‘Someone recently likened one of my large-scale photographic works to a mildly humorous father’s day card,” says Rodney Graham, chuckling. “I thought that was the funniest thing.” Many of Graham’s more deadpan photographic works could indeed pass for old-fashioned father’s day cards. Cactus Fan, from 2013, features him as a white-coated scientist staring intently at a gift-wrapped cactus with four brightly coloured balloons attached. It is as if he is trying to figure out scientifically what it means, what the relationship might be between the cactus spikes and the helium-filled balloons.
Canadian Humorist, from the previous year, features Graham leaning on an Arne Jacobsen chair in a white polo neck. Next to him is a tea trolley bearing biscuits and a brightly patterned tea cosy. He is wearing fluffy slippers like a Canadian Alan Partridge. “The humour is there,” he says, “but I think of it almost in terms of a defence mechanism. Plus, it is a really difficult thing to pull off. You could go too far with slapstick – but I can’t do slapstick, so that’s not an issue. I’m not really an expressive person. I don’t have any talent for acting, so the deadpan element is kind of me.”
In the flesh, Graham is not so much deadpan as diffident. Over tea in London’s National Gallery cafe, he speaks quietly and with a certain hesitance, as if unsure language can convey the full complexity of his tumbling thoughts. His work – like that of his Vancouver compatriots Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas – is unapologetically cerebral, filled with clever visual puns and nods to other work.
Graham is in London to oversee a small exhibition at Canada House entitled Canadian Impressionist – a reference to the characters he plays in his conceptual photographs and films, rather than his painting style. A major retrospective, That’s Not Me, is also about to open at the Baltic in Gateshead. “It’s not accurately a retrospective,” he points out, sounding almost apologetic, “because there’s not much early stuff. I kind of went along with what the curator wanted. One floor will have silent film pieces, the other some large-scale, light-box photographic works and a small selection of books and records.”
Graham has been performing his deadpan songs almost as long as he has been making art, but sadly Baltic visitors will not get to hear any apart from at one special evening performance near the end of the run in May. “My music doesn’t really fit in the gallery,” he says. “It’s not like a Martin Creed thing. It’s just a kind of fantasy hobby. I don’t see it as an extension of my art. I approach it as a separate pursuit.” He has been playing with the same musicians for almost 20 years: the Rodney Graham Band is about to release a new record, Gondoliers, a follow-up to Good Hand, Bad Hand.
If you balk at the very thought of artists indulging their rock’n’roll fantasies, prepare to be pleasantly surprised. One not untypical song, Walking to Walgreens, begins: “Here’s a thought – Miami’s hot / I’m walking to Walgreens in flip-flops.” It’s like Pavement, but looser and funnier. “I really struggle to write lyrics,” says Graham. “They always come last. I think it’s because I have nothing to say, really.”
Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and grew up with “a vague idea of becoming a writer or an artist”. At university in the late 1970s, he was taught by the artist Ian Wallace, with whom he also played in a band – UJ3RK5, pronounced You Jerks – alongside Wall. “Post-punk galvanised us in Vancouver, ” he says, suddenly almost excited. “We were into Devo and we actually supported Gang of Four when they played in Canada.”
Like Wall, Graham is very much a product of Vancouver’s then-thriving photo-conceptual scene, making large, backlit, staged tableaux that often referenced classical paintings even as they resembled ultra-real documentary photographs. Ever since, his art has remained unapologetically referential – to art history, literature, cinema, psychoanalysis and pop culture.
His earliest works, including one in which he used a shed on his uncle’s farm to project an inverted image of a tree, were made using a camera obscura. Then, in 1983, he created Lenz, in which he rearranged the pages of the Georg Büchner novel of the same name into a kind of labyrinthine Borgesian loop that echoed the original protagonist’s psychological crisis as he wandered through a forest.
Ten years later, Graham designed Reading Machine for Lenz, a rotating machine that accentuates the disruption of the text and, by extension, the disorientation of the character. The deadpan humour of Cactus Fan, meanwhile, is undercut by its knowingness: it is a homage to The Cactus Enthusiast, a 19th-century painting by Carl Spitzweg in which a gardener stares at a cactus that appears to be staring back at him.
Graham’s favourite writer is Raymond Roussel, the French avant-garde novelist whose work abounded in puns, footnotes, wordplay and annotations and the artist has written a kind of meta-novel, The System of Landor’s Cottage, that riffs on Edgar Allan Poe final story, Landor’s Cottage. There is a certain obsessiveness in his approach, I suggest, in its meticulous formalism and willingness to explore often obscure thinkers. “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe.”
Graham began using himself as a character in his work in 1994, when he made the still disturbing Halcion Sleep. In it, he is driven – unconscious – from a motel in the suburbs to his city centre home, having taken sleeping pills. “I wanted to make this inversion of the film noir trope, in which the hero is drugged and kidnapped and taken to the outskirts of town, where he wakes up disoriented in a shack. I instructed my brother and his friend to drive me into town and put me to bed. But the footage was so unsightly, I just used the driving part with me slumped unconscious.”
By surrendering control of his own project, Graham also subverted the conventional role of the artist. Still, it seems like an extreme thing to do. “I guess so,” he says, “but, as I said, I’m not any good at acting, even acting unconscious. I was actually very depressed at the time. Initially, I wanted to use ether to knock myself out, so I went to see Jeff Wall’s father, who was a doctor. He said, ‘There are three stages of unconsciousness and the third is death. Don’t do it.’”
Graham’s breakout piece was Vexation Island, a film made for the 1997 Venice Biennale, in which he played a castaway on a desert island. It begins slowly, with the character sleeping beneath a palm tree. He wakes up, shakes the tree to loosen a coconut that falls and hits him on the head, rendering him unconscious again. It is Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence, shot in the kind of sumptuously unreal colour that 70s TV advertisers loved.
“It was a make-or-break moment for me,” he says. “I sank $50,000 into it and, through a contact I had in Hollywood, managed to get all these movie technicians to fly down to the Virgin Islands and work for free. I just went for it – and went deeply into debt for it – but it changed my work dramatically.”
Since then, his deadpan, obsessive, endlessly referential art has moved from the analogue to the digital without surrendering any of its odd, wilfully cerebral charm. “For a recent piece, I created the set of a bookshop in my studio. It is maybe 35-feet deep and, with digital, you can read the words on the books on the back walls. It’s nuts, but it’s what I always wanted.” The work, titled The Antiquarian, depicts a bookseller slumbering in his chair surround by rare books but no customers. “It’s based on someone I know in Vancouver,” says Graham, smiling, “but it it is also about another route I might have pursued if I hadn’t done art.”
- Rodney Graham: That’s Not Me is at Baltic, Gateshead, 17 March-11 June. Canadian Impressionist is at Canada House, London, until 27 May. Gondoliers is released by thevinylfactory.com
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