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Interview with Anthony Spira, curator, Whitechapel Art Gallery
Anthony Spira- The first and last work in the exhibition, 'Halcion Sleep' invites visitors to travel on a dreamlike journey full of references and conundrums. How might you explain the diversity of your subjects and techniques?
Rodney Graham- 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. All art is about interpolating yourself into a tradition in one way or another.
AS- Your inverted photographs of trees and camera obscura models literally turn the world on its head. Do these 'scientific' experiments reveal a scepticism for accepted patterns of perception and the understanding of our environment?
RG- You don't have to delve very deeply into modern physics to realise that the scientific view holds that the world is really not as it appears. Before the brain rights it, the eye sees a tree upside down in the same way it appears on the glass back of the large format field camera I use. I chose the tree as an emblematic image because it is often used in diagrams in popular scientific books and because it was used in Saussure's 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.
AS- Why did you claim to 'neurotically hate cinema' in the early eighties?
RG- My hatred was neurotic because I was jealous of cinematic authors who, as practitioners of the dominant art form of the 20th century, could claim to affect a much larger audience in a deeper way. The implication was that as a visual artist, I was doing something a little too rarefied, elitist and out of date. My film trilogy is based on both personal childhood models and Hollywood stereotypes - 'screen memories', to adapt Freud's term.
AS- How does your enthusiasm for literature manifest itself in your text works?
RG- I never had a clear vision of myself as an artist. Earlier on I was equally interested in becoming a writer. It was the openness of conceptual art and its incorporation of textual and theoretical elements that emerged during the first years of my university education that opened my eyes to various possibilities. Lenz was the first text work I did when I was interested in appropriation as an artistic strategy. I wanted not only to appropriate literary works in an artistic context but to add to them - to interpolate myself into them - as a kind of performance.
AS- In your recent albums, you reference many different styles with an adaptability that appears at times equally reverential and mercenary. Other works emphasise the importance of practice in musical production.
RG- The intention with the pop music CD was different to that of the appropriation works that I described before. It was more about learning how to be a singer songwriter by copying, in a way that other works were about learning how to write a novel. I'm no longer as interested in conceptual strategies of appropriation that involve a kind of ironic distance. I'm more interested in inhabiting the roles I choose, like a method actor. As I get more into performing music in a singer songwriter context, I am developing an appreciation for the transitory pleasures of performance. My model at this point in time is more Bob Dylan and the 'Never Ending Tour' than Brian Wilson locked in a recording studio.
AS- Even in the section which is enigmatically entitled 'Bliss' domestic and idyllic environments present unbreakable cycles. If 'Bliss' suggests an arrival or an escape, then 'Halcion Sleep' may be the only relief. How appropriate is it to consider your work, with all its rich diversions, as a meditation on the human condition?
RG- While it's true that circular works invoke inescapable cycles of life and death, there is a practical aspect to my use of cycles and loops as well. When you show time-based works like video projections in a gallery, it makes sense to create short loops to 'ensnare' the viewer. The great thing about museums is that you don't have to show up on time. It is also an interesting formal problem to construct narratives with a view to create a seamless join at the loop point rather than a climax and denouement. Regarding 'Halcion Sleep' as an escape, I think of it too as a kind of a joke on the romantic idea that the artist is always working, even while asleep, because he or she is dreaming, and thus creating new artworks.
Rodney Graham has exhibited internationally for over 20 years, with recent exhibitions at Wexner Center for the Arts, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, and the Kunsthalle, Vienna. He represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1997.
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