A conversation with Robin Rhode and Trevor Bishai
Robin Rhode by Ruud Baan, Courtesy Voorlinden museum
Trevor Bishai in Conversation with Robin Rhode
Robin Rhode is on a search for the infinite. Keenly aware of the potential for art to push beyond the confines of its frame, the South African-born artist has long been interested in how geometry, form, and color can access a higher, more universal aesthetic realm. Taking his artistic practice out of the studio and onto the streets, where he enlivens wall drawings with spirited protagonists, Rhode uses form and geometry to expand conventional narratives of place and community.
Having been active as a multidisciplinary artist for over twenty years, Rhode has produced an extensive body of work including drawings, photographic series, performances, and films. Currently based in Berlin, Rhode has created most of work in his native Johannesburg, but has more recently explored several other locations such as the West Bank. This spring, Museum Voorlinden in The Netherlands is presenting a major retrospective encompassing works from Rhode’s entire career. Leading up to this exhibition, Musée had the privilege of speaking with Robin about his upbringing, his use of photography, and what inspires him to find new places in which to create his work.
Robin Rhode, Nigerian Sands, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris/London
Installation view museum Voorlinden
Trevor Bishai: Can you identify one moment in your upbringing when you realized you wanted to be an artist, or was it more gradual than that?
Robin Rhode: I was always very absorbed with art as a kid, even though we didn’t have any art facilities or art education in school. I somehow realized early on, around the age of sixteen, that I had no other choice but to become an artist because I really showed a lack of academic focus. I also had zero creative outlet, so I became a real problem kid. So I’d just do graffiti, I was tagging, I was drawing in my high school textbooks, I was just out of control—I had no choice but to become an artist.
TB: How did you get into photography?
RR: My interest in photography comes from my understanding of how a piece of performance art is captured and exists as a document—proof of the action that actually existed. What comes to mind as an inspiration would be Yves Klein’s “Leap Into the Void.” That kind of set me on my course to consider the body placed inside a frame or a picture frame, and becoming the protagonist or the medium for what is happening inside the frame.
Installation view museum Voorlinden
Photo: Antoine van Kaam
TB: Usually in photography you capture objects and scenes that aren’t necessarily yours, but you’re doing a very staged form of performance art photography. So I feel like there’s a lot to be said there about how you’re documenting your own creation by creating something else, so there’s sort of a meta-narrative there.
RR: Over time I began to understand that I could add extra layers of meaning to the image by maybe considering props. By considering objects that have an inherent meaning in themselves. As an aesthete I believe that cinema has all these levels and layers of construction inside of it, and I’m trying to have my work sometimes function as cinema does, to give it depth, multiple dimensions. I’m trying to create meaning through considering dimensions.
TB: When did you decide to take just the mural and change it into something more dynamic and interactive?
RR: When I was in art school, I wanted to resist the bland, controlled atmosphere of the interior studio space. So, I became rebellious towards that system and decided to embrace the outside, the street, as my new context. And some of why I did that was also to take a political position in terms of shifting the role of the viewer of contemporary art in South Africa—from the kind of educated and informed eye that was predominantly white to the unassuming, to the not-knowing, to the passerby, to the pedestrian, to the homeless, to the laborer. And to somehow expose the public to a process of contemporary art. Not the final work itself, but to see a process unfold.
Robin Rhode, Light Giver, Light Taker, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and London.
Installation view museum Voorlinden
Photo: Antoine van Kaam
TB: And it’s outside, in the public, not hidden away.
RR: Yeah. I go to my neighborhood, I can just take a drive for five minutes, and I’m in a very, very rough area. High unemployment rate, high drug addiction rate. It’s really a struggling community, constantly plagued with gangs and violence and drug wars. But somehow I felt totally at home. I grew up close by, I had friends in the neighborhood and stuff. I didn’t feel threatened at all actually. That’s where I worked [from] 2010 until about 2018. [If] you look at the work that I make, I never turn my camera on that reality. My intention is just the wall. The way the art world has shifted now, it’s all about the lived experience and the reality of a cultural experience. I worked against it. I was like, I’m not even going to show it. I’m going to search for perfection. I’m going to search for the infinitive. I’m going to show this community which is plagued with violence that there is a way to escape it—I’m going to depict green grass as shades of green triangles. I’m gonna show paradise as a Polyhedral geometric pattern using the palettes of Claude Monet. I’m going to show the nude figure as a cube, you know what I mean?
TB: I know you are very interested in geometry. I see a bit of a juxtaposition between the geometry on the wall, which is very regular, and the subject’s motion, which is very fluid or irregular. Were you intentionally trying to create such tension?
RR: The inspiration for geometry comes from my search for the infinitive. I’ve made a lot of work that deals with the infinitive, the figure-8 for example, trying to depict how the notion of the infinite can exist as an aesthetic. Also, I love this idea of injecting a level of spirituality to the work, and we can speak about sacred geometry, forms that have kind of a sacredness in their perfection or in their symbolism. It’s the organic body versus my depiction of geometry, but then again, the body itself is a depiction of geometry, too.
Still from Robin Rhode, Piano Chair (2011). Digital animation, 3:53 min. Courtesy of the artist.
TB: It is quite interesting when you talk about humor and play. How does this come into play with more serious themes that you seem to have, like in “Piano Chair,” which imitates a lynching?
RR: Well, humor and play are both very interesting devices because humor comes through this idea of the absurd—the absurdity of painting an object on the wall and pretending as if it’s real, even though it’s painted in a very crude manner. In South African society, we like to make fun. A very funny culture. But throwing trash at a drawn trash can is also a very critical way of looking at what we perceive to be reality and what is not, what is three-dimensional and what is not. And then humor becomes a very powerful tool to overcome trauma. The humor acts as a way to reject the reality of trauma; it is a coping mechanism. But I’m also really not overly conscious of this balance. I just do it and don’t let it determine too much or predict which way I’m going to go or anything like that. I’m not in control of everything.
TB: I’ve also noticed that only some of your works show the subject’s face, while many of them don’t. Do you want to touch on that at all?
RR: It’s only recent actually, my three last pieces were actually the first time I exposed the face after many years.“Nigerian Sands,” “Mandala,” and “Delta”—yeah. The exposing of the face was more like a celebration. Let’s celebrate our identities, we don’t have to hide them anymore, we can embrace who we are. We’re beautiful and I wanted to celebrate my doppelgängers, my protagonists, too.
Robin Rhode, Chalk Bicycle, 2021. THE EKARD COLLECTION.
Installation view museum Voorlinden
Photo: Antoine van Kaam
TB: Yeah, and when we were talking about infinity, this is definitely the piece that stuck out to me the most.
RR: After “Nigerian Sands” and “Delta” and “Mandala,” the narrative changes. I give up the Johannesburg wall in 2018 and then I find new walls—I have a new context. Palestine.
TB: My gut reaction to hearing that you worked in Palestine is that it's the location of the Western Wall. So, I find that there’s a lot of significance there, where your practice is brought to a place where a wall is very important.
RR: In 2019, I was based in the city of Jericho. Where there is probably the most powerful narrative of a wall ever. It’s the mythological city of the wall, right?
Installation view museum Voorlinden
Photo: Antoine van Kaam
TB: Right! So did you go there because of this story?
RR: I had visited a few times, for tourism. I was trying to work there because Palestine reminded me a lot of South Africa. There’s a political parallel to South Africa, with Israel seen as an apartheid state, but I also realized that aesthetically, it had these hallmarks of South African suburbs and townships. With a lot of panel beaters, car workshops—a really kind of gritty, grimy atmosphere. It was like, I know this world, I want to draw there. Spiritually, also, this is a very charged context, and it is a context that has some of the most powerful stories ever written. Stories that have shaped three faiths. And I wanted to work in a world where it was charged with narrative. A narrative that is spiritual, that is part mythological, that is part fictional, that is part archaeological. So I thought, maybe it’s a place that I can work in because it’s so fertile with narrative. I think what is exciting me now is to look at my work not only as exclusively from Africa or Johannesburg, but seeing it as a vessel to the world that I find myself in, and I then reflect that, become a mirror to that.
TB: Do you feel like most of your life is ahead of you?
RR: Definitely. [The] more you work with the unfamiliar, the more you’re always trying to find something. Some people have said to me, ‘Robin, you’re always searching, you must stop trying to search.’ I’m always trying to find things. I don’t know whether that’s a bad quality or a good one; I don't know what they mean. This show in Voorlinden is one of the biggest shows in my life, and it reflects a departure—right now, I’m in the process of a huge recalibration. I’m selling my studio and trying to become a painter. Hopefully post-COVID, I can once again go out there and explore the context of the nomadic studio. I think I’m really good at that stuff, going out there into the world and figuring out what to make of different contexts. I’m just trying to find a place where I can find a story to tell that I find, for myself, interesting.
Rhode’s solo exhibition is on show at Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, The Netherlands until September 26, 2021.
