(In)animate Stones in Jimmie Durham’s The Dangers of Petrification
… this piece began with a different kind of human craziness: the phenomenon of things reminding us of, or looking like, other things. Walking along, I pick up a stone: “This looks like a potato,” I say. Over years of walking around Europe, I have found a petrified slice of an apple, petrified pecorino, petrified pumpernickel, petrified cake, and various kinds of candy, among other curiosities. On the banks of the Po River, I found a petrified cloud.
— Jimmie Durham, “1000 Words”
Introduction
Jimmie Durham (1940–2021) was an American visual artist, poet, and essayist well known for incorporating Native American themes into his work. He used various materials and was particularly drawn to stone. Anne Ellegood, a curator who organized artist’s first North American retrospective at the Hammer Museum in 2017, noted that for Durham, stone was important not only as a material used to represent something, but because stones themselves could be seen as evolving sculptures created over time by the elements.¹ Some examples of Durham’s artworks with raw stones include Stoning the Refrigerator (1996), Self-Portrait Pretending to Be a Stone Statue of Myself (2006), and Still Life with Spirit and Xitle (2007).²
The Dangers of Petrification, created in 2007, consists of vitrines presenting stones of varying sizes, colors and shapes accompanied by labels. Some stones are placed on ceramic plates and some on wooden cutting boards. The display is augmented with a spoon, two kitchen knives and hand-written texts on paper. The vitrines look like a natural history museum display, except that the labels are handwritten and non-sensical.³
Existing interpretations of this artwork draw attention to stones’ mimesis, their use outside of architecture, and their subjectivity. This essay continues exploring The Dangers of Petrification by looking at it through the lens of theories of art history. The questions it asks are: What theories are appropriate to analyze Durham’s work? What can these theories tell us about this piece? And how do these new insights relate to existing interpretations?
What Do We Know about The Dangers of Petrification?
There are three main accounts on the artwork: one given by the artist himself in his 1000 Words for Artforum and two accounts presented by curators Anselm Franke, who displayed the artwork at the Animism exhibition in 2010–2014, and Richard Hill, who described the artwork in the exhibition catalog. According to Durham’s account, he simply collected stones that looked like something else, e.g., an apple or a candy. This collection of stones then formed an artwork that “pretends,” in Durham’s words, to be a scientific display of petrified objects.⁴ However, Durham’s text, while giving some insight into the meaning of his work, goes on to explain how clouds turn to stone and, thus, continues playing the same game as the artwork itself.
Another account on Durham’s artwork is given by curator Richard Hill, who brings attention to the artist’s long-standing interest in investigating and criticizing the way architecture shapes our society. According to Hill, many artist’s works show how stones can be used and understood outside of architecture.⁵ For example, in The Dangers of Petrification, stones represent petrified organic objects, such as an ice cream or a piece of pecorino, and, thus, make us think of food rather than architecture.
Finally, the account by curator Anselm Franke, while also touching on Durham’s critique of architectural monumentality, focuses more on natural aspects of stones in Durham’s artwork. Here, the stones’ mimesis, i.e., resemblance to other objects, is not produced intentionally by people following the Western tradition of stone statues, but is a result of a natural process of petrification. According to Franke, this raises a question of whether these stones are subjects or objects and what the boundary is between the two.⁶
Petrification and Colonialism
Throughout his artistic career, Durham focused on indigenous themes and extensively used Native American imagery in his work. Considering this, the use of a postcolonial theory seems appropriate to further analyze and interpret The Dangers of Petrification. Moreover, the term “petrification” brings to mind The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (1925– 1961), whom Durham often quoted in his works (see, e.g., Untitled (Often Durham Employs…) of 1989).⁷
In his book, Fanon writes: “The arrival of the colonist signified syncretically the death of indigenous society, cultural lethargy, and petrifaction of the individual.”⁸ According to philosopher Douglas Ficek, Fanon uses the term “petrification” to indicate adherence to tradition by native people, which leads to their social and cultural stagnation.⁹ As a result of this colonization strategy to “petrify” the colonized, indigenous cultures become “an inventory of behavioral patterns, traditional costumes, and miscellaneous customs”¹⁰ and “the colonized are … relegated ontologically to the status of things — things like stones.”¹¹
In The Dangers of Petrification, Durham shows exactly this “inventory” of petrified objects, but he turns Fanon’s metaphors into physical reality: a metaphorical inventory becomes a real museum display with objects being labeled and presented in an organized manner, and metaphorical people like stones become actual stones that are supposed to represent petrified organic matter, such as salami or bacon. Moreover, Durham makes this museum of stones look profoundly Western. The presented objects are taken out of their native context and their original meaning is reduced to how these objects are perceived by a Western viewer: if a stone resembles a piece of bacon, it is simply labeled so and even put on a plate or a cutting board to further emphasize its new meaning.
Describing the Western world of colonizers, Fanon writes: “A world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues: the statue of the general who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge.”¹² The Dangers of Petrification, while resembling this “world of statues,” in fact shows the opposite of it. According to Franke, here Durham inverts the Western tradition that uses stones as a means to immortalise itself.¹³ Instead of human-made statues, there are the (supposed) results of a natural process of petrification; instead of grandiose subjects, such as famous people, there are ordinary and short-lived objects, such as bread or an apple. With this, Durham seems to criticize the colonizers’ desire for eternity and, through it, the desire for domination.
The analysis of petrification within the colonial context, in Frantz Fanon’s terms, relates to Hill’s interpretation of The Dangers of Petrification as a part of Durham’s project against the connection of art to architecture. Here, Durham not only shows yet another alternative use of stones outside of architecture, as Hill observes, but criticizes the social consequences of petrified architectural monumentality.
Stones Come Alive
In addition to challenging the architecture, stones in Durham’s oeuvre also acquire independent agency, actively participate in real-world processes and, hence, become animate. For example, in Stoning the Refrigerator, stones fly and change the appearance of a refrigerator; in Still Life with Spirit and Xitle, a bolder with a face fell on a car and modified it irreversibly. The most suitable theoretical framework for dealing with animate inorganic matter, e.g., animate stones, is new materialism, a theory that emphasizes the agency and vitality of material entities beyond human perception and control.
According to political and social scientists Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, new materialists usually avoid differentiation between organic and inorganic, or animate and inanimate.¹⁴ While the stones in Durham’s artwork are clearly inorganic, they also represent organic objects such as a piece of bacon, a candy, or an ice cream. As a result, it is unclear how a spectator is supposed to perceive and interpret these stones and whether the distinction between inorganic and organic should be made at all. Moreover, this blending of organic and inorganic is not only reflected in the visual similarity between the two, but is reinforced by positioning the stones on plates and cutting boards as if they were ready to be eaten.
Coole and Frost write further: “[M]ateriality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.”¹⁵ In The Dangers of Petrification, the stones are indeed active, self-creative, unpredictable and, thus, animate. First, most obviously, they are involved in the process of petrification, where an organic object, preserved under the right conditions for a very long time (e.g., centuries), has its organic matter gradually replaced by minerals.¹⁶ Here, the stones are actively becoming something they were not, they are evolving sculptures created over time by the elements, according to Ellegood, or “‘matter becomes’ rather than ‘matter is’,” according to Coole and Frost.¹⁷
Second, the stones in Durham’s artwork manifest their animate nature, generative powers and agentic capacities by “pretending,” in Durham’s words, to be petrified food, which happens on two levels. On the one hand, the stones pretend to be organic objects by being visually similar to them. On the other, according to the hand-written labels, the stones represent not the objects themselves, but their petrified state, which in reality also happens to be pretending, because the whole petrification idea is only a mystification created by the artist.
Overall, the new materialist view on The Dangers of Petrification with its blending of organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, relates to Franke’s question about the subject/object relationship in this artwork. According to him, there is no opposition between subject and object in Durham’s work, but a fluid balance in a continuum between these two extremes.¹⁸
Conclusion
To analyze The Dangers of Petrification from the point of view of theories of art history, it seems appropriate to use postcolonial and new materialist frameworks because of Durham’s references to the works of Frantz Fanon and to stones’ agentic capacities. The postcolonial analysis suggests that food turned into stone and presented in a museum-like setting refers to individuals petrified by colonizers and to indigenous cultures turned into inventories of customs. The new materialist analysis suggests that in his work, Durham removes boundaries between organic and inorganic and presents stones as active and creative. The stones not only become petrified versions of food, but, in Durham’s words, “pretend” do to so. These findings support and extend the ideas of Hill and Franke about the use of stones outside of architecture and about the blurred boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity of stones.
The use of the above theories also leads to interpretations that seem to perfectly complement each other: where one ends, the other begins. In the postcolonial framework, animate matter turns into inanimate stones, while the new materialist framework aims to eliminate the distinction between the two. This creates a continuum of interpretations of Durham’s stones: from animate, to inanimate, to the unity of both.
There is, however, one prominent aspect of Durham’s work that complements and challenges both the postcolonial and the new materialist theories: it is the artwork’s playfulness manifested in the overall absurdity of the presented results of the petrification process (especially, the petrified cloud) and in the hand-written texts accompanying some objects. Ficek writes: “The colonizers would like to petrify the natives completely and to create a world so saturated with seriousness that its opposite — playfulness — would be nowhere to be found.”¹⁹ But if the colonized in The Wretched of the Earth and the stones in The Dangers of Petrification are still playful, then, in Fanon’s words, petrification is not complete, it is only a pseudo-petrification and, according to Coole and Frost, the matter is rendered “active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.”²⁰ After all, maybe The Dangers of Petrification is nothing more than a collection of “things reminding us of, or looking like, other things,” as Durham himself described it?²¹
This text is a draft of the paper published in Panoramic: The Leiden Art Review, 1(2) (Leiden 2024) pp. 56–61.
- Anne Ellegood, ‘1000 Words: Jimmie Durham’, Artforum (2009) p. 187.
2. For more examples, see David Titterington, ‘Throwing Stones: Jimmie Durham’s lithotechnics’, Medium (2018).
3. Anselm Franke, ‘Animism. Notes on an Exhibition’, E-flux Journal 36 (2012) p. 49.
4. Ellegood 2009, p. 189.
5. Richard William Hill, ‘The Dangers of Petrification, or ‘The Work of Art and the Ages of Mineral Reproduction’, Animism I, ed. Anselm Franke (2010) pp. 134–137, spec. p. 134.
6. Franke 2012, p. 50.
7. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, ed. used New York 2004 (first published as Les Damnés de la Terre in 1961).
8. Fanon ed. 2004, p. 50.
9. Douglas Ficek, ‘Reflections on Fanon and Petrification’, Living Fanon: Global Perspectives, ed. Nigel C. Gibson (London 2011) pp. 75–84.
10. Fanon ed. 2004, p. 172.
11. Ficek 2011, p. 76.
12. Fanon ed. 2004, p.15.
13. Franke 2012, p. 50.
14. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, eds. Diane Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham 2010) pp. 1–46.
15. Coole and Frost 2010, p. 9.
16. Hill 2010, p. 134.
17. Ellegood 2009, p. 187; Coole and Frost 2010, p. 10.
18. Franke 2012, p. 50.
19. Ficek 2011, p. 80.
20. Fanon 2004, p. 17; Coole and Frost 2010, p. 9.
21. Ellegood 2009, p. 189.
