Here's the Artforum.com blurb on Rodney Graham's show at 303 Gallery: "The primary work in this show, Phonokinetoscope, 2001, recreates a bicycle ride taken by Dr. Albert Hofmann through Berlin's Tiergarten on April 19, 1943. Before hopping on his bike, Hofmann, a chemist researching ergot alkaloids, swallowed a quarter milligram of the then new compound LSD-25. Later he would write that it dramatically altered his 'acoustic and optical perceptions.' Graham's film, complete with bike ride, LSD (which he washes down with coffee from a vintage thermos), and music composed and sung by the artist, mercifully avoids any overt psychedelia. Instead, it focuses on subtle interconnections and slippages between visual and aural perception, offering instances where sight and sound merge, as when the wheeze of the film projector matches the visual rhythm of a playing card hitting the spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel."
 Actually none of the above is precisely true. The 16 mm film loop is synchronized with an LP recording of a song by Graham, a kind of folk-metal ballad in the John Cale/Nick Drake/Syd Barrett mold. As the song begins, Graham is already on his bike. He pedals through the park, stops to stare fixedly at a statue, and rides across a bridge in reverse-motion--an homage to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the press release reminds us. The playing card in the spokes of his bike, anchored with a wood clothespin, suggests he's regressed to a childlike (or dork-like) state. The lyrics to the song are as dumb as they are poignant: Who is it that does not love a tree?
I planted one, I planted three.
Two for you and one for me.
Botanical anomaly...
You're the kind of girl that fits into my world...
You're the kind of girl that fits into my world... Finally, at the end of the song, he sits down, and with power chords climaxing on the soundtrack, eats a square of blotter and stares entranced at the clothespin and the playing card, a Queen of Diamonds (as in Lucy in the Sky with...?). Of course, since the piece is a loop, you could interpret the end as the beginning, and imagine the film as a trip that lasts an eternity. EXCEPT Graham has deliberately made it possible for any idiot to walk into the gallery and lift the the tone arm off the LP, which stops the song and disconnects the "looper," bringing the film--which people are watching in a different room from the one with the turntable--to a sudden, jarring halt. The woman at the desk said many viewers have gotten angry when this happens.
Rodney Graham talks about Photokinetoscope in the November Artforum, which is just hitting the stands this week. He claims the music and film are asynchronous, which means that even though there is a "beginning" and an "end" to the song, they could conceivably occur at any point in the film loop. Therefore, the LSD trip is implicitly endless, and the blotter-eating is something that occurs every five minutes or so. He also says the piece is a reenactment of an actual LSD trip he took in the Tiergarden in May 2001. (The blotter was called "Mad Hatter.")
Yet there is still some temporal confusion surrounding the piece: Graham's Artforum interviewer claims the backwards bike-riding (an amateur stunt that Graham performs in real time) is "a subtly victorious endpoint" to the film. I've seen the film a few times through (in New York and Paris last summer) and the end of the song always occurred when he sat down and ate the acid. Also, neither Graham nor the interviewer mention the eminent "interruptibility" of the piece--that ability of an unwitting third party to yank one out of one's reverie (which I described above). That's much more interesting and disturbingly lifelike to me than the endless loop, which has been done and done in film and video.
Finally, I want to pat myself on the back for (mostly) getting the Syd Barrett reference. Graham's song doesn't actually sound that much like the '60s psychonaut's music, but it must have been tugging at my subconscious that the line "You're the kind of girl that fits into my world" is from the Pink Floyd song "Bike." Unfortunately learning this diminishes Photokinetoscope for me slightly. That line, which I thought was Graham's, stuck with me for weeks after hearing it in Paris. It seemed like such a wonderfully anachronistic thing for an artist/songwriter to write in the '00s. Now I know it's an appropriated anachronism I'm not so impressed. Graham's song is still catchy, though.
HI THERE
i also had that line spinning for weeks (and still to this day) and i think the piece is worth seeking for hearing that song alone. i've researched the origin of the song, and found that it should be available on a rodney graham released album, titled Rock Is Hard.
i never knew that the piece was about LSD or psychadelia. i just found that the song lyrics referred to the statue of a female he continually visits in the park. and the bicycle. i even tried to rationalize the loop by thinking that the park could be a vagina and the statue a female goddess of life that could eventually bring life to him, but that is just, now thinking about it, just downright insane and utterly pretentious sounding.
It's as good an interpretation as Artforum's, which reduces the piece to "subtle interconnections and slippages between visual and aural perception." Better, even.
thanks :)
yeah it seems like they ignored the content of the media altogether, both isolated and combined. they touch the fact that music and image go together but they leave it at that.
instead of dissecting the work, they merely comment the surface, background, inspirations etc.
the quality and the fun of art, for me, is that it leaves freedom for false interpretation, the freedom to believe something about a work that isn't necessarily true, that escapes the imagination and perception-limiting force of scientific approach.
i now feel a little less (or maybe a little more) insane.
this makes me want to go to Tiergarten to drop acid and ride around on a bicycle.
i'm in
|
Here's the Artforum.com blurb on Rodney Graham's show at 303 Gallery: "The primary work in this show, Phonokinetoscope, 2001, recreates a bicycle ride taken by Dr. Albert Hofmann through Berlin's Tiergarten on April 19, 1943. Before hopping on his bike, Hofmann, a chemist researching ergot alkaloids, swallowed a quarter milligram of the then new compound LSD-25. Later he would write that it dramatically altered his 'acoustic and optical perceptions.' Graham's film, complete with bike ride, LSD (which he washes down with coffee from a vintage thermos), and music composed and sung by the artist, mercifully avoids any overt psychedelia. Instead, it focuses on subtle interconnections and slippages between visual and aural perception, offering instances where sight and sound merge, as when the wheeze of the film projector matches the visual rhythm of a playing card hitting the spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel."
Actually none of the above is precisely true. The 16 mm film loop is synchronized with an LP recording of a song by Graham, a kind of folk-metal ballad in the John Cale/Nick Drake/Syd Barrett mold. As the song begins, Graham is already on his bike. He pedals through the park, stops to stare fixedly at a statue, and rides across a bridge in reverse-motion--an homage to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the press release reminds us. The playing card in the spokes of his bike, anchored with a wood clothespin, suggests he's regressed to a childlike (or dork-like) state. The lyrics to the song are as dumb as they are poignant:
Who is it that does not love a tree?
I planted one, I planted three.
Two for you and one for me.
Botanical anomaly...
You're the kind of girl that fits into my world...
You're the kind of girl that fits into my world...
Finally, at the end of the song, he sits down, and with power chords climaxing on the soundtrack, eats a square of blotter and stares entranced at the clothespin and the playing card, a Queen of Diamonds (as in Lucy in the Sky with...?). Of course, since the piece is a loop, you could interpret the end as the beginning, and imagine the film as a trip that lasts an eternity. EXCEPT Graham has deliberately made it possible for any idiot to walk into the gallery and lift the the tone arm off the LP, which stops the song and disconnects the "looper," bringing the film--which people are watching in a different room from the one with the turntable--to a sudden, jarring halt. The woman at the desk said many viewers have gotten angry when this happens.
- tom moody 10-12-2001 5:46 am
Rodney Graham talks about Photokinetoscope in the November Artforum, which is just hitting the stands this week. He claims the music and film are asynchronous, which means that even though there is a "beginning" and an "end" to the song, they could conceivably occur at any point in the film loop. Therefore, the LSD trip is implicitly endless, and the blotter-eating is something that occurs every five minutes or so. He also says the piece is a reenactment of an actual LSD trip he took in the Tiergarden in May 2001. (The blotter was called "Mad Hatter.")
Yet there is still some temporal confusion surrounding the piece: Graham's Artforum interviewer claims the backwards bike-riding (an amateur stunt that Graham performs in real time) is "a subtly victorious endpoint" to the film. I've seen the film a few times through (in New York and Paris last summer) and the end of the song always occurred when he sat down and ate the acid. Also, neither Graham nor the interviewer mention the eminent "interruptibility" of the piece--that ability of an unwitting third party to yank one out of one's reverie (which I described above). That's much more interesting and disturbingly lifelike to me than the endless loop, which has been done and done in film and video.
Finally, I want to pat myself on the back for (mostly) getting the Syd Barrett reference. Graham's song doesn't actually sound that much like the '60s psychonaut's music, but it must have been tugging at my subconscious that the line "You're the kind of girl that fits into my world" is from the Pink Floyd song "Bike." Unfortunately learning this diminishes Photokinetoscope for me slightly. That line, which I thought was Graham's, stuck with me for weeks after hearing it in Paris. It seemed like such a wonderfully anachronistic thing for an artist/songwriter to write in the '00s. Now I know it's an appropriated anachronism I'm not so impressed. Graham's song is still catchy, though.
- tom moody 11-01-2001 12:40 am
HI THERE
i also had that line spinning for weeks (and still to this day) and i think the piece is worth seeking for hearing that song alone. i've researched the origin of the song, and found that it should be available on a rodney graham released album, titled Rock Is Hard.
i never knew that the piece was about LSD or psychadelia. i just found that the song lyrics referred to the statue of a female he continually visits in the park. and the bicycle. i even tried to rationalize the loop by thinking that the park could be a vagina and the statue a female goddess of life that could eventually bring life to him, but that is just, now thinking about it, just downright insane and utterly pretentious sounding.
- mr nice (guest) 1-28-2009 4:13 am
It's as good an interpretation as Artforum's, which reduces the piece to "subtle interconnections and slippages between visual and aural perception." Better, even.
- tom moody 1-28-2009 4:30 am
thanks :)
yeah it seems like they ignored the content of the media altogether, both isolated and combined. they touch the fact that music and image go together but they leave it at that.
instead of dissecting the work, they merely comment the surface, background, inspirations etc.
the quality and the fun of art, for me, is that it leaves freedom for false interpretation, the freedom to believe something about a work that isn't necessarily true, that escapes the imagination and perception-limiting force of scientific approach.
i now feel a little less (or maybe a little more) insane.
- mr nice (guest) 1-28-2009 6:09 am
this makes me want to go to Tiergarten to drop acid and ride around on a bicycle.
- sarah 1-28-2009 9:08 pm
i'm in
- Skinny 1-29-2009 2:00 am