jimmie durham

YOU ARE HERE*, 2020

Installation View: Jimmie Durham, YOU ARE HERE*, 2020, TITAN, New York City, October 12, 2020 - January 3, 2021.
My map is an homage to the great drawer, Saul Steinberg, who
made THE map of Manhattan.
When I lived there I walked everywhere and was continually lost.
This was obviously training in uncertainty;
to learn to be less sure of my position.
Manhattan is a really good place. Also a good place to be unsure.

Jimmie Durham
17
 Jimmie Durham (1940-2021)

YOU ARE HERE*, 2020

Print: 127 x 66 cm (50 x 26 in.)
Phone booth: 213.4 x 106.7 x 68.6 cm (84 x 42 x 27 in.)
Unique + 1 AP

4
EUR 225,000
 Installation View: TODOS JUNTOS, kurimanzutto, New York, November 11 - January 2023.
10 11
 Installation View: TODOS JUNTOS, kurimanzutto, New York, November 11 - January 2023.
14 15
 press release
kurimanzutto presents TITAN,
an outdoor exhibition in a series
Anne Collier of phone booths located in New
Cildo Meireles York City, a project conceived by
Glenn Ligon Damián Ortega and Bree Zucker.
Hal Fischer During an exhibition period of
Hans Haacke twelve weeks, twelve voices will
Jimmie Durham each take over the exterior panels
Minerva Cuevas of twelve specific phone kiosks.
Patti Smith Running from October 12, 2020–
Renée Green January 3, 2021, this collective
Rirkrit Tiravanija exhibition occurs during the last
Yvonne Rainer season of the booths before their
Zoe Leonard removal by New York City, and
during the presidential election
A project by and post-election period.  Renée Green, Rirkrit Tiravanija,
Damián Ortega and
Bree Zucker
The TITAN project takes as
its premise that a gallery may
kurimanzutto exist by an open space, open at
any hour, and free for all viewers,
even in the middle of the night.
Its location is delineated by a
looped walking route, short
circuit, between West 51st and
West 56th Street on 6th Avenue, in
Midtown Manhattan. This location
was chosen for its concentration
of advertising structures, and
proximity to financial and cultural
institutions.
The TITAN project aims
to open a space for experience,
imagination, and dialogue during
a decisive time of great potential
change. It occupies advertising
spaces, as an open inquiry on
communication via the avenues
of commerce, control and agency,
in relationship to the corporeal
history of the phone booth sites.
Participating artists include:
Anne Collier, Cildo Meireles,
Glenn Ligon, Hal Fischer,
Hans Haacke, Jimmie Durham,
Minerva Cuevas, Patti Smith,
Yvonne Rainer and Zoe Leonard.
All artists are represented in
collaboration by their respective
galleries, and to them we give our
special thanks for their support
and camaraderie: Anton Kern
Gallery, Galeria Luisa Strina,
Galerie Lelong & Co., Project
Native Informant, Paula Cooper
Gallery, Bortolami Gallery,
Gladstone Gallery and Hauser
& Wirth. We acknowledge with
gratitude, Barbara Gladstone, for
allowing us the space to develop
this project with Damián Ortega
in New York.
This exhibition continues
kurimanzutto’s ongoing dialogue
with a broad audience in the
public sphere. Since its inception
in 1999, kurimanzutto has
consistently promoted projects and
exhibitions outside of a traditional
white cube space to stimulate
cultural dialogue. Previous
projects involve exhibitions and
performances in local markets,
floating gardens, parking lots
and airports, alongside the recent
billboard project Sonora 128, in
Mexico City. TITAN marks the
first collaborative citywide project
by kurimanzutto in New York.
exhibition map
W 57th St W 57th St

6th Avenue between

6th Ave
West 51st Street and 56th Street
New York City
6
Jimmie Durham
W 56th St W 56th St
1 7
5 8
2 Yvonne Rainer 4 9
10
Rirkrit Tiravanija
W 55th St W 55th St
3

4 Patti Smith
5 Minerva Cuevas W 54th St W 54th St

6th Ave
6 Glenn Ligon
11
7 Hal Fischer W 53rd St
3
W 53rd St

8 Anne Collier
2
9 Renée Green W 52 St
nd

12
W 52nd St

10 Cildo Meireles
1
11 Hans Haacke W 51 St
nd
W 51nd St

12 Zoe Leonard

6th Ave
W 50nd St W 50nd St
TITAN
damián ortega, bree zucker
TITAN is an intervention into
New York City’s communication
channels, specifically, within a
series of phone booth kiosks.
As a show, it is a way to enter a
vein, a pre-existing path of fluid
communication and distribution.
It is also a way to define a new
circuit, to delineate a new path,
and to transform the pattern on the
grid. While a traditional gallery
space often marks a perimeter
or sphere for contemplation, in
this day and age, we believe in
the necessity to open a space
outdoors, for collaborative action.
For our project, we saw an area
of unused real estate and decided
to define it in a new way. We are
grateful to the twelve artists who
accepted our invitation to engage
with these spaces, in the streets of
New York City.
The format of the TITAN project
is the phone booth kiosk, latticed
windows of steel advertising
frames, which look out into other
possible worlds and exist in the
city as precise points on a grid.
Experienced together, the points
of these kiosks may be akin to
acupuncture on a corpus, a body
revealed through the landscape of
an island. This island is of course
Manhattan, and the TITAN booths
along Sixth Avenue are a network
of connected ideas, a series of
dioramas broadcasting visual
images, engaging each other
through their mutual co-existence.
Their advertising panels, real and
yet illusory, become focal points
merging into a panorama, which
simultaneously reflects and poses
questions to the external world.
These public advertising structures
provide a space for intervention,
allowing for sporadic ideas, flash
actions that exist and disappear,
to displace the establishment.
Art often functions in this way,
in a constant state of becoming,
perpetually happening, and
evolving in its meaning and its
message. Our project reflects
this constant action, as a pulse of
energy, a sudden vibration on the
streets of Manhattan, which will
just as suddenly disappear. Formal
or informal, serious or humorous,
such transient action is a form
of freedom, and uninhibited
communication with a drive
towards dispersion. Our impulse
to move outdoors and to graft
onto the circuitry of the city is a
positive way to revive outdated
hardware and to generate an event,
which within each Titan, is an
interaction bringing us together.
The title of our project, TITAN,
is taken from a now defunct
transit advertising firm. Likely,
the original company name was
borrowed from the Twelve Titans
of Greek mythology. These elder
gods, the first rulers of the cosmos,
were eventually overthrown by
their offspring. Cast off from
power and relegated to the
confines of storybooks, the Titans
now jointly share their name with
a moon of Saturn. This name
then, TITAN, is redolent of orbits,
circular motions, celestial, political,
and cyclical power. It reflects a
law of the so-called capital jungle:
you rise, you rule, you fall. Our
project addresses such cycles of
power, change and chance, in the
challenging and changing world we
all inhabit.
Echoing this internal cycle,
the exhibition is intentionally
organized in a loop along Sixth
Avenue, the Avenue of the
Americas, in midtown Manhattan.
Here, monolithic corporate
structures stand shoulder to
shoulder alongside a pastiche of
landmarks. The twelve TITAN
kiosks that support and become
the exhibition are bordered by
and exist in the shadow of other
much larger Titans: Radio City
Music Hall, UBS, Crédit Agricole
CIB, MoMA, and on nearby 57th
Street, the ghost image of Peggy
Guggenheim’s Art of This Century
Gallery. In the time of a pandemic,
these other Titans now appear
as ghostly echoes of our own
individual isolation. Through them alert to the messages on other
we recognize ourselves and the TITANS, around the city, which
quandary our world is in. may at any moment, join this
project and share their own points
The TITAN phone booths stand on of view. Together we are a voice,
corners, spaced across, diagonally all together, we are the people.
or catty-corner, each spying on,
or overlapping with the next, so
that new experiences, chance
encounters, and jostling with
strangers are all possible. Chance
and agency, in walking the city,
are built-in components of the
project. Encounters are open-
ended and optional, dependent on
each individual. Perhaps that is
partly why it is so interesting for
us to intervene on and in this new-
old structure with the voice of a
human. On an individual level, the
TITAN kiosks still bear traces of
human life and many can still host
telecommunications. Their history
tells an important story. At this
moment of great change, humanity
must be center stage.
Importantly, this exhibition need
not stop at 6th Avenue. We remain
a brief history
bree zucker
Pay phones sprang from the
idea of communication as a
necessity. Their history provides
a compressed summary of socio-
economic urban evolution, from
their initial rise in popularity
through their later downward
slide into obsolesce. Upon their
introduction at the dawn of
the twentieth century, public
phones enjoyed a brief fling
with glamour. Billed as private
offices, they were made with
hardwood and leather and staffed
by concierge attendants. In
the 1920s, public phones were
standardized as self-serve, coin-
operated models and became
pervasive. By the 1940s, they
had moved outdoors, cementing
their role as a popular social
nexus. From the 1950s on, public
phone booths were a standard
feature of popular culture. Their
modern, four-sided glass cabins
were associated with comic book
heroes (Superman’s changing
station), mystery thrillers (Alfred
Hitchcock’s Birds), and the
anonymous surveillance “tips”
made in films. In the 1970s, this
same untraceable trait helped
the booths become locales
for crime, urban mafias, and
drug dealers. In response, their
design was altered from a closed
box to an open, three-sided
pedestal. By the late 1990s, these
same city booths had earned
a bad rap as “risky facilities,”
rumored to be repositories for
discarded needles. From then
on, payphones slid further into
decline as outcast denizens of
the city. In the 2000s, as mobile
technology became individualized
and ubiquitous, the booths’
trademark function was rendered
irrelevant, and their outside shells
repurposed for advertising. More
recently, tracking beacons were
surreptitiously installed, to push
advertisements, and “spy” on
consumers roaming the streets.
Today, there are still 1,300 active
phone booths in Manhattan. Many
are still in working condition;
yet perform different functions
from those originally intended.
Inside the cabins, the blank
metal sheeting is often used as
a blackboard, a tablet to paste,
stamp, scratch, sign or graffiti
with codes and slogans. Outside,
their design reflects an aesthetic
mash-up: perforated metal
sheeting and fluorescent tubing
mix with plastic ceilings and
LED lights. While some booths
still wear the name “TITAN,” a
misnomer for their modest size,
others are stamped with a simple,
objectifying “Phone” on top.
These days they pass by largely
unnoticed or avoided. In a city
where real estate is considered
a golden denominator, phone
booths are tiny angles of unknown
space, ancient islands, pagan gods
from a prior era.
jimmie durham *1940, United States - 2021, Berlin

In his artistic research, Jimmie Durham was interested in what happens

“away from language”, in the relationship between forms and concepts.
Working against Western Rationalism, his practice was rooted in uncertain-
ty and paradox. Durham created in an array of mediums: drawings, installa-
tions, video (which he used to document his performances), and sculptural
constructions often combined with written messages, photographs and
objects. Covering a broad range of subject matter in artworks —as well
as in essays and poetry— his production was often laced with the agility of
wordplay, a dry, highly critical humor and, above all, insight. He consistently
addressed the political and cultural forces that construct our contempo-
rary discourses, the history of oppression, the futility of violence and the
powerlessness of the minorities in the world. Jimmie Durham worked
with both natural and artificial materials, and was particularly drawn to
the intrinsic qualities of those that have been used throughout history as
tools: stone, wood, bone, iron and glass. Stone was a primary material for
Durham due to its role in defining power dynamics of culture and society
through architecture and ideas of monumentality; he used it to underscore
the polemics of nature vs. culture, religion, architecture, and Eurocentric
ideas of history.

Durham moved to Geneva in 1969 and enrolled in the École nationale

supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he worked on sculpture and perfor-
mance. In 1973 he moved back to the U.S. and became involved in the Amer-
ican Indian Movement as director of the International Indian Treaty Coun-
cil and its representative before the United Nations, thus becoming the
first official representative of a minority within this organization. In 1980,
he focused his attention back to art, but remained concerned with dis-
mantling stereotypes of American Indians that had been widely accepted
and disseminated in American culture: a theme he returns to in many of
his essays. Durham gained notoriety within the New York art scene, but
found his work was seen as “Indian art” and failed to encourage fundamen-
tal —political or artistic— discussions about how American Indian histo-
ry and culture have been misrepresented by others. Disappointed by this
misunderstanding and by the American government’s intractable policies
regarding the Indian movement, he left the U.S. in 1987 and moved to Cuer-
navaca, Mexico, until he returned to Europe in 1994.

Durham was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement prize in
the 58th Venice Biennale (2019).
kurimanzutto

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