A Certain Lack of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics. - book reviews

ArtForum, Summer, 1994 by Bell Hooks

A Certain Lack of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics, by Jimmie Durham, ed. Jean Fisher. London: Kala Press, 1993. 255 pp. 18 illustrations. $18.95.

An insightful essay is like that cut on your favorite record, tape, or CD that you play over and over again 'cause it sounds so good. And Jimmie Durham's collection has its share of good cuts. A Certain Lack of Coherence merges passionate revolutionary commitment to social justice and transformation with an awesomely intense devotion to making art. The clarity of purpose in his writing confronts and challenges the reader.

Through his work as an activist in the struggle for Native American rights, and from his experience of crossing the borders between the world of his Cherokee family and community of origin into a broader social context, Durham has garnered an expansive critical awareness of the interconnectedness between cultural practices and the politics of domination. In "Creativity and the Social Process" he offers his credo for making art: "I think the purpose of art is to help people interpret their world so that they may be better able to change it in positive ways." In opposition to the kind of privatized vision of art that privileges the individual's own relationship to his or her work and suggests no desire for any more interactive art process, Durham challenges us to consider how our understanding and engagement with art would change if art were recognized as part of a "social dialogue," if we could accept art as existing for "the purpose of critical social interpretation." His challenge is a critical intervention in the assumptions that overdetermine artistic practice and the valuation and marketing of art.

When speaking of artistic production, Durham talks to everyone, but a number of essays in this collection are clearly addressed to a white audience, as when Durham announces, "I feel fairly sure that I could address the entire world if only I had a place to stand. You have made everything your turf. In every field, on every issue, the ground has already been covered." His engagement in critical dialogue with this audience does not exclude nonwhite readers, it simply requires that they consciously situate themselves: we can either enter these texts as voyeurs watching the spectacle, or we can choose sides. Durham's essays (like some of my own) generate a feeling of disease in the reader because he is not content to have us passively consume his thoughts. The style of the writing contests, interrogates, and demands. One clear demand is that we know what side we are on, what causes we are willing to stand up for, whether we have any commitment to social change that would lead us to sacrifice, give up, surrender, [Incomplete Text in Original Publication]

Durham understands firsthand need for coalition across differences of culture, nationality, ethnicity, race. Not only does he share a perspective with the diasporic black liberation struggles that shaped and informed his work, he is able to critique the failings of those struggles. Although his polemical writing is fully engaged with his Native American cultural legacy, Durham cautions against a narrow understanding of self and identity. His critique of notions of authenticity resonates for all marginal groups who are struggling to reclaim the space of our history and resistance, and who, in the process, overvalorize our cultures of origin in ways that produce serious critical blind spots. Challenging the narrow nationalist notions that invite marginal groups to invest in ideas of purity and authenticity that simply mirror the destructive Eurocentric cultural imperialism we would resist, Durham concludes A Certain Lack of Coherence by admonishing Native Americans, and all of us who occupy spaces outside the white mainstream, to remember that "we are from the past, but we echo and reverberate in the present. What a responsibility! It is necessary that, with great urgency, we all speak well, and listen well. We, you and I, must remember everything. We must especially remember those things we never knew. Obviously that process cannot begin with longer lists of facts. It needs newer, and much more complex, kinds of metaphors. Perhaps we must trust confusion more, for a while, and be deeply suspicious of simple stories, simple acts." This call for critical vigilance--in the making of art, the revisioning of history, and the creation of a culture of resistance--can be heard throughout Durham's work, in his art, in these essays.