At his most deadly serious, Rodney Graham plays the artist and the clown. Perhaps he never could distinguish the two, and he dares you to try.
He photographs dead flowers in his studio, prints it as large as life, and calls it art. He saves a photo of a pipe-cleaner artist in Amalfi for more than fifty years before printing it again as a diptych, running seven and a half feet across. He must have loved the artist’s dedication, ingenuity, and, when it comes down to it, serious child’s play. Italian sunlight cannot make it past the studio window. 
If the colors of Graham’s flowers look vivid, even pleasing, they are still the colors of death. So is the white of the stool on which they rest—the same white as his easel in a Studio Construction, framed and mounted behind glass. Another construction saves some of those pipe cleaners from the trash, as a white shroud. Still, he is clowning around while making art. The most recent work in a gallery career survey, at 303 Gallery through October 24, turns to acrylic and sand. One painting adds seeming eyes to the abstraction. It has an equal debt to Cubism and to a clown face, but then artists from Antoine Watteau to Pablo Picasso have no shortage of harlequins.
Graham has his clown face, too, on video, where death is a mere vexation. He lies on the sand as if dead, in Vexation Island from 1997. Strong winds blow through the palm trees, and a barrel rests at his feet. Somehow he draws the attraction of a colorful parrot, the mark of a pirate, and dresses in the red vest and stockings of an ancient mariner, only cleaner. The camera closes in on a serious gash on his forehead, which looks more and more deadly as the camera lingers and his eyes open. But then they are the black eyes not of a fight, but of a make-up artist.
For all his media, he made his name as a conceptual artist. He brought glitter to the 2006 Whitney Biennial and upside-down trees to the Fisher Landau Center, as if the bright lights of the club scene were not serious enough. The gallery links him to other Canadian artists, Stan Douglas and Jeff Wall, as the Vancouver school. One may want to dismiss them all as a one-joke affair. Still, Graham has more than one trick up his sleeve. He could teach a whole course.
And so he does, as Media Studies ’77. Once again he recycles or appropriates an old photo. He has wheeled in a VCR, at left in again a large diptych. Someone might as well have wheeled him in, too, on the right, where he sits at ease on a desk, cigarette in hand. He must enjoy prompting viewers to complain about the dated media studies. They could almost forget the work’s actual medium, its color and resolution rooting it in 2016, though the classroom clock is frozen in time.
The lecture has begun, but the monitor remains black, and the cigarette has not a puff of smoke. Perhaps the past is as dead, for Graham, as the present—lingering on just long enough to provoke you. Surely the blackboard is not part of the class, but it, too, looks suspiciously like a work of art. Chalk has smeared out into what could be layers of abstraction—or waves lapping at Vexation Island. You may never know when to admire a series for its dark humor or to write it off as glib. Better wait, though, until the lecture is over.
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