Upload
stevenson
View
219
Download
1
Tags:
Embed Size (px)
DESCRIPTION
Paries Pictus documents Robin Rhode's first solo exhibition in South Africa in over a decade. (Stevenson catalogue 71)
Citation preview
PARIES PICTUS
11 APRIL – 1 JUNE 2013
6
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
7
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
8
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
9
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.
10
11
PARIES PICTUSCOLOUR IN THE PICTURES2013Vinyl stencils, paint, oil crayons in custom boxWith the participation of children from Lalela Project
12
13
14
15
PARIES PICTUSCONNECT THE DOTS, DRAW THE WAVES, COMPLETE THE MAZE2013Vinyl stencils, paint, oil crayons in custom boxWith the participation of children from Lalela Project
16
17
18
BIRD ON WIRES2012/38 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each
19
20
21
22
Paries Pictus: Complete the Maze
23
24
Paries Pictus: Draw the Waves
25
26
THE POINT OF VANISHING2012/315 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
Paries Pictus: Connect the Dots
43
44
VULTURES20128 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each
45
46
47
48
TWILIGHT2012/38 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each
49
50
51
52
A SPANNER IN THE WORKS OF INFINITY2012/39 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each
53
54
55
56
UNTITLED (MOON STAMP + INK PAD)2012Wood, metal, rubber, Indian inkInstallation dimensions variable
57
58
BLACKNESS BLOOMS2012/38 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
ALMANAC2012/38 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each
69
70
71
72
CARRY-ON20139 framed C-prints41.6 x 61.6 x 3.8cm each
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
BONES201328 framed C-prints50 x 50 x 4cm each
85
86
87
90
A DAY IN MAY2013Digital animationDuration 3 min 15 sec
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
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
Woodstock 7925PO Box 616
Green Point 8051T +27 (0)21 462 1500F +27 (0)21 462 1501
JOHANNESBURG62 Juta Street
Braamfontein 2001Postnet Suite 281
Private Bag x9Melville 2109
T +27 (0)11 403 1055/1908F +27 (0)86 275 1918
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