Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein
by Sue Williamson
In 2004, the Perry Rubenstein Gallery chose to inaugurate their three exhibition spaces in West Chelsea with an extended exhibition of an artist then little known in New York, Robin Rhode.
Since then, Rhode�s particular brand of high energy performance in which he sets up classic situations and draws and acts his way through them, recording the process in photo and video, has become very much better known. At the end of 2005, Rhode was one of four young photographers showcased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the end of 2006, was one of the hits of Art Basel Miami, to name only two points on his rapid trajectory upwards. In September this year, Rhode will have his first major solo European museum exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
By now a highly in-demand young international art star, Rhode has not lost his allegiance to his old stamping ground, and in March this year returned to Cape Town to mount, entirely at his own expense, his Color Chart (2004-6) at the University of Stellenbosch Art Gallery, as part of Cape �07. Using a room sized rear projection, Rhode played out a series of running skirmishes against himself, wearing boiler suits of different colours. A powerful sound system of the velocity most desired by township taxis and hidden behind the screen filled the space with resonant beats.
And mid year, Rhode has returned to the Perry Rubenstein, again filling all three spaces. The show opened on May 5, and on May 13, the Sunday New York Times ran a full page article on the process of the setting up of the show.
As I heard Perry Rubenstein explain to gallery goers about a week later, Rhode is growing weary of being invited to do a performance at the opening of every new art space. �I was feeling like a minstrel�, he said. The new work has branched out to embrace a materiality that was not previously present. A silver perlemoen shell, on its back, like a busker�s upturned cap, is filled with coins - a reference, perhaps, to the fact that Rhode feels his early persona as street performer in a gallery has run its course.
In red South African Breweries� crates, the elegantly extended bottle necks of green glass bottles stretch upwards like plants free to grow in the sunlight at last. Rhode has said these represent Carling beer bottles, a brand beloved of the left during apartheid years because it was an international rather than a local brand. Referred to as �Zamalek� by Rhode, large quantities of it were quaffed before his performance at the South African National Gallery in 2000, at which Rhode pissed against a drawn Duchampian urinal (signed: R. Moet) on the gallery wall.
Memories of his tricks with a wall drawn bicycle are evoked by a real one coated with a thick layer of green Sunlight soap, a bronze bucket nearby as if on hand to effect an erasure.
Rhode�s homage to early filmmakers and the genre of slapstick plays itself out over a number of different pieces in the galleries. An almost impossible task has been set � but Rhode will strive to the point of exhaustion to make it work. In one, in a series of black and white photographs hung in a ziggurat shape Rhode plays ping pong with himself around a drawn table, stretching athletically to �return� the ball. Each stroke is registered by round white splat on the wall, till the entire wall is covered with splats.
But the piece which resonated most strongly for me, simple yet profound, was Candle. As Carl Sagan has famously said, �It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness�. Rhode�s piece was made on 16 mm film, a first for the artist. In it, the artist is attempting to strike a match to light a candle drawn on a wall. The grainy image is in negative. As the match catches and flares, the film goes into positive, adding detail to the figure of the man, seen before only as a pale grey silhouette, but as the artist�s hand struggles to get the wick to light, the film flickers and goes into negative.
The tension between various elements of his works has always been a key aspect of Rhode�s pieces: between the alternately advancing and retreating figures of Color Chart, between the casually drawn and the three dimensional of his performance pieces, and in Candle, the shifting balance between negative and positive, black and white, light and dark.
Rhode�s work has matured and evolved in exciting and unexpected ways, and this exhibition adds power, depth and shading to an ouevre that was already remarkable for its energy and consistently thorough conceptual basis.
May 5 to June 23
Perry Rubenstein Gallery
527 West 23, 526 West 24, 534 West 24
New York
www.perryrubenstein.com
