Employing an irresistible blend of satirical humor and self-reflective political commentary, Robin Rhode tests the limits of representation and reality. He is recognized predominantly for his energetic, physical interactions with his own two-dimensional line drawings. These range from Car Theft, 1999, in which Rhode drew a Volkswagen Citi Golf onto a wall at Truth Veils: The Inner City at the Market Theatre Galleries, Johannesburg, and proceeded to try and break into it, and YoYo, 2005, for which the artist drew a yo-yo in chalk on a dark gray wall behind him and later created prints based on photographs of him as if he were “spinning” the drawn toy.
“My work is drawn from life, rather than from Western modernity,” says Rhode, describing his way of working as “Going on reconnaissance. Finding a wall. Picking up a piece of charcoal. Setting up a video camera. Doing a performance.”
Rhode was born in Cape Town in 1976 and raised in Bosmont, Johannesburg. As a teen of mixed race in South Africa, he and his friends drew their “wish lists” of cars or bikes on street walls. Later Rhode studied production design at Film School in Johannesburg, where he learned to draw story boards. He is now based in Berlin and frequently travels to Johannesburg to visit family.
Today, the artist uses a wide range of media, from sculpture and blown glass to still photography, stop-frame animation, film, and live performance. He recontextualizes materialist fantasies by casting them in the light of identity politics and social and economic survival—as well as the absurd.
Rhode performs with exaggerated gesticulations. Often recording his actions with successive still photographs, he conveys the frustrations that follow the everyday attempt to access fetishistic objects of desire. In Untitled (Dream Houses) (2005), Rhode stands at the bottom of a large dilapidated wall. On the wall he draws various domestic objects, from a television set to a chair, from a pitcher to a table, depicting them as if they are falling slowly down the wall. In his performance Rhode reaches upward, trying to catch the drawn objects. He eventually drops everything as a drawn car also starts falling toward him.
Using simple methods and materials, the austerity of Rhode’s captured frames capitalizes on the ability of both the viewer’s and the performer’s imagination to fill in the gaps. The fantasies rely on a willing suspension of disbelief. But there is always the moment of escape, when Rhode walks away from the impossible chaos he has created. Parodying everything from the artistic gesture to consumerist desire and petty crime, Rhode’s work exhibits an acute sense of self-irony and illustrates his conviction that one can experience pleasure in art and still remain critical at the same time.
Untitled (Dream Houses) 2005
28 C-prints face mounted with Plexiglas on aluminum panels
Each 45.7 x 30.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York
© Robin Rhode
Color Chart (stills) 2004
Digital animation
4:50 min
Image courtesy of the artist and Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York
©Robin Rhode