The Dutch museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, opened in 2016 to show the collection of Joop van Caldenborgh, can sometimes feel a little heavy on art that dominated the early Noughties: humorous, bold and toying with our perception and even our idea of what constitutes art. There’s artist Leando Erlich’s real life swimming pool with its glass bottom, showing visitors moving in a box underneath. There is the sculpture of an older couple resting under a parasol by Australian artist Ron Mueck – it’s the size of a small building, every hair and pimple augmented and scarily real. And somewhere hidden in one of the corridors are Maurizio Cattelan’s two tiny elevators that open and close to the sound of a ping, going… where? But besides these crowd-pleasers, Voorlinden has an excellent program of temporary exhibitions. The current display, Robin Rhode, is the first solo exhibition of the South African artist (1976) in the Netherlands.
Piano Chair, 2011
My feeling upon entering the exhibition was a mix of surprise and confusion. There is so much going on in each individual work. Is this a drawing? Photograph? Sculpture? Performance? An Animation? In most works, it’s all of these media, all in conversation with each other.
The short digital animation Piano Chair shows the outlines of a black piano drawn on a white wall, and before you can really examine the work, you notice a man dressed in a black tie walking towards the piano, as if the wall, the canvas for the drawing, is now a stage set. Then you notice the rope. But now it’s a real-life rope installed on the gallery wall, which the man now grabs to try to pull the piano away, in a humorous, almost Charlie-Chaplin-esque act. He fails. The film ends with the piano catching fire, the flames filmed separately and inserted into the animation. Are you still following? It’s truly dazzling.
There is something really exciting about your mind being whirled around like that, constantly veering between perception, understanding, and undoing. We are shown all the different temporalities and all the different media all at once. The result is that we are both captivated by what is happening and by how on earth the artist made it work. It’s like our brains are engaged on different levels.
People in Rhode’s works often fail - in that sense, it has similarities with the work of performance artist Francis Alys. But whereas Alys’ art is sometimes so conceptual that it is difficult to grasp what exactly constitutes the artwork, Rhode’s work is a true visual feast. Some walls in Voorlinden are clad in wallpaper with geometric designs derived from Rhode’s real-life wall paintings on the streets of South Africa; on other walls, the artist has painted fresh drawings especially for this exhibition.
Chalk Bicycle, 2011
Chalk Bicycle looks so fresh and alive that it seems it was painted on the wall just moments ago. In fact, it was done just before the exhibition opened - you can see clips of Rhode at work on the walls on Voorlinden’s website. For Rhode, drawing on the wall is a performance; it involves his whole body in a vigorous acrobatic dance: so quick and virtuous that the drawing is there before you even realise what exactly he is doing. A real bike and the artist’s paint-covered shoes left on the floor give the illusion that a performance is still going on, except now it is done without the artist present. Rhode is a master of illusion, making us see and imagine things with just a minimum of visual means.
But there is a more serious undertone, too. Rhode sees his performance drawing as a kind of poetry: the rhythm of shapes, the harmonies hidden inside the lines. His futile interventions are a comment on the futility of life itself. As he says in one of the clips on Voorlinden’s website, he is trying to capture in his works the struggle of the everyday, in search of that one creative spark. “I use humour and play as an ode to survival - those small moments that can lift humans up.”
Phantom Rain (detail), 2019
Some works are more conventional: his photographs are always shown in series, documenting the stages of a performance that happened longer ago, in another place. Drawing extensively on the walls of streets and dilapidated buildings in his hometown of Johannesburg, Rhode engages performers to activate the sites. In the series Phantom Rain, the human figure almost merges with the tree, as if the body is just another compositional element in the whole. But of course, our mind tells us differently: a body is a three-dimensional, complex, moving thing. The effect is that both the drawing and the building become animated, an extension of the artist’s psyche. Even the tree starts to look like a drawing, and again, that wonderful moment happens, that mix between confusion and surprise, trying to join the rational part of our brain with our emotional and physical reaction to the work.
Untitled (Compass - Male & Female), 2013
In Compass Male & Female, an object is literally animated: a sculpture of an enlarged compass is suspended from the ceiling, so that it moves around like an elegant dancer. Rhode is interested in the idea that mathematical instruments can embody a kind of sexuality and a kind of animism, as if they are a stand-in for humans. It really starts to feel like everything Rhode touches comes alive, as if he can magically transform even the dullest and most common things.
Proteus, 2020
The series Proteus was made in 2020 in the backyard of Rhode’s parental home in Johannesburg. It is named after the prophetic god of the oceans rivers bodies of water. It beautifully captures the wrought times of the pandemic, having to make do with what is around us, having to find beauty in the domestic and the everyday.Looping back to the beginning - it’s an apt metaphor for the nature of Rhode’s work. His work offers no resolution; there’s only fleeting beauty and short moments of humour and surprise and connection.
Rhode’s art is tentative instead of declaratory: it poses questions instead of giving explanations. It is hard to pin down, its forms and mediums shapeshifting right before your eyes. Rhode’s art offers a meta-commentary on art itself: however much the artwork tries, it will never be able to fully grasp real life. And yet, I feel that Rhode’s art comes close. His work, to me, captures the incredible wonder and complexity of what it means to be alive.
Robin Rhode, Voorlinden, Wassenaar (The Netherlands), until 25 September 2021