The Big Sleep: Rodney Graham’s Plots and Loops

by Jason McBride

“Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection’s love, it does not have the restlessness of hope, the uneasy adventurousness of discovery, but neither does it have the sadness of recollection—it has the blissful security of the moment.”
—Kierkegaard, Repetition

Man, rock is hard. So are drugs, jokes, and theory, and in the mercurial work of Rodney Graham all of these happily coalesce in combinations that alternately amuse, mystify, bore, move, and delight. What also seems hard: containing the thematic and formal sprawl of Graham’s work, but the Art Gallery of Ontario has done a commendable job, turning over an exceptionally large portion of its space to “Rodney Graham: A Little Thought,” an exhaustive, first-of-its kind sampling of the 55-year-old Vancouver artist’s musical, sculptural, film, and photographic work. (The show continues on to Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Pennsylvania.) Graham’s oeuvre has generated considerable international interest in the last decade, having refreshingly fused various ideas of staging, repetition, and quotation with entirely new ways of thinking about authorial agency and its failure, the co-dependence of artistic mediums, and the slippery slope of subjectivity. The show is exhaustive and exhausting; the glut of aesthetic strategies, ideas and sensations (there are more than 25 works on display) is dizzying, even a little stomach-churning; wandering through the labyrinthine rooms can feel like being at an amusement park where the only rides are roller coasters and the only thing to eat cotton candy. Or, given the hermetic world (a world which actually argues for containment) that Graham has constructed—of loops, doubles, self-portraits, and self-perpetuating literary, musical, and art-historical referents—maybe the more precise metaphor would be a hall of mirrors made of spun-sugar glass.

Graham is the product of a Vancouver scene that has produced numerous other contemporary art-world stars, most notably Stan Douglas and Jeff Wall. Graham studied with the latter, as well as with photographer Ian Wallace, the three of whom would also form a new-wave band in the mid-80s called the UJ3RK5, pronounced “U-jerks” (other members included cyberpunk writer William Gibson and current CBC DJ David Wisdom.) Wall and Wallace would introduce Graham to several formative influences, including Dan Graham (no relation), Robert Smithson, Lacan, Foucault, and Raymond Roussel. One of Graham’s earliest works would be, with Wall and Wallace, an attempted structuralist remake of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964). That film was never finished, but photos from its production became the basis for Graham’s first exhibition, Still from a work in progress, part of a 1973 Vancouver Art Gallery show called “Pacific Vibrations.”

Graham’s attraction to cinema would remain and grow throughout his career, tied neatly to an obsession with psychoanalysis—a discipline, it’s often been pointed out, born about the same time as the movies. Interested in producing artistic interventions into existing works and seeking texts into which he could comfortably insert himself, Graham spent a year and a half studying Freud. The resulting artwork, and the precursor to many other similarly flavoured pieces, was Freud Citation (1988), a photograph of Hildebrand’s Die Gattung Cyclamen L. with an accompanying text referring to the book’s role in The Interpretation of Dreams. Kissing cousin to the unconscious, sleep is also a rich realm for Graham’s later works. This is most overtly revealed in Halcion Sleep (1994), a 26-minute videotape loop, in which the tranquilized and pajama-clad artist goes on a nighttime voyage through Vancouver, out cold in the back seat of a van. The cityscape, its lights and architecture, can be viewed through the rain-streaked windows of the vehicle, whipping by as Graham slumbers, motionless, a static figure against a shifting ground. The trio of screens above Graham’s sleeping head offers a separate “three-channel” view of the passing landscape, but they also look somewhat cartoonish, like thought balloons depicting an imaginary dream-life. This is the first piece in which Graham uses himself as an object or character, but notably he’s absolutely passive. (Graham dosed himself with the titular sedative in a motel, and was then carried to the car, later into his own bed. The tape begins and ends without revealing these “making-of” details.) Graham has described Halcion Sleep as being based on his earliest memory, that of awaking just briefly from a deep, “secure” sleep while being driven home by his parents. The loop thus becomes an infinite regress, but also a regression, to childhood. And it also contains echoes of Warhol, noir, and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). An interpretation of memes.

The entire show, with its many darkened nooks and occasional lullabies provided by Graham’s music or the soothing lull of a movie projector, has an equally cozy, narcotic feel. Amniotic even, in the case of Halcion Sleep, Phonokinetoscope (2001), Coruscating Cinnamon Granules (1996), Aberdeen (2000), or Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003) installations that one could spend entire days (or nights) with, given their hypnotic charms. These self-contained pieces stand, intentionally or not, in opposition to the trilogy of ostentatious costume dramas that Graham is more famous for: the Treasure Island travesty (his word), Vexation Island (1997); the cowpoke cut-up How I Became a Ramblin’ Man (1999); and City Self /Country Self (2000), a one-joke, two-handed diagram of class-consciousness and temporal displacement. These 35mm vaudevillian romances, while undeniably possessing a measure of intellectual intrigue, feel somewhat wan, both undernourished and over-determined; their slick production values and relative expense are incommensurate with their value—as art or entertainment. (I’m reminded of the claim that whenever Godard used to shoot on 35mm he was dealing with prostitution.) It’s almost axiomatic that contemporary visual artists falter when making the leap to traditional feature-length filmmaking; witness the mediocrities perpetrated by Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel. Graham’s films, however, while not aspiring to studio-picture (anti-) status, are still gussied up as such—short, repeating bursts of genre play and editorial adventurism in widescreen, Technicolor drag.

Vexation Island made Graham’s rep when it premiered at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and it fits most neatly into his corpus of somnolence. It provides yet another glimpse of the artist at rest, here dressed like an 18th-century buccaneer. On a desert island, lying beneath a palm tree, presumably knocked out (a large gash defaces his forehead), Graham slowly awakes to the squawking of his pet parrot. But as soon as he wakes and stands, he tries to dislodge a coconut from the tree. The coconut falls, hitting him on the head and rendering him unconscious again. The loop begins again, with a bird’s eye view of the island. This simple set-up is complicated by a number of factors: the vanquishing of causality caused by the loop (did the falling coconut create the head wound?); the rapid shifts in POV or “consciousness” (Graham’s, the parrot’s, the tree’s); and the intransigent refusal of both cinematic and “real” time (the film is designed to run for eight minutes, the average length of time a viewer spends with an artwork at the Biennale, but the looping permits theoretically infinite repetitions).

Nonetheless, I much prefer Graham’s poppy, gentle, and alluring chamber works, all of them more cheaply made, handcrafted, warmer. Phonokinetoscope is one of Graham’s best-known pieces, and, possibly, his most successful: a 16mm film loop activated by placing a needle on a 33 rpm record that sits on a turntable at the room’s entrance. The tune on the album (“Theme from Phonokinetoscope”) was written and is performed by Graham, but features lyrics lifted from Pink Floyd’s “Bike,” penned by the band’s much-mythologized founder Syd Barrett. The song is repetitive (of course), mesmerizing, and blatantly trippy—faux-Floyd that also suggests Barrett’s compositions for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). (Graham’s voice is a pleasing twang that recalls, at times, such indie stalwarts as David Berman or Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner.) The Barrett-written chorus, “You’re the kind of girl that fits in/with my world,” links to lines by Graham that allude to a disintegrating mental state (“I’m the I they failed to dot,” “When I fell off my medication/seems I lost the art of conversation”) that might presage the events of the film. The nearly five-minute loop depicts Graham, a silver-haired hunk in an all-black ensemble, dropping acid in Berlin’s Tiergarten and subsequently cycling through this verdant landscape. Eventually, Graham rides his bicycle backwards on the handlebars—an homage, the artist notes, to Paul Newman’s similar stunt in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). The entire piece is likewise a puzzle of associative references: Thomas Edison (inventor of the kinetoscope), Albert Hoffman (inventor of LSD, who enjoyed his first trip while he cycled home from his lab), Bas Jan Ader (Dutch conceptualist who rode a bike into an Amsterdam canal in his 1970 film, Fall II, Amsterdam and who later disappeared at age 33 while trying to cross the Atlantic by sailboat as part of his artwork, In Search of the Miraculous).

The film never drifts into psychedelia (that’s the music’s job), but it certainly mimics the more quotidian aspects of any drug experience. The overall vibe is placid, spacey, and trance-like. And it perfectly captures the slightly giddy, slightly bored feeling one has while waiting, impatiently, for a hallucinogen to kick in. Graham’s shifting countenance after he ingests the blotter—a close-up reveals it’s emblazoned with a picture of the Mad Hatter—suggests concern and consternation, never delirium. Unlike in the case of, say, Caveh Zahedi, who has documented his own wild Ecstasy and mushroom trips, what Graham is experiencing while drugged (if he really is) is never articulated; whatever roiling hallucinations might occupy his brain remain hidden. (Guided by Voices: “I wouldn’t/dare to/ bring out this/awful bliss.”) His altered state is a private, solitary, enclosed one, just as the loop prescribes a closed circuit. Talismanic, vaguely occult objects appear—a clothespin, a Queen of Diamonds playing card, the lid of a thermos that reads “Sunflower”—but these are revealed to be simultaneously extra-diegetic props, pointing outward to the existence of the installation itself: the clothespin is used to attach the playing card to the bike’s spokes, creating a sound analogous to the projector’s mutter; the thermos lid bears the same illustration as is found on the record label. Graham’s music, with its changes in tone and bursts of squalling guitar, hint at the different phases, the highs and lows, of an LSD trip, while the loop itself emphasizes the seemingly endless flight of consciousness that such a trip can induce. For Graham, the acid flashback and the film loop are nothing more or less than prosaic manifestations of repetition compulsion, an uncanny doubling.

Appropriately then, that a comfy, white leather chaise lounge sits in the room where this installation is housed. Another nice, homey touch, this is a place to recline while watching the piece but also, obviously, a nod to the analyst’s couch. For Coruscating Cinnamon Granules, Graham goes one further, constructing a small hut, its beams and drywall visible, built precisely to the dimensions of the kitchen in which he originally filmed the piece. Attached to this structure is a 16mm looping projector, beaming onto a screen in the dwelling a simple and elegant record of what could be a junior high science experiment: the titular spice is sprinkled onto an electric stove element, and the granules become sparks, a miniature lightshow, as the element heats up. In silent monochrome, and occupying only a single roll—three minutes—of film, the images recall a tiny solar system or the kaleidoscope of stars one sees after a bump on the head, but also Hollis Frampton’s nostalgia (1971); it’s even a homespun riposte to Robert Smithson’s grandiose Spiral Jetty. The coil of the element is of course yet another loop, and the projector’s noisy rattle provides its own soundtrack, standing in for the crackle and pop of the dancing cinnamon. It’s a delicate and sublime piece, as fragile as a pipe dream.

Transformed kitchen ingredients can also be found in Graham’s latest film piece, Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, where flour is used to simulate snow, a blizzard of which eventually blankets a 30s German-made Rheinmetall typewriter. A rumbling 50s Cinemeccanica 35mm projector (the Victoria 8 model) sits in the middle of the room and projects a fairly humble document of this old-fashioned yet mint-condition typewriter, capturing its silent repose from many different angles. Loving, fetishistic close-ups reveal the various keys, the platen and carriage all gleaming silver and black industrial surfaces seemingly untouched by human hands. The projector is likewise a feat of old-school engineering, a sturdy macho machine, the smooth whine of its parts just as loud as the clucking of a typewriter. It’s all the more surprising then when the snow starts to gently fall, a mute mist of white that gradually builds up on the keys of the typewriter, softening its edges and muffling it, until the machine is eventually all but buried: a low-tech special effect, à la Méliès or Maddin. Covered in snow, the typewriter is transformed into something like the talking creature in Naked Lunch (1991), or maybe it’s that the machine, useless and unwanted, is a relic covered in the dust of a century of technological advancement. The entire room is a time capsule of sorts, a call-and-response between two antiquated technologies and nature’s heedless insistence on their failure. Or maybe an evocative illustration of the phrase (by Montaigne? Maeterlink?) “Happiness writes white”?

Sadness isn’t necessarily productive of course; plenty of people, artists or not, are struck dumb by depression. Graham’s own unhappiness, however, mentioned in interviews and in countless song lyrics, has proved a rich resource. Aberdeen addresses one of rock’s most famous depressives, Kurt Cobain. Aberdeen, Washington, an hour’s drive south of Vancouver, was the hated birthplace of the late singer/songwriter, who killed himself in 1994 at age 27. Graham, it would seem, is unusually (but perhaps just coincidentally) attracted to artists with shortened life spans (Ader, Smithson, Yves Klein), but Cobain seems a special case. Cobain’s melancholy, artistic exploitation of his own biography and drug use, dovetail perfectly with Graham’s preoccupations. Depressives sleep a lot; junkies nod.

Cobain, Graham admits, also inspired him to return to making music of his own. In 1995, Graham formed another band, Volumizer, then later released two solo CDs, The Bed-Bug, Love Buzz, and Other Short Songs in the Popular Idiom (1999) and Rock is Hard (2003). As with Graham’s other ventriloquistic, appropriative artwork, the music makes good use of samples and plundered lyrics. But the motifs running throughout the albums (which could be filed somewhere between Burt Bacharach and Robert Pollard) speak to a ravaged emotional landscape. Real life or not, ironic or not, the lyrics have a literary sheen, a genuine poignancy and romantic fatigue found in the best indie-pop. Tortured, rueful, sensitive boy stuff. Some song titles: “High and Lonesome”; “Autumn Complaint”; “Hard Luck Day”; “What is Happy, Baby”; “So-Called Friends”; “That’s What it Feels Like to Be Washed Up in Your Home Town.” (The music, with its low-fi inflections and intimate, revealing lyrics, again feels closer in spirit to the handcrafted, low-tech chamber works.)

In Aberdeen—a slideshow made up of 80 sequential images, another kind of loop—Graham depicts a place of great physical beauty that is, nonetheless, economically depressed, depopulated, drab. A place obviously left behind. The photographs themselves are as unremarkable as Aberdeen itself, and vaguely reminiscent of Jack Pierson or Lee Friedlander. They show views of the town which emphasize its banality and neglect: empty parking lots, shuttered Chinese restaurants, kitschy storefronts, dumpsters that look like public art. But the music accompanying the slides is somewhat joyful, melodic, created by Graham and built of samples from Alice Cooper, Eric Burdon, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Is it the music that inspired Cobain, or just the tunes that Graham listened to while walking around the town himself? Graham compares Cobain’s loathing of Aberdeen with Freud’s loathing of Vienna, but what’s felt most in Aberdeen is a pure, sad, absence—as if the centre is hollow. Cobain left the town long ago, then left everything else.

Graham’s work has increasingly hinged on the problems of inscribing an authorial presence, but Cobain’s problem, he often muttered in interviews, was how to take himself out of the picture. How to slip away from stardom and just make music. And in Aberdeen, that’s all that remains. Cobain’s longings led to heroin, then suicide, but Graham, for all his romanticism, doesn’t seem to crave that particular oblivion. His strategy is to disappear into the work, into an image of himself that’s not himself. Graham is an auteur of artifice, and an artificial auteur. When he plays pirate (or psychonaut, dandy, cowboy, rock star, prisoner) he’s doing a number of things, but he’s also creating, via technologies that create an illusion of presence, a useful performance of absence. A kind of sleepwalking. For him, the flight’s the thing, with its camouflage and escape—the stuff that dreams are made of.