Modernity and Consciousness in the Art of Rodney Graham
Andrea D. Fitzpatrick
Rodney Graham, Vexation Island, 1997
35-mm CinemaScope film with stereo sound transferred to DVD,
9 min. continous loop projected onto screen size 156 x 366 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London, UK.
Rodney Graham, City Self/Country Self, 2000
35-mm film with sound transferred to DVD,
4 min. continous loop projected onto screen size 240 x 330 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London, UK.
Rodney Graham, Phonokinetoscope, 2001
16-mm film instillation with vinyl disc and modified turntable, 4:45 min. continous projected loop.
Dimensions variable. Courtesy of Donald Young Gallery, Chicago.
He sleeps in a narcotic stupor; receives a blow to the head that knocks him unconscious; falls with the force of an imploding high-rise; gets kicked in the pants by his sadistic alter ego; drops LSD and rides a bicycle perched backwards on its handlebars. The video and film performances of Canadian artist Rodney Graham (b. 1949) involve a number of journeys: some physical (by vehicle, foot, and bicycle); others psychic (involving sleep, drugs, or violent shocks to consciousness). Some of the roles staged by the artist are loosely autobiographical, while others fantastical. In Halcion Sleep (1994), he represents himself sedated and pyjama-clad, passed out in the back of a moving vehicle, introverted and buffered from the city’s stimuli; in Vexation Island (1997), he plays a castaway on a deserted island, alienated from civilization and doomed to eternal failure; in City Self/Country Self (2000), he acts as a nineteenth-century dandy on a collision course with a country fop (both roles played by Graham); in Phonokinetoscope (2001), he is a melancholy intellectual on a psychedelic trip in a public park. Graham’s journeys of revelation can be considered a contemporary manifestation of flânerie, updated with parody and inflected with self-willed psychosis. The flâneur figure, and the heightened visuality embodied by him, is an appropriate lens through which to consider Graham’s artworks, which involve the movement of his body in relation to various topographies, some urban, some “natural.”
Graham’s works are ‘cinematic trips’ in which he subjects himself to trials and tribulations both harrowing and obtuse.[1] These journeys are allegories for the states of consciousness the artist wishes to explore, always questioning the presumptions of linear time, seriousness, and the rationality that have framed Western, pre-modern notions of philosophy and the creative processes. Graham’s focus on modes of consciousness (involving sleep, drugs, dreams, shocks, and anxiety) unfolds in ways that signal a significant return to modernism’s themes or, more precisely, their continued relevance to contemporary art). Although Graham’s work makes evident the latest technical and aesthetic innovations in contemporary film and video art (the work of Stan Douglas and Gary Hill come to mind), it also suggests the preoccupations of the modernist avant-garde. According to Matthew Teitelbaum, some of these themes in Graham’s work are: ‘the art of translating experience and time and analyzing the act of seeing as expressed in Cubism; the operations of chance and the essential rethinking of art’s place in everyday life articulated by Dada artists; and one of the legacies of Surrealism, namely a privileging of the links between the unconscious and personal experience.’[2] Although Teitelbaum was writing for a 1994 exhibition catalogue of the artist’s work prior to but not including the works to be discussed here, his identification of some modernist themes circulating in Graham’s work still holds. A statement by Boris Groys written for the same catalogue is also still provocative: ‘this artist’s handling of the modern tradition is neither critical in the usual sense of this word, nor affirmative. [. . .] Thus we are dealing with an original strategy that needs to be defined more precisely.’[3] With Groys’s recommendation in mind, I proceed with an investigation of Graham’s work by turning to Walter Benjamin, the theorist who best identifies the themes of modernism while also pointing to avenues that lead directly to the postmodern age.
When discussing postmodern strategies, it is practically a cliché to refer to Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) because it explores the fetishization of originality and ‘the aura’ in light of the avalanche of simulacral images emerging from mass-oriented technologies of capitalist markets (such as newspapers, illustrated magazines, and films). While the postmodern obsession with representation and the photographic image is clearly incipient in Benjamin’s much-cited theory on the loss of the aura, with contemporary film and video, on the other hand, a different spectrum of motifs are engaged. These can be productively explored with recourse to his less-cited ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939), an essay in which Benjamin thematizes the following: the physicality of space; the urban as a significant place; and the constant bombardment of sensory impulses arising from various contacts (mechanical and human); in short, the embodied and technological aspects of the modern world and the subject’s experience of it. Further, Benjamin links between the most important intellectuals of the modern era (Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, as well as Henri Bergson) and the technologies emerging with modernity such as the assembly line, newspaper print production, the telephone, photography, and film. Important for Benjamin is the modern subject’s ruffled state of consciousness, emblematized by the flâneur and the pedestrian. Other significant themes in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ are temporality and shock, both pertinent to the analysis of video and film works which involve time-based media and can therefore be subjected to dramatic editing techniques in order to convey explosive movements and to produce shock. Unlike the stasis inherent to the photographic image, film and video are founded upon the temporality of sequential images and therefore hold a greater potential for narrative and other trajectories, in particular, those involving space, time, and bodies.[4]
As mentioned, in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Benjamin was captivated by the figure of the flâneur, whose very existence in literature and in life demanded the presence of the city, its crowds, and pedestrians.[6] The flâneur’s silhouette is modern, urban, and cuts effortlessly through the bustling streets, apparently avoiding its shocks and jolts, but nonetheless enchanted by their energy. Benjamin is interested in the effect of such encounters on modern consciousness, and makes a case for how the shocks and jolts of the city became a paradigm of the modern subject’s experience:
These ‘shocks’ to the body and to the senses, formed by a series of fragmented, interrupted experiences both psychological and physical, reflect the fabric of everyday life. Here Benjamin is informed by Freud’s proposals in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), an essay in which the psychoanalyst suggests that the modern subject must not fully digest or internalize such stimuli (so that they become stored permanently as memory, which would overcome the subject), but buffer and deflect the shocks. Unlike Freud however, Benjamin believed that the shocks should be retained and actively engaged in consciousness, thereby making them readily available for such ‘poetic’ purposes as he believes Baudelaire achieves with his epic ode to modernity, Les Fleurs du mal (1857).
One of the original flâneurs is, of course, critic and poet Charles Baudelaire, who was captivated by the various levels of society on display in Haussmann’s Paris, in which newly-emergent playgrounds, promenades, parks, and commercial thoroughfares offered a steady stream of visual and narrative interest, such as: ‘The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of fleeting existences – criminals and kept women – which drift about in the underworld of a great city [ . . .].’[7] The Baudelairian practice of flânerie was primarily one of looking rather than participation, of recognition and evaluation of urban life and its peculiar social patterns.[8] Baudelaire’s own critical powers were filtered through his observant position as a flâneur; witness to the intangible but continuous movements of the urban masses. His definition of what was modern in art is thematized by a sense of movement, which applies to the flow of crowds in the city streets (indeed, they were the subjects painted by Edouard Manet and the Impressionists): ‘By “modernity” I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.’[9] The elegant, pseudo-philosophical prerogative of the flâneur is to retain a slight distance from the masses. The crowd, by contrast, is described by Benjamin as having an ‘essentially inhuman make-up’ in which ‘composure has given way to manic behaviour.’[10] Nonetheless, as Benjamin states, the flâneur is tied integrally to the city streets and to its crowds in Baudelaire’s writing: ‘To endow this crowd with a soul is the very special purpose of the flâneur.’[11] Moreover, Benjamin’s approach to the lyric poetry of Baudelaire is itself a meandering pattern, not unlike the trajectories of the flâneur. According to Hannah Arendt, the critical methodology of Benjamin’s writing is emblematized by the flâneur: ‘It is to him, aimlessly strolling through the crowds in the big cities in studied contrast to their hurried, purposeful activity, that things reveal themselves in their secret meaning [. . .].’[12] In terms of the artwork of Rodney Graham, our key interest in Benjamin and his essay on Baudelaire lies in his identification of the themes of the flâneur and shock. From a broader perspective, shock emerges as the underlying threat of catastrophe that haunts and frames the utopian aspirations of modernity. This is in keeping with Graham’s work, which may initially appear carnivalesque, but is ultimately dystopic and unsettling.
The legacy of these historic thinkers – not only Benjamin and Freud, but also Poe, Bergson, and Proust – who all influenced the course of modernism’s development in visual art, emerges in striking ways in the work of Rodney Graham. Graham’s attraction to a number of site-specific experiences, depicted from an embodied perspective and at ground level, through various levels of (un)consciousness, temporal distortion, and shock, offers a contemporary reflection of the legacy of “psychogeography” and the dérive theorized by Guy Debord and his Situationist International colleagues in the 1950s, which inspires this issue of Drain. Rather than expand directly upon the S.I. practices (which is done thoroughly by other contributors to this issue of Drain), I turn to Benjamin’s essay and to Graham’s artwork to demonstrate how they contribute to a lively and enduring stream in European thought (involving consciousness and the creative perception of the urban geography). This legacy weaves from Baudelaire to André Breton through to the present in North America. Rodney Graham’s work brings new adrenaline to such penultimate modernist themes as the city, its mechanical rhythms, distorted temporalities, and various modes of consciousness.
Rodney Graham, Halacion, 1994, single channel video, silent, transferred to DVD,
26 min. loop. Coutesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London, UK.
Graham’s Halcion Sleep (1994) is the first work in which the artist used his own body as a performative vehicle, which signalled a major new direction for him. It is a self-referential work involving sleep and the journey, themes which subsequently recur in his work. Halcion Sleep is a 26 minute, single-take video of the artist wearing striped pyjamas and sleeping in the back of a van while being driven through streets of Vancouver at night. Earlier, in a motel on the outskirts of the city, Graham purposely ingested a double dose of the prescription sleeping pill Halcion, ‘a sedative/hypnotic chosen for the pleasant thoughts of the past evoked by its name – that of the bird of legend (halcyon), who builds her nest in the sea.’[13] He arranged to then be driven home by his brother and a friend while he was still sleeping, during which time the video was made. He wanted to return to feelings of childhood safety, to re-engage and re-kindle gentle memories of sleeping as a child: ‘I also wanted to enact a regression based on my earliest recollection: that of briefly, only briefly, awakening from a luxurious and secure sleep in the back of my parents’ car on the way home from some family road-trip, before drifting back to sleep.’[14] Graham’s association between waking consciousness and anxiety is evident in Halcion Sleep in its nostalgia for childhood dreams. His statement reveals the dark side to his journey in attempting to keep at bay a creeping anxiety ‘briefly, only briefly.’ His journey is one of contemporaneity because the drug of choice is produced by the industry of designer pharmaceuticals created in recent decades to alleviate a complex spectrum of mood or attention-deficit disorders, sleep disturbances, anxiety, and depression. Graham’s work reflects the era when Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (admired by Graham) committed suicide, and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s novel Prozac Nation (1994) become a bestseller. As art historian Christine Ross has shown in her analysis of the videos of Ugo Rondinone, Rosmarie Trockel, Douglas Gordon, and Bruce Nauman (among others), depression, sleep disorders, failure, and a desire for the disengagement or a muffling of the subject away from the perils of social interaction are tendencies to characterize subjectivity from the 1990s to today, and comprise a significant thematic in contemporary art.[15]
Basically nothing happens in Halcion Sleep, which makes it similar to Andy Warhol’s experimental film Empire (1964): both works focus on singular, immobile “objects” in which the only perceptible action is a peripheral flickering of lights in the darkness. With Warhol, this is the result of tourists taking flash photos from New York’s Empire State building at night[16]; with Graham, the blur of street lights passed on a rainy British Columbia evening. Sylvia Martin makes the apt comparison between Graham’s Halcion Sleep and another precedent by Warhol, Sleep (1963), a silent film which records the slumber of the poet John Giorno for a phenomenal five hours and twenty-one minutes. Martin states that, ‘Both [. . .] focused on a sleeping person, thereby taking the duration of time as their theme.’[17] At times, Warhol’s Sleep looks like a photograph due to the figure’s immobility; for long stretches, Giorno is almost completely still. The centrality of passing time in all of these works makes important the Bergsonian concept of the durée – or lived, experienced time – a view of temporality as a physiological and phenomenological process involving a layering of memories.[18] Benjamin comments on Bergson’s durée, describing it as a perpetual flow of time that precedes and exceeds the life of the subject, as something unpleasant that must be endured like a torture: ‘The durée from which death has been eliminated has the miserable endlessness of a scroll.’[19] The irritation of real time in Halcion Sleep and Warhol’s Sleep suggests how the durée experienced by the viewing subject, evident in the viewer’s boredom, is paralleled by the works’ unfolding in a time-based medium. According to Lynne Cooke (commenting a later film by Graham), ‘The lived moment in cinema becomes the moment as cinema: the performance enacted by the cinematic language becomes a performance of existence, an articulation of durée [. . .].’[20] Distinguishing Graham’s work from its earlier precedent is the fact that Warhol’s Sleep was the first of his many experimental, 16 mm films that were shot at twenty-four frames per second and then projected at sixteen frames per second. This effectively slows down the figures’ movements to a sluggish, drugged appearance of only two-thirds the normal speed. Warhol’s Sleep is a structuralist exploration of the film medium, where an extended duration of time is pitted against various movements (the flow of the film through the projector, and the slowed down, infrequent movements of the sleeper’s body). Thus, consciousness is engaged in Warhol’s film not only by its subject matter (sleep), but also by a temporality altered by a mechanical adjustment to the projection equipment. And while Warhol’s Sleep has homoerotic connotations, it is neither a psychological nor a personal film; it does not constitute a portrait (in the traditional sense), or reflect the prior emotional engagement of Warhol to his subject as a memoir or (auto)biography. Sleep primarily reveals Warhol’s proclivity to voyeurism in his early films, treated in formal terms by way of structuralist experimentation. By contrast, Graham’s Halcion Sleep is exhibitionist, autobiographical, psychological, and topographical due to the trajectory of the artist’s body through the streets of his native Vancouver.
A journey was taken by Graham but not experienced consciously. By shooting the performance at night, and by focusing on his immobile body rather than the passing spectacle, Graham insulates and cocoons himself, as well as the viewer, from the city. Halcion Sleep therefore translates the flâneur motif into an inverse territory, projected not outward in response to the world, but inward. Graham takes recourse to sleep as if to close himself off from the visual pleasure offered by the city. Graham buffers his consciousness against shock not only by taking a private vehicle, thereby avoiding the physical jolts of pedestrian movement, but by anaesthetizing himself from the ride itself. The trajectory through the city as a potentially alienating experience is brought up to date; typical of the suburban mentality of North America, travel is done in a private vehicle rather than on foot. The immediacy of the flâneur’s experience is muted by the metal and glass of an upholstered, automotive fishbowl. Instead of the flâneur being the locus of active vision, Graham’s docile body is supine and unaware. He is neither the active perpetrator of the gaze, nor does he does return the viewer’s gaze; he is the one on display, a spectacle of inertia.
Graham’s trip alludes to art before Warhol, most strikingly to André Breton’s conception of Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s involving the creative potential of the unconscious, sleep, madness, and trance-like states directly inspired by Freud’s research. Freud’s explanation of what a dream state entails, from his essay ‘A Note on the Unconscious’ (1912), is therefore pertinent:
Freud’s description of dream work as the unearthing of uncomfortable issues, reflecting the events of the day but woven through a life-time of repressed experiences, reminds us that the ‘tendencies’ buried in the unconscious are there because they cause the subject ‘repulsion.’[22] Graham’s strategy with Halcion Sleep – the intentional pursuit of particular dreams – is clearly not in keeping with Freud’s insistence that the function of dreams is to allow the hitherto repressed content of difficult experiences to emerge in a semi-consciousness state, where it can be safely tested. Graham’s paradoxical strategy – involving the tension between chance and rationality, the uncensored content of dreams and their coaxing or editing – recalls the challenges to the automatic writing and drawing practices of the Surrealists in their early years (such as André Breton’s with Robert Desnos, and André Masson’s).[23] According to these Parisian avant-gardists, the modern subject should renounce rationality in favour of a revolutionary state of consciousness, one that has a drugged look and feel to it. This is espoused by Breton (who was directly inspired by Baudelaire) in his early conception of Surrealism, about which he writes: ‘There is every reason to believe that [Surrealism] acts on the mind very much like drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can put man to frightful revolts. It also is, if you like, an artificial paradise, and the taste one has for it derives from Baudelaire’s criticism [. . .].’[24] Graham’s wilful ingestion of a hypnotic sedative forms a dialogue with the self-induced waking dream states that propelled Breton through the streets of Paris on erotic-poetic journeys. Recounted by Breton in the photographically-illustrated memoirs Nadja (1928) and L’amour fou (1937), these journeys – almost all on foot – involved chance encounters, memory flashes, magical coincidences, premonitions, and of course, ‘mad love.’ Other Surrealist activities included scavenging trips to the Paris flea market for the chance to find novel objects. Because Baudelaire was a key literary hero of Surrealism, one should understand Breton’s activities, walking the streets with a heightened visionary sense, as revitalized forms of flânerie: the contingency of the artist-poet’s body to the actuality of the street is always assumed. When Breton describes the particular monuments, hotels, and neighbourhoods in Paris that cause him a special frisson, he writes: ‘I succumb to the wonderful dizziness these places inspire in me, places where everything I have best known began.’[25] The flâneur’s contingency to the street is, however, not quite carried into Graham’s Halcion Sleep because the Canadian artist’s journey reflects the layout of North-American cities. Surrounded by sprawling suburbs, they necessitate travel by car. Further, Graham’s dream-state differs from Breton’s because it is neither waking nor walking. While Breton’s flânerie is ultimately phallic pursuit of eroticism and the fulfillment of male desire, Graham’s is a nostalgic, Proustian projection back in time to enchanting memories of childhood.
Halcion Sleep initiated a phase in Graham’s work that has continued to the present: a series of short films made with professional production values involving the artist in theatrical roles, some of which revolve around sleep or altered states of consciousness. Vexation Island (1997), a nine-minute film shot in CinemaScope with Hollywood production values, was a favourite at the 1997 Venice Biennale because of its perfect integration of the loop structure (fostered by DVD projection) with a storyline based on repetition. The film stars Graham (in full costume and makeup) in the role of an eighteenth-century British gentleman stranded on a deserted, tropical island. The remote “paradise” location suggests the antithesis of the urban: a complete alienation from the city and from civilization itself. This solitude proves to be both geographic and existential. Graham’s scenario first presents the castaway asleep in the blazing sun next to a parrot. After an extended period, with light flickering on the blue water and illuminating the near-shadowless, white sand, our protagonist slowly wakes up. Disoriented, grumpy, and thirsty; he has the bright idea to shake a near-by palm tree to release a coconut. True to Newtonian physics, the coconut falls down to hit our hapless character squarely on the forehead, creating a prominent, bloody wound and sending his stunned, inert body backwards with a monumental, catastrophic thud. This veritable “fall of man” is shot at such close range (with the camera positioned in a ditch in the sand) that Graham’s red-costumed body momentarily eclipses the sun. The DVD technology allows Graham to structure the film in a loop, so that after the coconut reduces him to a sprawling, unconscious figure on the beach, he will once again wake up and repeat his futile actions, ad infinitum, doomed for eternity in a Sisyphean nightmare. The crisply-edited sequence of shots, which drive forward the inevitable encounter between man and coconut, are augmented by brilliant colours, glittering sunshine, and convincing special-effects.[26] The cycle repeats seamlessly, woven into a narrative in which a hilarious apex is simultaneously a pathetic dénouement.
As Jack Liang points out, the seductive compulsion of the Vexation Island involves a Freudian repetition and return; the so-called death drive described by the psychoanalyst in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’[27] Turning directly to Freud’s 1920 essay (which, I remind the reader, inspired Benjamin’s theme of shock in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’), one learns that the drive towards ‘mastery’ achieved by repeating the painful circumstances of a difficult situation is a common (rather than pathological) response to the threat of danger.[28] Freud describes a boy who plays fort-da with his toy by repeatedly throwing it from his play-pen, only to draw it back by its string. Freud interprets the toddler’s game as an imitation of his mother’s departure and return and a means to offset the pain of her absences (by the control he asserts throwing and retrieving the toy). Unlike the child in Freud’s famous study, Graham’s castaway in Vexation Island never masters the threat to consciousness, but experiences a shocking jolt that wounds him again and again. The ‘pleasure’ of returning to experiences that can be potentially dangerous compels not only the protagonist in Graham’s film (the artist, who is trapped by his own self-defeating actions), but also the viewers, who are transfixed by the tragic-comic sequence enough to watch it repeatedly. The viewer is left unnerved because the film’s circularity subverts the expectation of closure fundamental to most dramatic films and literature, which involve linear narratives and clearer beginnings and ends.
It was Jeff Wall who first made the connection between Freud’s important essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ and an earlier work by Graham in which the loop structure is used with a radical, modernist literary text as the medium.[29] For the book-work entitled Lenz (1983), Graham appropriated a classic novel of German Romanticism by Georg Büchner (1835) and excerpted a section of it so that the phrase ‘the forest’ forms a link between the beginning and end of a narrative sequence which could be repeated without causing any incoherence to the story. Graham had this excised section of the story type-set so that ‘the forest’ would begin and end a series of pages, which were subsequently printed eighty-three times (enough times to comprise a book-size volume), and then bound to form his “own” version of the story. Graham’s selection from Büchner’s tale has the depressive protagonist travel by horseback through the night into a winter forest (a suicidal ordeal of solitude and despair, a “dark night of the soul” against the elements), and emerge in morning to meet a kindly, elder pastor who provides him shelter and moral support. After sleeping overnight and upon waking, the protagonist repeats the entire journey into and out of the forest, including the morning meeting with the pastor, as if the previous night’s ordeal had never happened. Graham simultaneously condenses and extends Büchner’s tale through the Freudian principle of repetition and return, so that the hermetic, futile narrative structure becomes closed without achieving any closure. If one considers Vexation Island a citation of another canonical work of modernist literature, Robinson Crusoe, as does Dorothea Zwirner,[30] then the following insight offered by Wall allows one to understand Graham’s strategy in Lenz as a precedent for his use of the loop in subsequent films. According to Wall, Graham’s achievement is ‘to extract the core of unsurpassable despair and dystopian anxiety from the original, and configure it not as literature, but as a non-linguistic, form-ruining force [. . .] by a means of a principle of repetition.’[31] Wall also explains that since the repetition of the Lenz tale is achieved by industrial processes (printing and bookbinding), the subjective, creative aspect of authorship is rendered neither obsolete nor decimated, but mechanized.[32] It is fascinating how Rodney Graham’s use of the loop structure in Vexation Island clearly originated in a medium that is textual, numerical, and tangible, the détournement of Lenz, a work of modernist Sturm und Drang literature.
According to Zwirner, Vexation Island ultimately ‘tells the story of a blow to the head.’[33] Surely Graham’s sequence will eventually change and he’ll learn from his mistake, or else he’ll fatally succumb to his repeated concussions and put all parties out of their misery. In dreams, however, the self never dies. And, much like good dreams, or those involving desire, its fulfillment, or a series of harrowing, tantalizing near-misses, Graham’s film repeats a non-lethal story. Nonetheless, the wound caused by the coconut falling on Graham’s forehead never heals and is endlessly re-inflicted. If the historic, literary archetypes in Vexation Island are familiar, its philosophic implications are no less profound. As Zwirner notes, ‘The wound, hence, both initiates and concludes a “vexatious” cycle, which becomes a metaphor for inner abjection and defeat.’[34] The external, physical wound – a stigmatum that marks him as an eternal target – comprises the central motif to the protagonist’s rise and fall. He gets up, not without some difficulty, only to be struck down, dumbfounded, felled by his own relentless striving (or mere stupidity). The audience laughs: is this slapstick or tragedy? The allegorical dimensions of Graham’s work resonate with the modernist questioning of teleological notions of progress (going back to Rousseau and the Enlightenment) involving alienation and solitude amidst the urban environment, a desire to abandon “civilization” and “rationality” in order to escape to a “natural” paradise, and the impossibility of doing so. The psychogeography in Vexation Island involves a desperate, life-threatening removal from the conveniences of modernity and civilization. Away from the city, man is “out of his element” to the extent that in trying to help himself, he sends himself into a perpetual nightmare.
Graham’s allegory also conveys a cynical, postmodernist critique, the humbling correction of the masculinist hero myth of the artist-genius with images of humiliation and vulnerability. Transcendence and immanence, the mind and the body, progress and regression, are all locked in tension. This leads us to an aspect of Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ not yet discussed in the Graham literature, where the psychoanalyst makes a case for the presence of self-defeating behaviour as a protective mechanism originating at the biological level (thus going against the evolutionary principles of Darwin). The philosophic assumptions Freud shattered with this important essay strikes at the centre of centuries-old (at least since Descartes) humanistic ideas about the apparently innate impulses towards the preservation of life and the continued aspirations of sentient beings (with humans at the pinnacle) towards rationality and progress:
Thus sounds a seismic death knell towards humanistic optimism and its premise of ever-improving, ever-advancing development. As Wall convincingly argues: ‘But even those who do not accept Freud’s sociology have recognized in the notion of a death-instinct operating in history and image, however distorted, of actual social and psychic forces which produce and reproduce misery.’[36] In light of the implications of Freud’s essay, the repetition-compulsion inherent in Graham’s Vexation Island goes beyond a parodic, anti-heroic, or myth-busting allegory for postmodern times, and speaks to a philosophic legacy of radical, secular thinking at least since Freud.
The narrative in Graham’s short, looped film City Self/Country Self (2000) can be described as a cataclysmic “contact” occurring between a city slicker and a country hick, who are both played by the artist. In the pedestrian movements of both of Graham’s “selves,” the film creates a choreography of cruelty. The sound of horses’ hooves clomping on a cobble-stone street sets the tempo. As the Country Self strolls through town, he adjusts a black hat, stops to sniff a rose, and then checks the time on a clock tower. Simultaneously, the City Self strides with determination along the same street, where he tips his hat to a passing lady, gets his boots polished by a subservient boy, and then checks the time on his pocket watch. After a bustling, horse-drawn carriage passes, the two “selves” cross paths in the middle of the street. All of a sudden, the City Self swings around to violently kick the unsuspecting Country Self in the ass. This causes the Country Self’s hat to fly off his head (talk about Freudian imagery . . .) and land on the cobble-stones. Because the kick was filmed from many different angles and repeated eight times with razor-sharp, rapid-fire editing, the traumatic event achieves cubistic coverage. The Country Self subsequently retrieves his composure and his hat, which he places back upon his head, and begins his walk through town as if nothing had happened, thus initiating the confrontation-kick cycle once again. Like the circular narrative of Vexation Island, the digital projection creates a hermetically-sealed loop that insists upon a Freudian repetition and return, itself a structure that shocks. Graham uses the combination of film and DVD media to heighten the rhythm of the walking movements, to exploit the panic felt by the viewer, and to exacerbate the sense of shock created by the impending kick.
The Country Self is kicked at the staccato pace of the mechanized world. It is therefore important to note an analogy Benjamin makes between the film medium and the experience of the shocks to consciousness that afflict modern subjects, who must navigate the flows of city traffic, the rapid-fire rhythms of a conveyor belt, and other technology-driven activities:
Recent commentary on the centrality of the shock experience to modernist, avant-garde consciousness is made by contemporary film theorist David Campany who writes (about Dziga Vertov): ‘If the speed of modernity was experienced as a series of switches in tempo and shocks to perceptual habits, then progressive art was obliged to match and parry with switches and shocks of its own.’[38] Campany’s view suggests that Benjamin’s understanding of film is still an accurate description of the cinematic impulses of the cinematic avant-garde. This is pertinent to Graham’s work, which makes evident a modernist inheritance when he, on one hand, uses the video medium in Halcion Sleep in a documentary way (without edits, as if to anaesthetize himself against such shocks) and, on the other hand, edits his films Vexation Island and City Self/Country Self so that protagonists and viewers alike experience shock to the maximum effect, in extended, repeated form.
Although in City Self/Country Self the cobblestone of the street and its narrow, curving layout alludes to an earlier historical era (medieval times), the mechanized movements of its various bodies (human, animal, and mechanical) are emblematic of a Benjaminian modernity. With his materialist’s eye for detail, Benjamin observes the automation of bodies that arose due to the inventions of modernity. In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ he notes such gestures as the hand striking a match, the tapping of the telephone receiver to initiate a call, the factory worker robotically responding to the assembly line, and the addictive movements of gamblers in their games of chance.[39] These modern movements – quick, fragmentary, violent, and repetitive – are also central to the metronymic rhythm of Graham’s City Self/Country Self. Not only the kick, but the shoe-shine boy’s militaristic swish of cloth on leather, the horses’ clacking hooves, and the ticking time-pieces bring everything into ominous synchronization, and reflect the automaton rhythm of modernity ruled by the standardization of time. As Benjamin also suggests, there are different responses to be taken towards the onslaught of modernity’s jolts. These are embodied by two distinct figures, the flâneur and the pedestrian: ‘There was the pedestrian who would let himself be jostled by the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forgo the life of a gentleman of leisure.’[40] Both figures, the pedestrian and the flâneur, and their inextricable relationship to the city’s streets, are central to the shocking contact that occurs in City Self/Country Self. Consciousness verges towards psychosis because Graham inhabits two different roles simultaneously: the meandering flâneur, who thinks he can buffer himself from such violent shocks, and the pedestrian, the perpetrator of such explosive jolts. Strangely, it is the Country Self that plays the meandering flâneur with time to smell the flowers, while the City Self is on a mission with robotic drive.
The parcelling out and segmentation of time (which was in previous eras conceptualized as flowing and continuous) is another theme of modernity according to Benjamin. He notes Baudelaire’s ‘second hand’ metaphor, the incessant ticking and marking of the passing of time on a pocket-watch, which suggests a manic awareness of the advancement of time and history, of time’s regularization into precise intervals.[41] Benjamin brings attention to the artificiality of telling time in the modern era (dictated by the mechanization of clocks rather than by sensory experience or memory), which causes Baudelaire despair: ‘The outbreaks of rage are timed to the ticking of the seconds to which the melancholy man is slave.’[42] As mentioned, temporality and a negotiation of its flow is a foundation for film and video. As if mirroring the time-based parameters of the medium, Graham has both protagonists in City Self/Country Self check the time, and the pocket watch (personal time) is brought into synchronization with the clock tower (civic time). As Cooke writes, ‘Temporality in Rodney Graham’s CITY SELF/COUNTRY SELF (2000) thus assumes manifold guises – cyclical as well as linear, simultaneously into the past as well as the future – as he counterpoints a lived variant with one that is mechanistically calibrated and regulated.’[43]
Clearly, the repetition of shocking experiences which drive the looped narrative in City Self/Country Self parallels the behaviour Freud calls ‘repetition/compulsion.’[44] The implications of Graham’s title City Self/Country Self, and the eerie resemblance between the two characters (suggesting the split self, the double, or the evil twin), make clear that the whole scenario is a dream. However, with City Self/Country Self, the scenario involves the ‘traumatic neuroses’ that are evident in some ‘anxiety dreams’ or ‘punishment dreams’ which, Freud notes, are a disturbing qualification to the notion of dreams as wish-fulfillment because ‘they merely put in the place of the interdicted wish fulfillment the punishment appropriate to it, and are thus the wish-fulfillment of the sense of guilt reacting on the contemned impulse.’[45] The City Self’s kick is repeated to a sadistic extreme by the editing, so that in a few seconds the Country Self experiences humiliation magnified to hyperbolic proportions. As a nightmare of public shame (clearly the “punishment” for aspirations to social sophistication), Graham’s kick is classically Freudian. This horrific social situation is augmented by the unfolding of the film as two parallel movements in which the individual trajectory of each “Self” is laden with social niceties. Their walking movements build to a spectacular crescendo, a shock to consciousness (in particular, to self-esteem) that even a Freudian subject would have difficulty buffering. The psychogeography of City Self/Country Self thus entails a paranoiac fantasy in which Graham projects his private neuroses into the public sphere as social chastisement meted out like clockwork. The film’s evocation of Freudian subjectivity is also evident in Graham’s decentralized, destabilized identity, the awareness that others have conflicting or negative views of the self. The confrontation is not, of course, between self and other, but within one subject whose dream materializes the oppositional aspects of the self with vivid clarity.
Graham’s attraction to altered states of consciousness unfolding in public places is also apparent in Phonokinetoscope (2001), a 16 mm film installation accompanied by psychedelic music, some of it composed and sung by the artist. The short, looped film shows Graham seated on a stone in the middle of a well-groomed park, actually the Tiergarten in Berlin. Dressed in a black turtleneck, jeans, and horn-rimmed glasses, Graham is reminiscent of a beatnik from the 1960s or, more ironically, the Germanic “avant-garde” character Dieter invented by the Canadian comic Mike Myers for Saturday Night Live. After ingesting a square of blotter acid imprinted with an Alice in Wonderland Mad Hatter character on it, Graham spies a playing card and a wooden clothes pin lying in the grass. Ingeniously, he uses the clothes-pin to insert the card into the spokes of his bicycle so that it will make a clicking sound when the wheels rotate. The clicking sound sets off another machine, a turntable playing vinyl recordings (both retrograde technologies) beyond the film image and in the gallery space itself. Graham then rides the bicycle in a meandering path through the park, stopping occasionally to stare in wonder at a statue, and eventually returns to the original stone, to sit, contemplate, drop LSD, and yet again notice a playing card and clothespin in the grass.
The title of the work is Graham’s variation on Thomas Edison’s 1889 invention called the kineto-phonograph, which allowed a projected film to be synchronized with its recorded soundtrack. In Phonokinetoscope, Graham uncouples the projected film image from synchronous sound so that the assortment of songs vary in relation to the image, creating an endless assortment of ‘music videos.’[46] The playing card stuck in the spokes of the bicycle wheel (so that when it turns, its sound mimics that of the film projector) makes evident Graham’s attraction to mechanical sounds and his debt to the precedent established by Michael Snow with his experimental film Wavelength (1967), in which a whirring sound increases in pitch and volume steadily for the 45 minute duration of the film, to a near-deafening level. Because the mass of Graham’s projector and the audibility of the film running through it are insisted upon by the artist, the Phonokinetoscope installation is similar to a number of his other films, such as Two Generators (1984), Rheinmetall/Victoria - 8 (2003), Loudhailer (2003), and Torqued Chandelier Release (2005). Graham’s unveiling of the mechanised reality of the film projection (suggesting that it is not so much a flow as much as a jolting, forward movement of serial images and segments) reminds one of an observation by Benjamin, ‘That which determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film.’[47] Graham makes the viewer aware of the mechanical nature of the film medium when sound and image become dislodged from their usual synchronization.
The site-specificity of Phonokinetoscope masks the urban; the Tiergarten is an artificial oasis of “nature” in the middle of a huge, industrialized city. Graham’s performance is surely a generational reference because it alludes to the activities of hippies, such as sit-ins and love-ins in public parks. Because the artist was born in 1949, he would have come of age during the 1960s, a decade of psychedelic experimentation. Graham’s journey is both physical, involving the movement of his body (at one point deftly riding backwards on the bicycle’s handlebars), and mental, a drug trip whose duration would certainly exceed the parameters of the short film. True to layers of irony in Graham’s work, he stops his bicycle near Rousseau Island, an oasis within the planned park situated at the center of Berlin’s urban landscape. Nature and culture meet in subversive ways when the civilizing powers of cultivated nature are put into contrast with Graham’s artificial state of consciousness, harnessed by the counter-culture of chemical laboratories. According to Mathew Hale, Graham did, indeed, drop acid, although the documentary aspect stops there because the entire scenario was scripted by Graham in advance and directed by a hired professional. In Phonokinetoscope, as in Halcion Sleep, the tension between the work’s seemingly spontaneous narrative and its obvious preconception would appear to be at odds with the mental hallucinations experienced by the artist. The fact that Graham is “tripping” on acid is only evident by his fascination with the flickering, stroboscopic effect of the playing card stuck in the rotating wheels of the bicycle, and his desire to ride the bicycle while sitting backwards on the handlebars.
In Phonokinetoscope, the journey as a metaphor for escape – from the reality of urban life, and from the burden of rational consciousness. The trip metaphor in Phonokinetoscope returns us to the thematic explored in Halcion Sleep and it is similarly haunted by depression and anxiety. In the split between the image and the sound (in which there is no synchronicity, but instead, a shuffling among songs), Hale finds ‘a representation of a destabilized mind.’[48] This is mirrored by Graham’s original lyrics for one of the songs played during the film, which are as follows:
The lyrics reveal a tormented subject at odds with the image of the care-free stunt-man one sees in the film, whose antics are funny. Hale makes the connection between Graham’s pensive position in the film (when he is seated on the rock, surrounded by “tools” he has yet to utilize), with Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melancholia (1514), an allegory for a self-absorbed, depressive artist with writer’s block and, on a broader level, the active life pitted against the contemplative life. As with the all the works by Graham discussed previously, a farcical exterior is the masquerade for a melancholy subject.
In conclusion, Graham is an artist in the Duchampian tradition (involving chance and dry humour in tension with rationality and intentionality). In many ways, his outlook is also typically Canadian: intellectual, depressive, and self-deprecating while simultaneously ironic and irreverent. He is hilarious but never shows himself laughing. His expression is stern or sceptical and his delivery dead-pan. As curator Josée Bélisle notes, the ‘personae’ performed by Graham are vulnerable rather than heroic, and involve ‘hints of a “personal story” and bravura works in which self-depiction has no fear of self-mockery – nor of transgression.’[50] The chameleon identities played by Graham are, in turn, the melancholic, the self-defeating fool, the victim, and the freak. In a manner distinct from other male contemporary artists who use their bodies for performative purposes, Graham explores anxiety-ridden subjectivity by way of slapstick theatricality and farce. He always insists upon an embodied – rather than transcendent (i.e. Cartesian) – experience of consciousness; with Graham, there is no mind-body split. The artist’s body is a mediating density, an emblem for the states of consciousness he wishes to perform, despite the impossibility of his body fully expressing the mental functioning that is unfolding within. The urban landscape and feelings of alienation brought about by the city’s requisite social contacts are also evident in Graham’s work. His trajectories, embodied psychogeographies in relation to urban spaces, point directly to the flâneur and his alter ego, the pedestrian. Freudian themes of repetition-compulsion and shocks to consciousness are magnified by editing and the endless loop structure chosen for his work. Temporality becomes a hallucination of perception as Graham provokes the medium, disrupting linear time while showing time’s susceptibility to being broken into intervals. In Graham’s work, consciousness ultimately fall into two categories: hyper-perceptive and alert to the social perils of navigating the city streets, or alternatively, drugged, sleeping, or otherwise subdued. What makes Graham’s work so compelling is the way he blurs the boundaries of such modes of consciousness by, for example, depicting dream scenarios with the crystal-clear attention to microscopic detail fostered by feature film quality production values.
Graham’s journeys and the art-historical connotation brought to them by the flâneur, the shocks of modern experience, and the consciousness arising from them suggest that the themes preoccupying the avant-garde should be understood in terms of a continuous series of citations linking modernism, postmodernism, and beyond. Rather than a rupture from the past, such an understanding of contemporary cultural production as implicated by the tenets of modernism is hardly novel. As T.J. Clark writes of the modernist themes that continue to resonate in the postmodern era:
Rodney Graham’s interest in self-defeating repetition and return, temporal distortion, and the underlying anxiety of socially-constructed identities, demonstrates the limits to modernity’s utopian aspirations. Further, Graham’s artistic practice, involving such productive recourse to shocks to consciousness, shows how such shocks are amenable to ‘poetic experience’ (as Benjamin suggests is possible in the Baudelaireian tradition). Thus Graham’s dystopic art presents both the ‘dreams’ of modernity and its ‘primary processes,’ those psychological states and darker drives that compel us once the glossy veneer is broken. The references to modernist experience in Graham’s art do not comprise nostalgic tendencies, but are strategically (self)critical and, through his affirmative recourse to video and film media, entirely contemporary.
[1] I am grateful for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper at a panel discussing Projections, an exhibition curated by Barbara Fischer for the art galleries of the University of Toronto in 2007. This major survey covered over thirty years of Canadian artworks in lens-based media by such luminaries as Michael Snow, Stan Douglas, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Rodney Graham, and Rebecca Bellmore (among many others). Fischer’s conception of Projections as ‘a cinematic trip,’ involving works that ‘take the viewer somewhere,’ inspires my discussion in terms of flânerie, an activity that unites movement and visuality with urban spaces.
[2] Teitelbaum, Matthew. ‘Returning to the Present or Writing a Place in the World: Rodney Graham’, in Rodney Graham: Works from 1976 to 1994 (Toronto and Chicago: Art Gallery of York University and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1994), 29.
[3] Groys, Boris. ‘In the Context of Modernism’, in Rodney Graham: Works from 1976 to 1994, 43.
[4] Photographs arranged sequentially and or a grid, common structures inherent to conceptualist, photo-based practices of the 1960s onward, are clearly an exception with regards to the capacity for narrative. Perin Emel Yavuz has discussed Sophie Calle’s Suite vénitienne (1998) and other series of photographs by the French artist, in which she takes on the role of a female flâneuse, stalking and photographing men unknown to her in public places (such as museums or city streets), in terms of the tension between the neutral objectivity of the modernist grid and the narrative aspects of Calle’s vaguely-autobiographical practice, so loaded with desire, personal and sexual history, and emotional projection.
[5] Benjamin, Walter. ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939), in Arendt, Hannah (ed. and trans.) Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 155-200.
[6] Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, 162.
[7] Baudelaire, Charles. ‘On the Heroism of Modern Life: The Salon of 1846’ (1846), in Frascina, Francis and Charles Harrison (eds.) Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 18.
[8] A useful summary of this practice in terms of Manet’s painting is provided by Smith, Paul. ‘Manet, Baudelaire, and the Artist as Flâneur’, in Impressionism, Beneath the Surface (New York: Harry N. Abrams – Perspectives, 1995), 33-57.
[9] Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), in Modern Art and Modernism, 23.
[10] Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, 172.
[11] Ibid, 195.
[12] Arendt, Hannah. ‘Introduction’, in Illuminations, 12.
[13] Graham, Rodney. ‘Artist’s notes,’ in Exhibition Guide to Rodney Graham: A Little Thought, cur. Jessica Bradley (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2004), n.p.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ross, Christine. The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
[16] Mekas, Jonas. ‘Movie Journal: Warhol Shoots Empire, 30 July//1964,’ in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (London and Cambridge: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2007), 50.
[17] Martin, Sylvia. ‘Introduction’, in Video Art, ed. Uta Grosenick (Köln: Taschen, 2006), 19.
[18] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
[19] Benjamin, ibid, 185.
[20] Cooke, Lynne. ‘Rodney Graham: A Tale of a Hat’, Parkett, vol. 64, 2002, 97.
[21] Freud, Sigmund. ‘A Note on the Unconscious’ (1912), in Rickman, John (ed.) A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud (New York: Doubleday – Anchor, 1967), 51-52.
[22] Freud, ibid, 51.
[23] This was a central methodological problem to plague the desired stream-of-consciousness mode. For Breton, the question was whether or not automatic writing or drawing should be “corrected” by editing prior to its publication or exhibition.
[24] Breton, André. ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), in Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Michigan: Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 37.
[25] Breton, André. Mad Love (1937). Trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 47.
[26] Michael Rush, in Video Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), notes that the ‘richness’ of the work was achieved under the direction of Robert Longevall (176).
[27] Liang, Jack. ‘Another Day in Paradise: The Film and Video Work of Rodney Graham’, Parachute 95 (1999): 14.
[28] Freud, Sigmund. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ trans. C.J.M. Hubback, in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, ibid., 147.
[29] Wall, Jeff. ‘Into the Forest: Two Sketches for Studies of Rodney Graham’s Work’, in Rodney Graham: Works from 1976 to 1994, ibid., 11-26.
[30] Zwirner, Dorothea. Rodney Graham (Cologne: DuMont, 2004), 51.
[31] Wall, ibid., 14.
[32] Wall, ibid., 18.
[33] Zwirner, ibid., 50.
[34] Ibid., 9.
[35] Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ ibid., 162.
[36] Wall, ibid., 13.
[37] Ibid., 175.
[38] Campany, David, ed. ‘Introduction,’ The Cinematic (London & Cambridge: Whitechapel and MIT P, 2007), 10.
[39] Benjamin, ibid., 174-175.
[40] Ibid., 172.
[41] Ibid., 180.
[42] Ibid., 184.
[43] Cooke, ibid., 96.
[44] Freud, ibid., 150.
[45] Freud, ibid., 157.
[46] Rodney Graham cited in Hale, Mathew, ‘And I’m Wondering Who Could be Writing this Song,’ Parkett Vol. 64 (2002): 119.
[47] Benjamin, ibid., 175.
[48] Hale, ibid.
[49] Graham, Rodney. The Phonokinetoscope (2001) original song lyrics, as cited by Hale.
[50] Bélisle, Josée. ‘Brilliantly Paradoxical Work,’ in Rodney Graham. (Montréal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2006), 73.
[51] Clark, T.J. ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam,’ October 100 (2002): 172-173.
Andrea D. Fitzpatrick is assistant professor in the history and theory of art, University of Ottawa (www.visualarts.uottawa.ca). Research interests involve the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of contemporary lens-based art (photography, film, and video) and photojournalism. Current publications address: Suzanne Opton’s “Citizen” portraits of Iraqi exiles (One Hour Empire, Fall, 2008), Andres Serrano’s The Morgue series (RACAR, Vol. 33, 2008), and a memorial portrait by AA Bronson with Jorge Zontal (in the ‘death issue’ of BlackFlash, October, 2008). A book chapter on the visual metaphors of Brokeback Mountain (the film and the short story by Annie Proulx) is forthcoming.
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