Robin Rhode at the Venice Biennale
by Kim Gurney
Cape Town-born artist Robin Rhode has been selected by Venice Biennale director Maria de Corral for the exhibition 'Experience of Art' to be shown in the Italian Pavilion. Rhode, who was born in 1976, is the youngest of about 40 artists picked for the prestigious show. He is well known for video and performance art pieces that interrogate economic and social values and assumptions, often using humour and play.
According to the New York Perry Rubenstein Gallery, his work bridges 'the low-fi and the high-tech' and uses the subcultures of hip hop, sports, film and fashion to create provocative, high-energy pieces that investigate the rapid flux of South African politics, socio-economics and culture. At the gallery's September 2004 inaugural opening of Rhode's 'Night Caller', the artist drew a telephone booth directly onto the gallery wall while engaging the audience to participate.
The Gallery continued, 'Rhode uses crude materials like charcoal or black house paint to draw in the public realm - on the sidewalk, in the street, on building walls - and photographs and video tapes his performances using a stop/ action style that recalls Edward Muybridge's chronophotography.'
Rhode says of his own work in his ArtThrob biography: 'Through experimental drawing and performance, my artwork conveys a space in which identity itself can be kicked over, played with and therefore reinvented. I express the irony and paradox of the situation and paradigm of failure that becomes the substitute for the heroic advances of art on life.
'In the serious play of these transformative interventions, most of which are transient and contingent rather than allowing the verities of achievable art media, I point to the nature of 21st century art: mediated to the hilt, too knowing for its own good, reverential, edgy... that has proletarian touchstones but plays on the rarefied air of the conceptual, that you need to be quick to catch. Check it.'
Rhode currently lives in Berlin. Besides the Biennale, he will also show at the Museé de Modern de la Ville de Paris, Yokohama Triennale and the Museum of Modern Art this year.
