PHOTO:Rodney Graham -Lightboxes
Rodney Graham’s medium is the classic advertising light box but behind the smooth, shiny surface of illuminated photography, behind the perfectionist scenography, there always lurks a touch of melancholy that tells of the burdens of always playing one’s role perfectly in the theater of life. We seldom see a smile, the object rarely looks us in the eye. He happily drifts off into nothing, into the distance or into the past.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum Frieder Burda Archive
Since the ‘70s, Rodney Graham has been working on a rhizome-like, conceptual oeuvre that has never shied away from new jumps in time or genre. His work combines film, photography, installation, performance, painting, literature and music. Graham, who, along with artists such as Jeff Wall or Stan Douglas, belongs to the Vancouver School, appropriates styles, trends and discourses from the era of romanticism through to post-modernity, commenting or expanding on them or rethinking them with an understated irony. His sources of inspiration range from greats such as Sigmund Freud, Richard Wagner or Edgar Allan Poe to pop icons like Kurt Cobain. In the process, he simultaneously reveals and conceals his own artistic self-image, attitudes or feelings. In his solo exhibition “Lightboxes” at Museum Frieder Burda presents light boxes, a central medium in his complex oeuvre,that range from 2000 to the present. The exhibition begins with the monumental triptych “Antiquarian Sleeping in his Shop” (2017). In it, Graham portrays a collector who has nodded off while reading in his store, which is decorated with antiques and curios. Graham collected the props for the project himself in the antique and bric-a-brac shops of Vancouver. His work can be viewed as a multi-layered allegory for a retreat to eclectic styles and nostalgic inner worlds. His “Media Studies 77” (2016), which is being displayed on the mezzanine, seems like a parody of media research and academia in the post-factual world we live in today. In this case, Graham adopts the role of a dandy-like professor. If the medium is the message, as postulated by the Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan in 1964, it, along with its entire discourses, has been reduced to a simple surface. The screen is dark, the blackboards are blank, the only message in the entire room is the self-staging of the teacher. At the same time, Graham transforms this scene into a surface composition with abstract and monochrome elements. Upstairs in the museum are key works from the last decades, light boxes, many of which feature Graham’s best-known incarnations. They include, for example, the roles of the amateur painter, the camera salesman, the craftsman, the rambling man and the cowboy. All of Graham’s light boxes, including his still-life-like arrangements, teem with references. He constantly undermines the lines between high and mass culture and connects banal, everyday contexts with elaborate allusions to art history and intellectual history.
Info: Curator: Patricia Kamp, Museum Frieder Burda, Lichtentaler Allee 8b, Baden-Baden, Duration: 8/7-26/11/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.museum-frieder-burda.de
