Resumen de Jimmie Durham's "Building a Nation" and the ruins of American exceptionalism
This essay provides a close analysis of a single installation and performance work created by the Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham in 2006. It argues that the artwork deconstructs the colonial aspects of post-9/11 American foreign policy, submerging viewers in an installation and performance that encourages consciousness of the role of violence in shaping American national identity. Simultaneously, the work goes beyond this, incorporating a performance of home -building and dialogue amid the violent installation in a way that parallels conceptions of home and decolonization in contemporary Indigenous philosophy. Relating contemporary Indigenous art to both present-day and historical processes of globalization, the essay addresses the complicated interface of Indigenous perspectives with the study of global contemporary art. In so doing, it provides a close analysis of the artwork in the context of Indigenous history and thought, as well as modern and contemporary art.
