Malinche and Cortez, 1988-1992

Narrator: This sculpture is Durham’s interpretation of a historical figure, Malinche.

Anne Ellegood: Within the Spanish conquest, she was sold as a slave to [Hernán] Cortés and functioned as his interpreter and traveled around Mexico with him.

Narrator: Anne Ellegood.

Anne Ellegood: She, in current Mexican history, is often held up as a traitor, but like Durham's interest in thinking through the complexities of Pocahontas as a historical figure, in this work he's also arguing for a reexamination of Malinche not as a traitor, but rather as a woman who was sold into slavery and oppressed by the colonizer.

Jimmie Durham: I did want to show the unreality of the myth, of the idea. The unreality of what they call reality. I carved a more realistic looking foot and I had a piece of yucca cactus that just happened to look like a foot, so I stuck it on.

Then, I made Cortez, but for a long time, he was just a face. I made many different layers that were all tinted differently, so then when I sand it down, it looks disgustingly like flesh, if flesh were dead and petrified. I wanted him to look monstrously bad and greedy, like he wanted Mexico.