© Rodney Graham: How I Became a Ramblin' Man, 1999. Video/sound installation. 35 mm film transferred to DVD, DVD player, projector, 4 speakers, AV receiver. 9 minute loop. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago.

At first glance, Rodney Graham´s film work How I Became a Ramblin´ Man appears idyllic. We see a man, his horse and his guitar in an impressive, beautiful natural setting. Together they comprise the American dream, an image of freedom and mythical masculinity: the solitary wanderer in self-imposed exile from the clamorous city. The man slowly rides up on his trusty mount, stops alongside a small river, takes out his guitar and sings a song, then retraces his steps. But in viewing the film a number of times, one experiences that the man is anything but free. In a repetitive sequence, he is captured in an endless cycle between that point in the countryside from where he appears and to which he returns.

Looping is an important element in Rodney Graham´s work. In an earlier work, Lenz (1983), he reconstructs an early 19th century novel into a looped sequence of four pages repeated 83 times, an image of the suicidal poet´s circumstances.

In How I Became a Ramblin´ Man the repetition creates a feeling of claustrophobia, a direct contrast to the wide-open landscape, undermining the linear narrative, one of film´s most traditional foundations. It is largely impossible to perceive a before and after in what we see, something that reinforces aspects of superficiality and cliché.

Repetition in the form of rehearsal is also an important aspect in Rodney Graham´s work. One could consider it to be something like practising a new language, in which the artist does his best to illuminate structures that form different cultural phenomenon. In How I Became a Ramblin´ Man he also acts and performs his own music. It could so easily become a parody, yet results in something more like a rehearsal, an assimilation of those means necessary within the context. The image is complicated by the artist´s choice of using simultaneous references to other contexts and thus does not completely "succeed" with any of them. There are loose ends and contradictions that turn the work into something more than a pure deconstruction. There are links to classic western movies, the language of advertising and the music video. The man on the horse reverberates western references, yet both the man and the horse seem too well groomed, too polished, and the costume doesn´t quite seem to fit in. In proper music video fashion, the camera pans about, yet are the lyrics really complete? And actually, has this man ever ridden a horse before?

Helena Holmberg

Rodney Graham was born 1949 in Vancouver, Canada, where he lives and works. His broad career as an artist spans book projects, audio, music, film, etc. Rodney Graham´s work has been exhibited at Documenta IX in Kassel, the Venice Biennial , Dia Center for the Arts in New York, Lisson Gallery in London, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Kunsthalle Vienna and in many other venues.

How I Became a Ramblin´ Man (1999) is filmed on 35 mm and transferred to DVD.

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