Robin Rhode: Paries Pictus

PARIES PICTUS

11 APRIL – 1 JUNE 2013

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JS: It’s more than a decade since you’ve exhibited in

South Africa. How would you contextualise your own

work now, after this long break?

RR: For me, South Africa is fascinating in its openness to

things, its attitude towards materials and spaces especially.

I’m especially interested now, and think this has a lot to do

with a particular South African aesthetic, in the lessons

of African-American artist David Hammons, whose own

work is street-smart, and blurs the lines between private

and public spaces. I’ve always, like Hammons, used

everyday materials and spaces, encoding them into an

aesthetic experience, and not been too concerned with

institutionalising art, whether in galleries or through

identity politics. I’m also very taken with the ideas of the

Arte Povera movement in Italy in the late 1960s, for the

way they valued the everyday also, and returned to simple,

powerful visual messages. South Africa has a great attitude

to materials in this way, it’s not so institutionalised.

Your combination of performance, lens-based media,

street art and attitude has brought you exposure

in major European and US galleries, including the

Hayward Gallery in London, and the Walker Art Center

in Minneapolis. Tell us a bit about how you’re received

in the world.

It varies quite a bit. My work is well-received in the UK, partly

because of a larger, more prevalent black community of

THE ART OF LO-FI, HI-DEF

ROBIN RHODE INTERVIEWED BY JAMES SEY

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art lovers. It’s also good in Italy, but perhaps more because

of a conceptual understanding in the market there. In

France, there’s more of an affinity with the performative

and comedic elements in my work. There’s a lot of street

art, buskers and live elements to art there, so that goes well

in France. In fact, the Centre Georges Pompidou has just

acquired what I call a ‘lo-fi, hi-def’ piece documenting me

drawing a charcoal mic on a wall and interacting with it. It’s

called Microphone. So there’s a diverse relation to my work,

and different kinds of appeal, with markets in Europe, but

in the US it’s much more about the black experience. I’m

involved with the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York,

where I’ve started a record label out of the bookshop. We

distribute through the museum, all limited edition vinyl, and

I design the covers. So that’s great to get involved in other

artistic avenues, like design and music.

Paries Pictus is your first show in South Africa in

12 years. Why now?

A lot of it has to do with wall drawings! I’ve been much more

involved with them lately, partly after seeing an amazing

show of wall drawings by Sol Le Witt at the Walker Art

Center. And I’ve felt that there was a huge potential in South

Africa for wall drawing. The lineage here, the ancient history

of Khoisan cave paintings, has always been important to

me. There’s something about the drawing of their belief

systems and rituals, their experiences and aspirations,

which resonates with me. And bringing that feeling up to

date, there’s our political past of protest murals, rather than

graffiti, the mural art in the townships that was more about

social upliftment than tagging – I was always drawn to that.

Messages like ‘Stay away from drugs’, ‘AIDS kills’, ‘Down

with Apartheid’. Once I took a US curator through Westbury

township, and we came across a crudely painted NYC

skyline, which had in the foreground a view of the Venice

Lagoon – why? Is it an aspiration to escape? A fantasy?

It was so poignant.

Paries Pictus – Latin for, roughly, wall drawing – includes

a site-specific intervention of drawings in collaboration

with Cape Town children from disadvantaged

neighbourhoods. Could you say some more about

the wall drawing concept in this show?

I’m attempting to develop the idea of wall painting under

the Paries Pictus banner, so that the potential of wall

paintings can be used by ordinary people, can be better

understood. I’ve taken this into a fine art context though –

there are Bauhaus graphics in the template for colouring

in, and there are other considered design principles, such

as graphics on the evolution of urbanism, from mud huts

to the megalopolis, on one side of the wall in the gallery. On

the other side are simple shapes forming a boat or yacht,

a set of dumbbells, a flower, etc, where the emphasis is

on geometry, shape recognition and change. Other parts

of the Paries Pictus space are devoted to drawing activity,

for example, where a stencil of five ‘colonial-era’ ships

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goes across the wall, and the kids draw waves under them.

Bringing wall art into the gallery is about planting a seed in

these young people, which is unusual in South African art,

especially for young, disenfranchised kids. It’s about turning

the gallery into a large colouring book.

The wall painting approach raises the issue of the

relationship of your work to street art generally, which

has been experiencing a bit of a vogue, what with Banksy,

Shepard Fairey and others going global. How do you

perceive the relationship, if there is one?

There’s a much greater focus now on street art, and on its

commercial value. When I showed at White Cube in London

in 2011 there were street art blogs covering the show. So

it’s big now. I think it’s a healthy thing that my work really

just touches on but runs parallel to street art. Many street

works and techniques have now evolved into abstraction,

but this doesn’t necessarily imply that they’re moving into

a gallery or fine art context. My work in turn is more about

an aesthetic evolution, about redefining the real. I have a

creative need to push an idea of painting or a conceptual

idea out of the gallery and into the street. The legitimacy

of street art is about bravery in making a statement and

risking injury and arrest, as much as about the image itself.

I don’t want to be embroiled in the tired notion that being

an artist in a gallery context, but who works with concepts

and materials close to street art, means that I somehow

appropriate that work or that idea. I therefore don’t see

myself as a street artist, but as a contemporary artist who

has roots in the street, and as one who adopts the mentality

of the street. I always saw myself as being in the white cube

of the gallery, and always saw myself as a conceptual artist

that incorporates street materials. My work is in fact not on

the street, but on a metaphorical roll of film, the one I use to

document the drawing, performance, whatever it is.

You’re also showing a range of photo-based series –

can you tell us a bit more about these?

The choice of works for this show is all about their relevance

to South Africa. One of my spiritual mentors is poet and

activist Don Mattera, and a few of the works are inspired by

him. Blackness Blooms, for example, with the giant comb

and the drawing which blooms into a huge afro that is also

about the blooming of black identity and consciousness,

is inspired by lines from his work. It’s also of course a

reference to the ‘comb test’ of blackness during the

apartheid era, those strange markers of racial identity

that we obsessed about at that time.

Twilight and Vultures are companion pieces, also partly

inspired by Mattera. Twilight references his metaphor of

coloured people existing in a twilight zone, between black

and white, night and day, indeterminate in terms of racial

classification and apartheid politics both physically and

psychologically. The feather in the piece acts as a kind of

barometer or timepiece, moving from dawn to daylight to

evening. The purple hoodie the character in the piece wears

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is referencing thug life, but also has spiritual undertones

– a kind of priestliness or monasticism. Vultures was the

name of Mattera’s gang in Sophiatown. The metaphor is of

the bird that feeds on scraps, but is only there when death

is around. The actual bird is replaced by an Okapi knife,

used by the gangs as a weapon of choice. In the piece, the

knife appears closed, perching on the tree branch. As the

character approaches, the knife opens, and confronts the

character as his shadow.

The series called Bird on Wires is inspired by the serial

‘chronophotography’ of the 19th-century scientist EJ Marey.

He made very influential studies of animals and humans in

motion, including many of birds in flight, which influenced

the development of early cinema. The wires are also meant

to recall the strings of a guitar.

The Point of Vanishing offers an ironic take on imagining

the perspectival view of inhabitants of the land when the

colonists first landed in their ships off the Cape of Good

Hope. Imagine a bushman cave or rock painting of such a

ship … the piece plays with the idea of such a representation,

and the character is dressed as a sailor, of course.

A Spanner in the Works of Infinity links the wall drawing of

the car at the entrance to the gallery with the tool that fixes

it. Also the wheel spanner denotes an ‘X’, such as the one

marking treasure or put down when casting a vote. When the

character in the series throws the spanner into sky, it spirals,

into the wall, creating the illusion of another dimension.

Structurally, this piece has quite a formal compositional style,

based on the Fibonacci mathematical grid.

In the piece called Bones I’m relating the history of the

game of dominoes to the human body. All 28 domino pieces

are used, and the title puns on both the skeleton and the

slang name for domino pieces. The character in the series

has a relation to each piece as part of the choreography.

It’s a very large work, 9.5 x 2.45m, and both numerically

and visually very interesting, for example with the double

blank and double six. The game also unfolds as part of the

viewer’s experience.

The last two works, A Day in May and Carry-on, are

perhaps the most personal in terms of my feelings for South

Africa. A Day in May is inspired by Worker’s Day. The digital

animation shows the figure carrying a black flag, the symbol

of anarchism and opposition. But as he protests, he is held

back by clothes pegs, so it’s domesticity that puts a stop

to his revolutionary fervour, and hangs him out to dry. It’s

about coming back to a sense of self, and a sense of home.

Carry-on is a pun on carry-on luggage, which in this case

is a graphic outline of South Africa, tethered by ropes to

the character, his sense of home that he carries with him,

but struggles to deal with. It begins to repeat itself, and to

fragment, so that although he is pulled by the South Africa

symbol, by the end of the work it’s undefined.

James Sey is a writer, academic and artist. He is a Research Associate in the Research Centre of the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Johannesburg.

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PARIES PICTUSCOLOUR IN THE PICTURES2013Vinyl stencils, paint, oil crayons in custom boxWith the participation of children from Lalela Project

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PARIES PICTUSCONNECT THE DOTS, DRAW THE WAVES, COMPLETE THE MAZE2013Vinyl stencils, paint, oil crayons in custom boxWith the participation of children from Lalela Project

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BIRD ON WIRES2012/38 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each

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Paries Pictus: Complete the Maze

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Paries Pictus: Draw the Waves

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THE POINT OF VANISHING2012/315 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each

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Paries Pictus: Connect the Dots

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VULTURES20128 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each

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TWILIGHT2012/38 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each

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A SPANNER IN THE WORKS OF INFINITY2012/39 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each

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UNTITLED (MOON STAMP + INK PAD)2012Wood, metal, rubber, Indian inkInstallation dimensions variable

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BLACKNESS BLOOMS2012/38 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each

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ALMANAC2012/38 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each

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CARRY-ON20139 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each

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BONES201328 framed C-prints50 x 50 x 4cm each

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A DAY IN MAY2013Digital animationDuration 3 min 15 sec

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Robin Rhode was born in 1976 in Cape Town, and lives in

Berlin. Major museum solo exhibitions have taken place

at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California

(2010); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio

(2009); the Hayward Gallery, London (2008); and Haus

der Kunst, Munich (2007). Notable group exhibitions

include Fruits of Passion at the Centre Pompidou, Paris

(2012); the 18th Sydney Biennale, All Our Relations (2012);

Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960,

Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); The Original

Copy: Photography of Sculpture from 1839 to the Present,

Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); The Dissolve, 8th

Site Santa Fe Biennale, New Mexico (2010); Prospect.1 New

Orleans, 1st New Orleans Biennial (2008); New Photography,

Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005); the 51st Venice

Biennale (2005); and How Latitudes Become Forms, Walker

Art Centre, Minneapolis, and other venues (2003-5).

Thanks to the staff and children of Lalela Project for

their contribution to Paries Pictus, and to the teams at

Rhodeworks, Berlin, and Stevenson, Cape Town.

Special thanks to Sabinah Odumosu-Rhode.

Back to the Future, 2013, vinyl stencil, paint, 185 x 434cm

CAPE TOWNBuchanan Building160 Sir Lowry Road

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JOHANNESBURG62 Juta Street

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info@stevenson.infowww.stevenson.info

Catalogue 71April 2013

© 2013 for works by Robin Rhode: the artist© 2013 for text: the author

Front cover Paries Pictus: Colour in the Pictures, 2013

Editor Sophie PerryerDesign Gabrielle Guy

Installation photography Mario TodeschiniPrinting Hansa Print, Cape Town