Jimmie Durham

2008

Sculpture, 150 x 860 x 860 cm.
Materials: airplane, stone, chains

Collection: Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

"The central piece in Paris will be a very large stone on a single- engine airplane. I made the work last summer in an old Russian airfield outside of Berlin, near the Polish border. (...)

The airplane looks really grounded. But it also makes me a little nervous. I remember how, after Sydney, the car pieces became popular—people enjoy seeing a car get what’s coming to it—and I ended up making a few versions, which are similar in the way that paintings are similar.

But when Christo and Jeanne-Claude started wrapping things, they could not have known that they would spend the next 50 years going around the world looking for new and bigger things to wrap. I can imagine myself in a similar predicament—this phenomenon is so often equated with success. It can be relatively easy to find bigger ships, bigger airplanes, bigger boulders. A stoned Concorde might have a sense of appropriateness." [full text here]