Robin Rhode
Raised in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, Robin Rhode is a visual artist who, at just 33, has exhibited internationally for the past 10 years. From an acute personal perspective shaped by South Africa’s history of racial discrimination, he highlights the push and pull between the liberating force of the individual’s imagination and the confines of media-driven stereotypes.
At school Rhode participated in a ritual or hazing scenario triggered by new students entering the unfamiliar arena of high school. Somewhere between bullying and initiation, the act has made an important imprint on his work. With a piece of stolen chalk, something would be drawn on the toilet wall, perhaps an object of aspiration, such as a bicycle, or faint shame, such as a candle, indicating the reality that many at the school could not afford electricity. The child would be urged by his fellows to interact with the drawing in an imaginative way - blow out the candle, climb on the bike, pedal, pedal. It was the main form of art to which Rhode was exposed, but it thrilled him and he became “determined, absolutely ruthless” about training as an artist, becoming one of only two coloured students at his art school (Chalk Talk, The Guardian Weekend, Sept 2008).
Rhode places himself firmly in the intellectual artistic tradition, citing Duchamp, Man Ray and the Russian constructivists as key influences. Yet, these “high art” associations do not negate his equally strong ties to popular cultural phenomena in the realm of sports, music, ”brandism”, and certainly graffiti. Rhode is realizing his own personal vision of the world that surrounds him in a way that goes beyond established borders and genres of art.
In 2005 Rhode was featured in the 51st Venice Biennale and New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Last year he was the youngest artist ever to have had a solo show at the Hayward Gallery in London. “My first language is English. I played cricket, watched football, yet I’m a person of mixed race and I was brought up under the colonial system. So as a South African visiting England I have always felt like a second class citizen” (The Times, 5 Nov 2008). “It’s the empire strikes back with this one” Rhode tells Morgan Falconer about his exhibition at the White Cube (read the full article from The Times: You’re cruel, Britannia).
Sound and music have often played a part in Rhode’s work, and he has turned to Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky on two occasions already. Promenade (2008), a photographic sequence and digital animation, is a celebration of Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. The animation, a 5-minute stop-frame succession of photographs set to music, is in Rhode’s famous style of having a figure interacting with the painting as it evolves on the canvas, which often is a rough wall or street in his native Johannesburg. The film, in which an illusionist invokes a cascade of rhomboid shapes which threaten to overwhelm him until he corrals them and brings them under control, resonates with Mussorgsky’s description of the experience of creating Pictures at an Exhibition: “sounds and ideas float in the air and my scribbling can hardly keep pace with them”. In another 2008 work entitled Keys, Robin Rhode again refers to Mussorgsky’s piano work and by doing so makes a direct parallel to his own favourite medium of working with chalk.
Robin Rhode and Leif Ove Andsnes were introduced to each other through the Paris curator, Laurence Dreyfus who was appointed by The Lincoln Centre in New York (the project’s commissioning arts institution) to suggest a suitable artist for this year’s performance project. Robin Rhode was a natural choice.
