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It’s hard not to like the work of Rodney Graham: one invariably gets the joke. At his most recent show at the Lisson Gallery in London I had to laugh before I even got in the gallery. Blinded by my own good taste, I had walked right past the gallery window, mistaking what was inside—a pair of colourfully dressed mannequins and two green waistcoats hung on the wall—for this season’s penultimate statement on hippy chic. I was not on Conduit St. however, and this was not merely fashion: this was Graham’s art! Tripping up on one’s better judgement is paradigmatic of the spectator’s predicament when faced by Graham’s work. In retrospect I should have guessed that these fashionable clothes bore the trademark style of his deeply ironic practice: a practice which directly confronts the always tenuous ground of art’s status as commodity fetish, as fashion—the notion of which accompanied my grin from ear to ear, as I entered the gallery.
Fashion, proper, has always been a recurring motif in Graham’s work. Long before these modish pieces were his immaculately tailored White Shirt (for Mallarmé) (1993), shown simultaneously at Barney’s on 5th Avenue and at his New York dealer. More generally, fashion has been integral to his persona as a sort of Baudelairian dandy who "should rather resign (themselves) to simply going to bed and remain there for lack of clothes to wear"—as the poet went on in a letter to his mother.(1) Of course, unlike Baudelaire, Graham can fall back upon an exquisite pair of striped, silk pyjamas that he had tailor-made for his work Halcyon Sleep (1998). A rather rough video to be sure, but not one without a certain flare: especially if one thinks of the video as a kind of joke, a pretence dreamt up to fill the lack in what one can only imagine as a frightfully thin wardrobe.
What is happy, baby provides a showcase of Graham’s ability for working across a fairly dazzling variety of mediums. What emerges from this show, and from an earlier show at the Kunstverein München, is something like a theory of the joke: a theory in which Graham figures as nothing less than contemporary art’s greatest victim of fashion. The spectrum of identities Graham assumes easily rivals the market’s own capacity for invention, novelty, and the ad hoc repetition of these. In Images qui succedent à la contemplation d’objets d’un grand éclat ou meme d’objets bien éclairs (2000) and My Only Novel, translated for the French (After William Beckford, Mark Twain) (2000), he plays the part of the slightly eccentric and overly intellectual conceptual artist—in whose web of metonymic references one finds the likes of Kierkegaard, Plateau, Lenz, Poe, Baudelaire, Roussel, and others. In Fishing on the Jetty (2000) he performs as a photo-conceptual artist appearing in the role of John Robie, a character played by Cary Grant in a Hitchcock film, who is pretending to be someone else. But one can also find Graham posing as bibliophile, utopian architect, Baroque projectionist, lecturer in Freud, independent filmmaker, and author/novelist, as well as the DAAD recipient for the current year. The four fashionable ensembles on show were props from Graham’s latest "costume picture" titled City Self/Country Self (Paris Street Scene 1865) in which he starred and produced. What is happy, baby refers to the title track of Graham’s third CD featuring himself in the capacity of singer/songwriter.
If one thinks of this impressive list as the empirical proof of Graham’s wardrobe, that is, as so many indications of the frightfully thin set of conceptual tools which the artist can work with at any given time, then one begins to see where the identification between fashion and art might hold out the possibility of something other than a febrile cooptation by the market. Because one consistently runs across so many instances and dimensions of this identity, often in blatantly accusatory forms, one comes away with the distinct sense of a rhetoric in action. In point of fact, fashion in all of its many guises—artistic, intellectual, on matters of taste in clothing, in the realm of ideas, and choice in mediums—grounds Graham’s practice for a reason. Thinking that one can escape the nature of the cliché involves a serious mystification of the self—one blinded to the self’s constitution in and through language. Like Baudelaire, Graham seems to have recognized that the identity of the artist is one particularly mutable to changes in fashion, in mood, and across mediums.
What Adorno calls an "immanent understanding of the material" exists in each of Graham’s works.(2) Each object, text, or song comes equipped with its own economy of taste built in. That this is tightly sealed off from the often facile surface of Graham’s work is Adorno’s point. Listening to Graham’s music, for instance, necessitates a kind of lazy act of meaning-making far different from that agility of mind required when confronted by Images qui succedent à la contemplation d’objets. If the former calls for a working knowledge of the convention of the love song, and how this might be turned into a slacker’s platform for thinking "the disenchantment of the world," the latter begs for an economy of meaning production more familiar to the rare book shop, the early history of cinema, that of minimalist sculpture and the science of optics. The procedures of each count on an act of sublimation equal to the object at hand and insinuated by the symbolic economies of fashion that a taste in either object entails. Making sense of each work means getting the odd associations, the tangential references, and the web of metonymic meanings that make up Graham’s dumbed down, if youthful—refined, if slightly eccentric—universe.
In fact, in all of Graham’s works there is a certain adequation between the act of interpretation and the fact of getting some private joke or other. Graham’s many personas are so present in his work that in making sense of it one feels almost pressured into working alongside his self-conscious authorial presence. More often than not, this means that understanding always presumes a certain humour; or more succinctly it presumes grasping the irony of the material itself as one presumes Graham himself has grasped it. The therapeutic aspect of psychoanalysis, and specifically Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, is almost certainly providing a sort of backdrop here. But there is something beyond the easy equation between understanding and feel good humour as well; something that works against the naïve therapeutic fact of being content or happy with oneself for getting the joke. For what is unnerving and far more unsettling is that one always gets the joke. My own satisfaction at having grasped the identity between art and fashion, and inasmuch having moved toward the clarity of truth from the cloudiness of error, is proof of that!
It is precisely at the moment of getting the joke that one broaches the complicated history of irony: irony in its two-fold nature, as a contradiction, as an empirical fact located in the present, as "laughter" struck from what Baudelaire describes as the "perpetual collision of two infinities."(3) In the flash of enlightenment one encounters the concept of irony as well as Graham’s particular purchase on it.
In capsule, the history of irony can be reduced to the shift from my original mistake in thinking Graham’s art to be merely fashion, to what I posited thereafter as the identity between fashion and art. What has been acknowledged as a kind of double irony by an illustrious list of ironists (Graham included) begins with this assumption to truth. If one accepts this identity as the paradigmatic instance of irony in its elementary form—for instance it was argued irony was the constitutive mode of appropriation art in the 1980s—irony of a second order works to unsettle precisely this conviction. It does so by shifting the entire set of questions from the object—as the housing of a symbolic structure of reflection where contradictory extremes are reconciled—to the subject where this hoped for dialectic is engineered. For Graham, irony is not exclusive to the object; rather, it is a problem located within the self. If it were not for the fact that the act of interpretation is consistently deemed a laughing matter in Graham’s work this would not be the case.
All of this can be sorted out in City Self/Country Self (Paris Street Scene 1865). The third of Graham’s so-called "Hollywood style star vehicles" this richly textured period piece describes the "comic misadventures of a provincial rustic on his first visit to Paris." Building narrative tension out of an easily recognizable set of 19th-century costume conventions, at precisely the stroke of noon Graham’s country self (played by himself) is unceremoniously booted in the ass by his city self (also played by himself). This ridiculous gag, what Graham singles out as the "injury laugh endemic to film comedy since Lumiere’s L’Arrouseur Arrose," comes off without a hitch. Aside from the visual slapstick itself, there is a laugh in seeing the artist in sync with popular forces as well as a joke in the supposed detachment of the artist from these forces. Both in character and continually falling out of character in his double roles as rustic and urbanite, irony takes hold and unravels the narrative at every point.
Perhaps one of the main reasons Graham gets his laugh is that much of what transpires in this "costume picture" turns on the fiction that the artist has been reading his social art history. The project is grounded in the form and circulation of an Epinal, (a broadsheet-type poster of this is provided), the historical and ideological nature of 19th-century costumery, peasant uprisings, class aspirations, the great Courbet, and the petite creve. The rustic or pastoral convention itself has always been central to dramatizing such antagonisms in a social order. The fact is that this work is not simply about getting famous by starring in your own film, it is about class: specifically, recognizing the nature of class (now) as the occulted matter of taste, a material question which is always tightly sealed off from the tasteful façade language provides. But City Self/Country Self is also about the fortunes of a class reading: class, if both a joke and a formulaic notion of the critical, also, is a discursive mechanism that has the power of deflecting the violence that goes along with any act of ridicule or derision, and turning this into a moment of laughter.
The punch line in Graham’s work, like the dialectical theatre between fashion and art, is nothing other than a moment in a series of happy moments grounded on the assumed superiority and demystified status of a self involved in a continuous interpretative operation. That fashion is so intimately connected with art is not the crux of Graham’s irony at all then: rather, the crux of Graham’s irony is the mystification within the self that such a recognition sustains. Tailoring a laugh around the identity between fashion and art is the point at which Graham’s concept of irony begins to unfold, where it blends with a theory of the joke and starts to whirl out of control. Getting the joke in Graham’s work means accepting the fact that the joke is always on you: that within the act of understanding one is always finishing off and polishing Graham’s jokes for him through a kind of self-duplication of one’s own making. What is happy, baby, puts Stendahl’s famous dictum of art to the seductive sound of music, as it was undoubtedly intended to be heard by the great ironist himself. In this sense, Graham’s work delivers art’s promesse du bonheur in terms of a happiness both fulfilled and constantly broken. For whenever one gets the joke and comes away happy, this modicum of content rests on the firm belief that it was actually transferred from the work to the viewer and not dreamt up by the clown standing there posing as the audience for contemporary art.
1. Charles Baudelaire quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 312.
2. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 115.
3. Charles Baudelaire, "On the Essence of Laughter and, in General, on the Comic in the Plastic Arts," in The Painter of Modern Life: and Other Essays, trans. J. Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 154.
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