May 6, 2004
Rodney Graham at 303 Gallery
An Artforum.com review of the Rodney Graham exhibition now at 303 Gallery. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
Rodney Graham has nudged himself out of his seamless-loop groove and returned to New York to show a film with a definite beginning and end. The establishing shot is a head-on view of a typewriter case; the cover promptly disappears, followed by lengthy, loving close-ups of a pristine 1930s Rheinmetall that call to mind Albert Renger-Patzsch's industrial fetishizations. But Graham is in an elegiac mood, and synthetic snow soon starts to descend from above, until the machine is entirely buried. (The first few flakes on the keys call to mind the brightly burning granules of Coruscating Cinnamon, 1996, a film seen in his last New York solo.) The film itself is projected by an outsize '50s Cinemeccanica whose click-clack whir provides the missing sound track; breaking out of tight formal constraints, the work resonates with an exceptionally affecting wistfulness.
The beauty of a good editor: 1) this review is about twenty percent shorter than my submitted draft yet makes all of my points, and 2) it reminds me not to get too cocky about my writing, as it can always be improved.
Special bonus: a review of a Rodney Graham show published in Flash Art sometime last year, perhaps September.
This compact survey of five recent films and Halcion Sleep, a 1994 video, explores in depth one aspect of Rodney Graham’s artistic practice. For the past fifteen years, Graham has created films, videos, photographs, music compositions and recordings, installations, and books to explore the limits of visual perception. He often does this by drawing attention to the passage of time: the flash of the bulb central to a series of 1970s Polaroids, the extension and deferral involved in his book projects from the early 1990s, or the repetition central to the film work on display in this exhibition.
Vexation Island (1997), How I Became a Ramblin' Man (1999), and City Self/Country Self (2000) constitute a trilogy: each is a meticulously produced short film that seamlessly loops a simple ‘costume vignette’. A Robinson Crusoe type, a lonely cowboy, and an urban dandy—all played by Graham himself—are doomed respectively to repeat senseless self-destructive acts, escapes, and cruelties. Set in idealized, fairytale-like surroundings, each invokes a haze of references that belies Graham’s wide reading (and poaching): the myth of Sisyphus, several Freud essays, spaghetti Westerns, and Dickens tales all come to mind. Despite their brevity (the longest is nine minutes), each film’s editing emphasizes a dramatic build-up. By the critical moment—when Graham gets knocked in the head by a coconut, sings a lonesome tune, or kicks himself in the pants—the viewer is so content to be relieved of this tension that she barely notices the loop. And it begins again…
Set in Berlin’s pastoral Tiergarten, The Photokinetoscope (2001) benefits from being seen in the context of these three earlier films. It too is a short loop, an immaculately rendered meditation on altered consciousness. Retracing Albert Hoffman’s acid-tinged bicycle ride, Graham pedals through the park, his senses heightened as he stares at statues and ponders a clothespin and playing card. Married to but not necessarily synchronized with a soundtrack written and performed by the artist, the film neatly inverts the premise of Halcion Sleep. In that work, he rides in a car, unconscious, from the edge of Vancouver to his home. In The Photokinetoscope, hyper-aware of all that surrounds him, Graham merges disparate techniques, materials, and sources to create a precise work that is closed in on itself. Yet, through myriad links to Pink Floyd, science, the history of drugs, and his own earlier work, the film opens out onto the world.