Arte: Chalk talk
His work is drawn on walls and floors, and is causing a stir on the art scene. Esther Addley on the slapstick of Robin Rhode
Esther Addley
The Guardian, Saturday September 20 2008
A man in a red turban, yellow T-shirt and blue jogging pants lies flat on his back on a tarmac road, and stretches out his arms. Next to him is a tall, wobbly chalk line reaching above his head. In a jumpy, animated sequence, the man lies on his side, legs curled and arms outstretched to touch the top of the white line. He's using it as a bar, much as a gymnast would, swinging round and round, his track defined by sketched chalk lines on the road. He spins to an unlikely "dismount", and is back lying flat, arms outstretched, on the other side of the line.
It's a jokey, nonsensical little skit, a routine in an anonymous stretch of street while (hopefully) keeping an eye on passing traffic. But this short, stop-start animation called Street Gym, by the South African artist Robin Rhode, is many other things: a charming, childish game, impossible to watch without smiling, as well as an ironic comment on the "gyms" available to young, mixed-race kids such as Rhode in apartheid- era Johannesburg - ie, existing only in the imagination. It recalls graffiti writers and mime performers and ancient cave paintings, but also, rather gleefully, slapsticky, cartoon characters: Jerry finding a piece of chalk on the ground and drawing himself a door to escape from Tom.
Rhode places himself firmly in the intellectual artistic tradition, citing Duchamp, Man Ray and the Russian constructivists as key influences. But the 32-year-old, though causing an increasing stir on the international art scene, remains at heart the cheeky, irreverent boy he was at school, melting Biros and unravelling his school tie to turn them into something more interesting, an activity that bewildered his teachers and earned him the nickname "The Artist".
Next month sees a major exhibition of Rhode's work at the Hayward Gallery in London's Southbank, featuring photographs, animations and film projects, alongside sculptures and abstract wall paintings. Always very simple and often quite moving, Rhode's photographic sequences and films depict the artist, or an actor, or a group of children, interacting with a rough sketch on a wall or on the ground.
In Harvest (2005), the artist captures himself scattering seeds that "grow" into painted lines of corn or grass on a wall. He scythes at the wall, the corn is "cut"; then he takes a sheet and lies next to the wall, appearing to make a bed in the scythed field of corn. He Got Game (2004) is a sequence of photographs in which he draws a basketball hoop, then poses on the ground to perform an impossible sequence of leaps and gravity-defying tumbles to score. In New Kids On The Bike (2002), a black boy and a white boy appear to cling to the handlebars of a speeding bike, while schoolbooks fly from their trailing satchels.
Bicycles recur in Rhode's work (the Hayward show will feature Soap And Water [2007], a bicycle cast from soap and placed with a bucket of water to experience the British autumnal weather), as do bottles, candles and somewhat improbable acrobatic feats. Though he did not recognise it until well established at art school in the early 90s, Rhode now traces these fixations to his time at his all-"coloured" school. (Both his parents are mixed race - "I think, from what I heard, my great-great-grandfather on my father's side could be German. My mother, she doesn't know, I'm embarrassed to say.")
At school, he participated in an odd ritual, somewhere between bullying and initiation, which took place in the boys' toilets. 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 only form of art to which Rhode was ever exposed, but it thrilled him and, he says, he became "determined, absolutely ruthless" about training as an artist, becoming one of only two "coloured" students at his art school.
If his pieces have become more abstract than the sometimes explicitly political work of his early career - in a nod to Duchamp, Rhode once chalked a urinal on an interior wall of the South Africa National Gallery in Cape Town and pissed on it - he remains an artist with a message. In Color Chart (2004-6), for instance, figures dressed in different colours enter one by one to battle with a hat-wearing, white-suited figure. White always wins.
The initial decision to work outside, away from galleries, was also political, he says. But while walls and streets have been his media and often his themes, Rhode sees more differences than similarities between himself and street artists. In fact, he says, graffiti artists don't seem to like him - perhaps not surprising, since Rhode has no compunction about "bombing" (painting over) graffiti writers' work, an emphatic no-no within their tradition.
For the Hayward exhibition Rhode will take them on, painting the famous graffiti-adorned underpass on the South Bank used by skateboarders with his own abstract, geometric forms. And if they don't quite appreciate his attempt to "relayer the optic forms" and respond by tagging all over his high art? He grins. "I'm actually all for my piece being bombed!".
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