“He got game”, Robin Rhode, 2000

“Skateboard”, Robin Rhode

“The Storyteller”, Robin Rhode, 2006 

Street Art trifft auf Videokunst & Performance: Robin Rhode. Im Zentrum der Werke des südafrikanischen Künstlers (geb. 1976 in Kapstadt, lebt in Berlin) stehen Performances und die Elemente der Strassenkultur (Sport, Musik, Mode, der Überlebensstil). (1) Danke, Anke!

“While “street art” might have a pejorative sting in fine art circles, it’s an apt descriptor for South African artist Robin Rhode’s work. And not simply because his art—often institutional critiques of museums and government offices—seems more at home outdoors than in the dim halls of officialdom, or because his work arises from the culture of pickup basketball, breakdancing, and graffiti. Rhode, quite literally, makes art on the street. On asphalt playgrounds, concrete sidewalks, and brick walls, this 20-something South African uses little more than a stub of chalk or charcoal to create performances that challenge the boundary between two dimensions and three—and confront the embedded histories and indelible memories that reside in architecture.

His works, public actions often exhibited as photographic series or wall drawings, are comic yet deadly serious: in Getaway, Rhode acts out an escape from The Slave Lodge, a Cape Town building that once housed slaves for the Dutch East India Company. With cartoonish charcoal-drawn motion lines trailing after him, Rhode high-tails it away from the site, stopping between stumbles to strike heroic runaway poses. In the deceptively simple Park Bench, he sketches a precariously angled bench on a white wall then struggles, unsuccessfully, to take a seat. The specificity of the site—the House of Parliament in Cape Town—gives the work its gravity: during apartheid, segregation of public life was legislated all the way down to public benches labeled “Coloured.” In Leak, Rhode takes aim at the sanctity of the art museum. Riffing on Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, an upturned store-bought urinal signed with the alias R. Mutt, Rhode drew a urinal on a wall in the South African National Gallery and proceeded to “fill” it. In an apparent critique of whose art gets hung in the official halls of postcolonial South Africa, he signed the work R. Moet, the Afrikaans spelling of Duchamp’s pseudonym. Taking a back-alley piss—the male act of marking territory—on the clean white walls of the museum sends a clear message to the art world: the museum, like the claimed turf of the graffiti writer, is ours.” (1)

Robin Rhode: “My focus is to try and reoccupy spaces with a presence previously excluded. As a reminder of the persistent battle to occupy terrain, I insert the body into fictive spaces that also functions as the real. Relationality, contribution and concern are issues pervading my working process while remaining committed to local issues and sites. My work reflects how personal history can be connected/linked to objects and experiences that could imply degradation or corruption. A value system is confronted by performance as monologue. Actions, are filled with political, rhetoric and anarchic energy, reflecting the fragility of memory and art engaging such rememberence, illuminating a common heritage of marginalisation. My scenarios speak of trying to fit into standards and frameworks that are devised by others, situations devised for exclusions, set up‘s for failure. I use humour and play to destabilise and admit the unseemly, expressing the desire to analyse, change, fictionalise and create alternative solutions for situations that are totally dominated by politics and market strategies.

My practice examines the notion of the everyday becoming a tool for unfolding a resistance – without being necessarily and explicitly oppositional, but rather playful, seductive and fantastical. Introducing narrative and storytelling as a means to build a bridge between diverse communities and audiences. Fantasy and narrative are suggesting a social practice, and they contribute to the layering of a social experience, beyond an exclusively cultural or artistic one. My art functions as a subtle suggestion that the subverse potential of art is as fragile, as ephemeral, as the lines of a chalk drawing.” (2)