Rodney Graham: artistic practice and conceptual frameworks

Rodney Graham -- who will he become next?

Rodney Graham is a Canadian artist, born in Vancouver in 1949. But he could be anyone -- or so his art suggests. In Fishing on the Jetty, 2000, the Rodney Graham renders himself into his own text as a filmed subject. In this film/performance art piece, the viewer is witness to the sight of Graham playing Cary Grant in his own nautical version of Alfred Hitchcock's 'To Catch a Thief.' Graham, within the context of the piece is himself, is the character of Grant, and is also the persona portrayed by 'Cary Grant,' the sublimely artificial romantic lead of the 1930's classical film in a who-done-it about mistaken identity, a film where the actor portrays a constantly misleading man with a shape-shifting identity.

In much of his work, which straddles the line between film and photography, Graham is both creator and subject, and is constantly exploring the notion of identity. Perhaps this is reflected in another of the artist's passion, that of the transforming musical textures of modern rock music. In Aberdeen 2000, the artist created a work named after the birthplace of Kurt Cobain, he portrays the deceased rock musician likewise as a celebrity as well as a fellow artist of a different medium. So many young people identified with Cobain, one of the reasons Graham says, for his fascination with the artist as well as his love of Cobain's music.

Perhaps most epically and most characteristically, however, Rodney Graham 'can also be seen in one of his recent works Victorian dandy. This may seem, on its surface, slightly less surprising, given the artist's life-long preoccupation with Victoriana. This newest incarnation of the artist in his work is featured a large new video projection work entitled City Self / Country Self, set in Paris in the 1860's and shows Graham playing two versions of himself, an urban dandy and a provincial rustic. The setup suggests not simply a new take on the familiar myth of the urban and rural mice of the children's tale "City Mouse and Country Mouse" but again also the nature of Graham's work, which stresses a perpetual fascination on the part of the artist with the permanent instability of the photographic, filmed self.

Unlike the static visual art of Graham's contemporary Andy Warhol Graham's art stresses the perennial, perpetually changing climate of the modern self. By stressing the self of the artist as well, rather than iconic images or repetition, Graham suggests a perpetual re-conceptualization of the artist in relation to society and to previously existing works of film, as in the Cary Grant persona he adopted in Fishing on the Jetty. The City Self / Country Self sets up a duality of selves on film, as well as a duality of artist and subject matter -- the artist's self is split between subject and creator, between rural and urban. "My film trilogy is based on both personal childhood models and Hollywood stereotypes - 'screen memories', to adapt Freud's term," the artist said, upon its initial release. (Spira, 2003)

The Lisson gallery promotional material for City Self / Country Self's exhibition in the United States stated, in its own interpretation that the alternate personalities of the artist, filmmaker and photographer assumed in the film represented "two paired particles set for a repeated, cataclysmic encounter played out within the long cinematic tradition of the knockabout gag," stressing the parodic representation of filmic tropes within the work of the artist. ." (Lisson Gallery, 2004) However, even more significant and remarkable is Graham's use of his own body and identity in so many of his works, including City Self / Country Self.

The title of City Self / Country Self suggests, as is characteristic of Fishing on the Jetty as well, although not explicitly in the title, that the self and the representation of the self is part of the project of the enterprise of the artist. The artist has two selves in the context of the work. But unlike Andy Warhol's use of iconic images separate from the artist and the self, Graham integrates himself into his works. He does not so in image, as his image is mutable, from the country to the city self, to Cary Grant or Kurt Cobain. But the gazer of the work is always aware that he is looking at a representation of the artist rather than the 'real thing,' however seamlessly the real and the false representation may seem to overlap with one another.

The film City Self / Country Self is part of a trilogy with Vexation Island, 1997 and How I became a Ramblin' Man, 1999. The 1999 incarnation of this trilogy embraces the Victorian fascination of the artist with his beloved rock n' roll music, which formed the texture of his adolescence, growing up in Canada. Graham, although a Canadian, stresses the predominance of American popular cultural all over the world, and his status as a Canadian national gives him a unique, betwixt and between perspective of American culture, being of the American language and argot, but slightly distanced from American patriotism and national politics.

All of the recent installations of Graham's work are supposed to deal "with man and nature, city and country." (Lisson Gallery, 2004) The external shaping of Graham's work of the self is what makes his work so emphatically postmodern, as he focuses on the external and surface shifts of the artistic self, rather than internal shifts of consciousness, unlike the beloved Victorians his art is so often in dialogue with. Graham has often taken the study and alteration of classic works of 19th Century culture "as a starting point," but not so much as an inspiration but as a starting point for the 20th and the 21st century instability of fact and fiction. (Lisson Gallery, 2004) Of his own work, Graham has noted "it may be a burden to re-invent oneself every time, but it makes things more interesting. My method of working comes out of a lack of technique because I did not come out of painting, sculpture or photography. I even dropped out of studying art history. Conceptual art and the tradition, established by artists like Judd, of having your work fabricated by someone else, made what I am doing possible." As well as fellow artists such as Judd, Graham cites linguistic experts such as Saussure, whose "book on linguistics to show the arbitrary relation between the so-called signifier and the signified. I was also using a kind of readymade strategy based on the disputable assumption that a photograph is not art but an upside down photo is." (Spria, 2003)