Rodney Graham
some works with sound waves some works with light waves and some other experimental works
16 June – 13 August 2000
The Canadian artist Rodney Graham (born 1949 in Vancouver) will be presented in a solo exhibition of new and older works from June 16 to August 13. Graham is the first guest of the newly established Munich Fellowship, which was established in 1999 on the initiative of the Kunstverein in cooperation with the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm and Bayerische Rückversicherung. With his works, which often take surprising turns, Graham has fascinated art circles and scholars alike in exhibitions such as Skulpturprojekte Münster, 1987, documenta IX, 1992, the Canadian Pavilion at the XLVII Biennale di Venezia, 1997, Cinema Music Video, Kunsthalle Wien, 1999, and recently at the DIA Center for Contemporary Art, New York.
The Sisyphean, absurdly repetitive is one of the typical characteristics of Graham's works, which he realizes in such diverse media as installation, photography, music, film, and video. The fascination of his methodology arises from his appropriation of modernism through postmodern means of allegory and in the style of parody. The source of inspiration and material is the horizon of modern experience, the works of Büchner, Freud, Poe, Melville, Wagner and Humperdinck or the etude teacher Carl Czerny. Many works are composed of obsessive, compulsive repetitions that resemble the automatism of early visual devices (photography or cinema). Model for a Siesta Room (2000), Corruscating Cinnamon Granules (1996), and Edge of a Wood (1999) explore the psychic function of the camera obscura and the cinematic apparatus as well as their reconstruction of the real.
In continuous repetitive sequences, the artist often stages himself - a reference to the influence of performance art in his work. In stylistically perfect pastiches, Graham superimposes the originals and in this way smuggles his displacements into the story. The thief from Alfred Hitchcock's film To Catch a Thief, who is supposed to unmask his double, forms the template for the most recent work Fishing an a Jetty (2000)-also a self-dramatization in which the goal is to simulate inconspicuousness through the manner of "disguise."
Rodney Graham's involvement with pop music grew out of his fascination with the late musician Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) and the fact "that Cobain seriously wanted to be an artist." Listening Lounge II (1999/2000) presents Rodney Graham's second music CD. Graham explains this evolution within his work as follows:
"I made the pop album then because I got tired of the almost tyrannical nature of those works coming out of my involvement with systems. Since my training in the sixties around conceptual art, I've been working about systems, more specifically, systems at the point where they threaten to get out of control. That's where a kind of delirium develops. That doesn't interest me that much anymore. I want to deal with more open structures."
Freudian psychoanalysis informs Graham's method of linking philosophical, social, historical, scientific, and artistic insights. In Schema: Complications of Payment (1996), a performance-lecture, the artist explores some of the possible considerations that accompanied Freud's formulation of the interpretation of dreams.
Rodney Graham's aesthetically coded works reflect on the 19th century and the transition to the early 20th century, a time when the laboratory of modernism was still developing with unwavering confidence. Aerodynamic Forms in Space (1977-96) consists of eleven color photographs that present themselves in the high modernist suprematist style of solarization, but show images of a misassembled miniature airplane.
Lecture by Rodney Graham, Wednesday, July 5, 7 p.m.
The Westfälische Kunstverein in Münster presents an exhibition by Rodney Graham from September 15 to October 29, 2000.