The words ‘American Indian’ and ‘museum’ conjure up images of arrowheads, masks and feathered headgear: anthropology with wildlife accents. You might not envision a plastic road-safety sawhorse topped by a dog skull with a seashell ear. Over the caption The Indian’s Parents (frontal view) you don’t expect a photo of a middle-class couple in formal attire. And you really don’t expect Pocahontas’ Underwear, red knickers festooned with shells, beads and chicken feathers The works of Jimmie Durham, whose sculptures, videos and drawings travesty both the museum view of Native Americans and the high art of the urban culturati, are on show in a retrospective, ‘At the Centre of the World’, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Durham was born in Houston in 1940 to a family that identified as Cherokee, and raised in rural Arkansas. After serving in the US Navy, gravitating to the art scene in Austin, and art school in Switzerland, he returned to the US in 1973 to join the American Indian Movement (AIM), then in full chaotic swing, fresh from its occupation of the Pine Ridge Reservation in Wounded Knee. He served from 1974 to 1979 as director of the International Indian Treaty Council, a UN-accredited NGO that advocated for indigenous rights, before AIM imploded due to infiltration and infighting.

His work was in the anti-art vein popular at the time, which continued his AIM activism and rejected traditional media. In 1982 he turned a downtown Manhattan gallery into a ‘Native American souvenir stand’, selling painted buffalo skulls for $5. The manufacture of ironically spurious artefacts fed works like On Loan from the Museum of the American Indian, and testified to the struggle of Natives living outside of old movies and environmentally minded TV commercials.

Being even a little Cherokee in northeastern Oklahoma is about as rare and remarkable as being a Michael Jordan fan in Chicago Sarah Vowell

In 1987 Durham moved (...)