Fugitive: Robin Rhode Drawings and Performances

A South-African artist in his mid-twenties, Robin Rhode often comes up against a wall. Since 1998, in his native city of Cape Town and in Johannesburg, and more recently in Berlin, Germany where he currently lives, Rhode has been using the wall as a primary m e d i u m for his ephemeral drawings and witty performances . Standing as a support to his charcoal drawings, the wall also functions as a backdrop against which to stage the tightly framed saynetes that constitute most of his performances. In contrast to the fleeting quality of both drawings and actions, the wall represents the permanence of architecture and the resilience of memory. In his drawings, Rhode re-enacts some of South Africa's colonial and segregationist episodes {Park Bench, 2000; Getaway, 2000) as well as points out to the challenges of a young democratic state facing the pitfalls of global consumerism and cultural assimilation {He Got Game, 2000; Street Gym, 2000). Rhode's practice has often been linked to graffiti, a "hip-pop" influence he readily acknowledges. However, if both Rhode's drawings and graffiti experiment with the idea of territory marking and expand on youth culture and street experiences, they show somewhat fundamental differences that are worth noticing. Most of Rhode's drawings are fine lined m o n o c h r o m e sketches that have a fine-arts quality to them and depict one single banal object in actual size—pop culture icons such as a bike, a car, or a basketball playground—unlike the often heavily narrative and overtly political polychrome frescos that most graffiti are. Moreover, if graffiti are made to last albeit for a short period of time, Rhode's drawings clearly are not, not only because of the temporary quality of the m e d i u m he uses but also because Rhode more or less intentionally erases his drawings in his interaction with them. Like Gary Simmons, Rhode only partially erases his drawings leaving once powerful symbols as accidental traces. As a result, Rhode's drawings appear as simple quotes, annotations in a discourse that for being fully articulated doesn 't want to tell the whole story in lengthy details and relies u p o n the viewer's ability to fill in the gaps of representation. His performances in turn are i m p r o m p t u and fugitive interventions that subtly interrupt more than they confrontationally disrupt the well-ordered canvas of the city. In Park Bench (2000) Rhode, clad in dark clothes, drew a bench on the wall of the House of Parliament, Cape Town. With one of its leg lifted from the ground the bench, very much realistically drawn, was miraculously standing on its own very much like a m i m e performance prop as Rhode repeatedly attempted to sit down on it. If Rhode much expectedly failed to do so, he managed to call to m i n d the not so distant history of legislated segregation under Apartheid where public benches would have been demarcated according to color lines. The dis-functionality of the bench and the failed demeanors of Rhode further suggest the un-viability and inherent flaws of such political system. Ironically, Rhode was subsequently marched to police headquarSpring / S u m m e r 2003 N k a - 6 7 Park Bench, 2 0 0 0 , Live p e r f o r m a n c e , T h e H o u s e o f P a r l i a m e n t , C a p e T o w n , C o u r t e s y t h e artist ters after a security guard had informed him that he was degrading government property. Re-setting the clock further back in time Rhode enacted an escape from the Slave Lodge, Cape Town, in Getaway (2000). Former slave quarters for the Dutch East India Company in the 1 7 t n and 1 8 t n centuries, the Slave Lodge is now h o m e of one of the town's museum. Without much ambiguity as to what...