In recent months, when it seems that all information must be filtered by the crisis and the economy, some newspapers have celebrated the publication of the Spanish version of the book “The 12 Million Dollar Shark” by economist Don Thompson to bring together a series of arguments with which to discredit contemporary art.
The book provides a lot of information and numerous anecdotes that make it entertaining to read, but let no one be fooled into thinking that it will give you the keys to understanding contemporary art from A to Z. Thompson’s vision is that all gallery owners want to be Larry Gagosian, all collectors want to emulate Saatchi and all artists aspire to be Damian Hirst. Art is reduced to a system of brands, in which Richard Prince and Louis Vuitton are interchangeable. Thompson’s surprising discovery is a real one when we are more than used to everything around us (cities, universities, museums, actors or film festivals) being brands: from Barcelona to Harvard, passing through the MoMA, the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie tandem or the Sundance Film Festival. Thompson’s problem is that he reduces Félix González Torres to the one who made a sculpture with a pile of sweets and his greatest desire seems to be to draw up a list of the 25 most influential artists based on the value given to them by the results at auctions.
A few years ago, in an interview in Artforum, John Baldessari was asked who he thought was the most influential artist for later generations. Baldessari replied: Rodney Graham. The work of Rodney Graham, of whom we can now visit an excellent exhibition curated by Friedrich Meschede at the MACBA, is not exactly easy. Trained in art history, anthropology, English and French literature, in his works he has explored aspects related to literature, photography, cinema, psychology, anthropology and art.
The observation of the same phrase (“through the forest”) repeated in the same position on two occasions in Georg Büchner’s book “Lenz” is taken as a leitmotiv and gives the title to the MACBA exhibition “Through the forest” which is divided into different chapters: the library or the archive, with a large part of this artist’s references; the forest, an intervention in which two generators powerfully illuminated a forest, changing the perception of the place; music, highlighting a fragment of Parsifal; cinema and photography and, finally, the identity of the artist, in which, with intelligence, distance and a critical eye, Rodney Graham represents himself as a Fluxus artist (throwing potatoes against a gong), as a classical musician, as a talented amateur or as a painter following the School of Paris.
It is no coincidence that Rodney Graham does not appear on Don Thompson’s lists, among other things, because it would be impossible to summarise his work in a single sentence. Fortunately.
[Article published in Bonart, 2010]
