny (the museum refused to accept these terms and didn’t acquire the work). This year he simply gave away the 50 works included in his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium.

The subject of a laudatory profile in the February issue of Art in America, Durham responded to the article--which focused to a large degree on his identity as a Cherokee Indian--with a letter to the editor stating that he is not, in fact, a Cherokee. (In the eyes of the U.S. Government, Durham isn’t officially recognized as a Cherokee because he has refused to register as such with the government.)

Obviously, Durham can’t resist throwing a wrench into any discourse that attempts to incorporate him, and in talking with him it becomes clear that the stereotypical lifestyle of the successful artist--as well as the idea of art with a capital A, neatly labeled, on display and available to be bought and sold--gives him the creeps.

“I primarily work with installations in an attempt to subvert that setup, but it’s very difficult to get around the fact that the art world is a capitalist institution and, as such, notions of value and meaning evaporate if a thing can’t be sold--monetary value is central to everything,” the 53-year-old artist observes over lunch at a Venice restaurant. “If you pay money, you’ve sacrificed to have that thing. If I give it to you, I make the sacrifice and you say, ‘Thanks, sucker.’ ”

Durham’s unorthodox views on ownership can be largely traced to his American Indian heritage; born and raised in a primarily Cherokee community, he grew up keenly aware of the issue of rightful ownership. Espousing a pantheistic philosophy that sees humans as merely having temporary stewardship of the world, the Cherokee believe that people can never actually own anything because we’re just passing through.

Durham’s understanding of this concept was honed to an even sharper edge from 1973 through 1980, when he gave up art altogether to work full time as an organizer for the ill-fated American Indian Movement. When AIM went down in flames in 1980, amid internal fighting and opposition from the U.S. Government, Durham returned to his art career, but it’s a career he views with a mixture of hope, suspicion and skepticism. He harbors no illusion, for instance, that multiculturalism--a gravy train he could easily hitch his own wagon to--is anything more than a cosmetic job on the sagging face of European culture as it limps into its twilight years.

“Multiculturalism is nothing more than lip service,” he says as he lights one in an unending series of imported cigarettes.

“It’s happening at this point in time because the state has to somehow acknowledge the current reality of the U.S., and that this is not the country the Pilgrim fathers are said to have created. Of course, it never was that country we read about in history books and never was a melting pot--it was a nation of slaves and masters from the beginning. The state invented the lie we know as history, and the state is very good at adapting this fictional narrative to fit its own purposes. And the latest adaptation of the story is the notion of multiculturalism.”

Durham’s strong opinions are at odds with his manner, which is uncommonly courtly and graceful. A slender, soft-spoken man who seems to move through life in a state of perpetual amusement, he tempers most of what he says with a flourish of humor.

Perverse wit is also a central ingredient in his work, which takes pleasure in pointing out the comical absurdity and covert manipulation in all things “official.” Exploring issues of identity, class, race, language and history, his work combines the vocabulary of the anthropologist, kitsch notions of the primitive, and deconstructionist art theory.

Durham synthesizes these disparate concerns in works like “On Loan from the Museum of the American Indian,” a 1984 installation first shown at the Kenkeleba Gallery in New York that presented faux artifacts (feathered underpants, a toothbrush, family photos) accompanied by framed captions commenting on the day-to-day life of American Indians in the late 20th Century (the piece was subsequently installed at several other locations). The racism implicit in the notion that anything related to American Indian life is suitable for a museum case comes through loud and clear in this wry piece.

For “Self-Portrait,” a painting from 1989, Durham cut a canvas in the silhouetted shape of his own body and inscribed it with text dealing with stereotypes of American Indian identity. In his sculptural work, Durham often interweaves traditional materials (beads, feathers, skins, carved bone) with elements representative of the European interlopers who attempted to extinguish native culture; “Bedia’s Muffler” and “Bedia’s Stirring Wheel,” for instance, are car parts that have been embellished and transformed into fetish objects.

For his exhibition at L.A. Louver, Durham will show “Various Gates and Escape Routes,” an installation he describes as a collection of “sculptural forms that function as passages out of here. The first thing you’ll see is a copy of this thing in the Mexico City bus station which I love because it’s so stupid--it’s a fake metal detector you have to pass through before you board the buses. The thing is incapable of detecting metal, or doing anything for that matter, so it’s purely a conceptual experience. After that, you come to two pieces using animal skulls that deal with death, and then finally you arrive at a slot machine that returns the quarter you insert into it and tells you, ‘You have another chance.’ ”

As with all Durham’s art, this piece was conceived as a site-specific work, and he arrived from Cuernavaca empty-handed, planning to make the piece from scratch during a monthlong stay in L.A. He’s finding it difficult to work here, however, as he doesn’t drive, has no idea where to get the stuff he needs for the piece and when he first got to town, didn’t even have a place to work (he’s now operating out of an unfurnished studio in the Brewery, an artists complex downtown). Durham seems a bit disconcerted at the prospect of putting a show together under these adverse conditions, but on hearing his life story, it becomes clear that his creative drive feeds off unsettling circumstances.

Born into the Wolf Clan in 1940 in Nevada County, Ark., the third in a family of four children, Durham had a nomadic childhood that took him from Arkansas to Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma.

“There were no jobs in the town where I was born, so my father went here and there looking for work,” Durham recalls. “He was a jack-of-all trades--a plumber, a carpenter, a maker of things--and he and the other men in my family taught me every imaginable technique for making things. I learned carving, iron work, carpentry--everybody knew how to do these things, but we never thought of the stuff we made as art.

“The religious environment I grew up in was absolutely nuts,” he continues. “We thought we were practicing traditional Indian spirituality but there’s no such thing--we’d been colonized for 350 years and there’s no way those traditions could survive intact. And, as far as the intellectual environment, I was raised in a world of gossip, I had problems in school, and I didn’t start reading until I joined the Navy when I was 19.” (The Navy launched Durham’s literary life by providing him with the complete works of Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane).

“I was pretty depressed as a child and I left home as soon as I could,” continues Durham, who hit the road when he was 16 and embarked on a series of ranching jobs that took him to Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. During this period he also became a member of the Native American Church, which is known for its once-legal use of peyote (the church’s water bird imagery continues to appear in Durham’s art). When the ranching work dried up in 1960, Durham joined the Navy and was stationed in the Pacific--”our job was to start the Vietnam war,” he ruefully recalls.

On being discharged from the Navy, Durham settled in Houston, where he lived with Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American playwright Vivian Ayers. “I thought of myself as a poet then because I’d started writing while I was in the Navy, and this woman got me involved with performing and writing theater,” says Durham, who did his first performance in 1963 at the Arena Theater in Houston on a bill that also featured Ayers and Muhammad Ali.

“I’d never stopped making things though--constructions, bone carvings, collages--and one day someone in our theater group saw some things I was making and said, ‘This is art--you should sell it,’ so I found a gallery in a shopping mall and they sold a bunch of my stuff on consignment. At that point, I considered writing my serious work and was still dismissive of visual art.”

In 1964 Durham moved to Austin, Texas, where he worked as a power plant mechanic at the University of Texas at Austin, and attended lectures in his free time. While in Austin, he met some Swiss exchange students who invited him to visit if he ever got to Europe, and in 1968, he showed up on their doorstep planning never to set foot on U.S. soil again.

“The only way for me to stay there legally was to go to school, so I enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva where I was to spend the next four years,” recalls Durham, who graduated with a BFA in 1972. “That was an incredibly valuable experience for me, and it was then that I learned how deep a practice art really is. I discovered Tristan Tzara and Duchamp, who’s still a major figure for me--in short, I discovered art.”

While he was discovering art, Durham’s political consciousness was also undergoing a transformation.

“I became involved in Indian politics while I was in Europe, because Geneva is where the U.N. happens--its showcase is in New York, but the real work takes place in Geneva--and most of my friends there were South American exiles and African Movement people. So when Wounded Knee happened in 1973, I returned to the U.S. and joined the struggle full time.” (Wounded Knee, a confrontation that occurred between radical American Indians and government forces in South Dakota, served as a catalyst for the American Indian Movement).

In 1974, AIM created the International Treaty Council, appointed Durham its director, and stationed him in New York where he was to spend the next six years working at the U.N.

“I left the movement in 1980 because it basically stopped existing,” he explains. “AIM had the same history as the Black Panthers--there was lots of internal fighting and craziness, and it was truly horrible for everyone. We started out with such high hopes and energy and by 1985, we were 50 years behind where we’d started from, mostly because of Reaganism.”

Durham left the movement planning to write the history of AIM, but quickly discovered he was too mentally exhausted for that job, so he went back to construction work. Though he’d continued to make art during his years with AIM, Durham recalls that “at that point I still hadn’t imagined that I might have a career in art, partly because the idea of career and art seemed so antithetical to me. I was super against commercialism.”

Nonetheless, he slowly began to edge back into the art world. In 1982, Durham began showing in group shows and that same year, became director of the Foundation of the Community of Artists, a New York artists advocacy group where he helped edit the newspaper “Art and Artists.” The following year he presented a performance, “Thanksgiving,” at PS 122, and in 1985 had two solo shows in New York (at the Alternative Museum and at 22 Wooster Gallery). At this point he’s been included in dozens of group shows both in the United States and abroad, has had 11 solo shows and has presented 13 performance pieces, six of which have been collaborations with his companion of 15 years, artist Maria Theresa Alves.

Asked to explain his view on the relationship between political activism and art, Durham says: “I’m a political activist because I feel it’s my responsibility to respond that way to the world. This is a responsibility we all have because this big old thing called the state is oppressing us all--it’s oppressive because it defines what reality is and presents itself as a source of truth, and this has pretty much been the state of things since the birth of the written word.

“Because of this, I feel that all art should address political issues,” he concludes.

“This isn’t to say art can’t justify itself simply by being beautiful--that can be enough too. But that raises the question of what is beauty for a given time and place? It seems to me that we’re at a point in history where political art may be the most important kind of beauty.”