Rodney Graham

Rodney Graham’s books, sculptures, photographs, films, objects, paintings and music; his artistic involvements with Sigmund Freud, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Donald Judd, Richard Wagner, the Brothers Grimm and Pablo Picasso; his practice of borrowing from, referencing, turning upside down and adapting other works and authors; his constant oscillating between quotation and autobiography, between the discourse of the professional and the pose of the amateur, offer, when taken together, such a broad field for critical, interpretive and theoretical approaches that looking back on 30 years of his work, one sometimes has the impression the artist is merely a postmodern fiction, the protagonist of an art novel related to the late twentieth century’s ambitious zeitgeist by an endless series of references and allusions, a figure who, as it were, goes about in disguise behind his various possible interpretations. This is not to say, however, that the character R.G. in any way disappears; on the contrary, despite all his different disguises he remains palpably present in the work, so much so that one cannot get rid of the suspicion that this is a person trying to construct a kind of self-portrait, or rather, trying to sound out allusively and theatrically all the possibilities that remain open to art in his time.

--Julian Heynen, excerpted from the essay, “A Kind of Author,” published in Through the Forest.

ACTIVE BACKLIST

RODNEY GRAHAM: BRITISH WEATHERVANES
Text by Iwona Blazwick, John Slyce, Candy Stobbs, Desiderius Erasmus.
CHRISTINE BURGIN/DONALD YOUNG
ISBN: 9780692002186 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 2/28/2011
Active | Awaiting stock

RODNEY GRAHAM: THROUGH THE FOREST
Text by Grant Arnold, Tacita Dean, Julian Heynen, Sabrina van der Ley.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775725774 | US $55.00
Pub Date: 5/30/2010
Active | In stock

RODNEY GRAHAM: WET ON WET
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783865603432 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 6/1/2008
Active | Awaiting stock

RODNEY GRAHAM: COLLECTOR'S CHOICE VOL. 1
Essay by Dorothea Zwirner. Foreword by Friedrich Christian Flick.
DUMONT BUCHVERLAG
ISBN: 9783832174972 | US $59.95
Pub Date: 12/15/2009
Active | In stock

RODNEY GRAHAM: A LITTLE THOUGHT
THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES
ISBN: 9780914357889 | US $39.99
Pub Date: 5/2/2004
Active | Awaiting stock

Rodney Graham

Perhaps the wittiest of conceptual artists, Canadian Rodney Graham wryly switches subjectivities: from artist to critic, from amateur to professional, from author to subject. He is shown here photographing a tree in Belgium, 1993, as reproduced in Through the Forest.

Rodney Graham: British Weathervanes

Text by Iwona Blazwick, John Slyce, Candy Stobbs, Desiderius Erasmus.
Published by Christine Burgin/Donald Young

A new work by Vancouver conceptualist Rodney Graham (born 1949) is always guaranteed to surprise and amuse in equal measure. Indeed, the idea of amusement, espoused by Duchamp as an aesthetic aspiration, is expanded by Graham in British Weathervanes to include the idea of folly, as espoused by the sixteenth-century humanist scholar Erasmus, author of The Praise of Folly (1511). Graham's Erasmus weathervane, made for the cupola of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, shows the author, modeled by the artist, reading a book while riding a horse backwards (elaborating on the anecdote that Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly on horseback). Erasmus' weather-blown obliviousness continues Graham's inquiry into involuntary journeys and cyclical and backward motion. This beautifully produced artist's book derives its design from the 1940s series Britain in Pictures and contains photographs, drawings and essays on the project alongside a letter by Erasmus.

Rodney Graham: Through the Forest

Text by Grant Arnold, Tacita Dean, Julian Heynen, Sabrina van der Ley.
Published by Hatje Cantz

A stalwart of Vancouver's Conceptual scene, artist and musician Rodney Graham has used an array of media to explore appropriated historical sources from literature, philosophy and pop music, and to induce shifts in the viewer's preconceptions and perceptions of these sources: Sigmund Freud, Donald Judd, Edgar Allan Poe and even Graham's former bandmate Jeff Wall have provided subject matter for the artist's critical tweakings. Through the Forest collects over 100 works, dating from 1978 to the present, that emphasize Graham's interpolations in cultural history—in the forms of appendices, bookmarks and exhibition devices in the style of Donald Judd. This monograph also premiers Graham's first incursion into painting, his 2005 series Picasso, My Master, which inflects the reverence commonly attending Picasso's work with his signature humor. Through the Forest makes a thorough assessment of Graham's influential and seductive body of work.

Rodney Graham: Wet on Wet

My Late Early Styles

Published by Walther König, Köln

Vancouver Conceptualist Rodney Graham defies categorization by employing multiple styles and working in diverse media including photography, film, performance, music and text. One of the most gratifying artist's books ever to grace D.A.P.'s list, Wet on Wet: My Late Early Styles presents a new body of work reflecting on the practice of painting. For Wet on Wet Graham adopts the eccentric persona of the "gifted amateur," a recurrent figure in his recent work. He presents 22 oils and one acrylic work in a variety of styles, placing painting in the context of a post-medium practice.
Graham credits music with informing much of his work. A musician himself, he views his role as an artist as an extension of the idea of performance. His work examines social and philosophical systems of thought, in particular those derived from the transition of the Enlightenment into Modernism.

Rodney Graham: Collector's Choice Vol. 1

Essay by Dorothea Zwirner. Foreword by Friedrich Christian Flick.
Published by Dumont Buchverlag

Volume 1 in the Collector's Choice Artists' Monographs from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection features the work of Canadian artist Rodney Graham as he strolls, via his works, through Modernism. On Graham's meandering itinerary through photography, literature, music, art, film, psychology, and linguistics, we encounter Richard Wagner, St»phane Mallarm», Edgar Allen Poe, Sigmund Freud, and Donald Judd, not to mention the prevalence of cinema and popular music. The contradictions in his work--gravity and play, reverential homage and scenarized self-presentation--show Graham to be a contemporary melancholic. This is the most comprehensive and insightful monograph of the artist's work to date.

Rodney Graham: A Little Thought

Essays by Cornelia Butler, Grant Arnold, Jessica Bradley, Lynne Cooke, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Sara Krajewski and Shepherd Steiner.
Published by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

One of Canada's most humorous conceptual artists--as witty as he is smart--Rodney Graham gets his first North American museum retrospective and accompanying catalogue. Rodney Graham: A Little Thought tracks the career of a brilliant, idiosyncratic artist whose work spans a range of media including photography, film, book works, installation and pop music. In this volume, amply illustrated with many never-before-seen images from early in his career as well as new photography of his most recent works, scholarly essays provide a broad context for viewing: Cornelia Butler looks at Graham's relationship to landscape and Canadian identity, Lynne Cooke examines the construction of the artist's persona in works such as City Self/ Country Self (2001), and Shep Steiner discusses the joke as a conceptual strategy for Graham. Diedrich Diederichsen considers the artist's oeuvre within the context of musical structure, and Sara Krajewski describes how Graham's video works unfold. Finally, Grant Arnold offers an in-depth illustrated chronology, tracing the range of activities that have occupied Graham since his early days on the Vancouver scene.