Rodney Graham on movies: love ‘em, hate ‘em

Rodney Graham makes movies for the seminar room. While often intriguing, an inherent limitation intrudes. Graham can loop a suggestive clip from a Sean Connery-era James Bond movie and raise all kinds of interesting questions in the process -- about the structure of cinema, the intoxication produced by mass media, Freudian narratives of repetition compulsion, post-structural ideas of negation, the artist as social outsider and more. But if a choice had to be made, it’s Connery and “Dr. No” I’d like to see a second time.

Graham is a Conceptual artist (born 1949) who is far better known in Vancouver, B.C., and Germany than he is in the United States. That’s one reason the Museum of Contemporary Art, long deferential to the German audience, has co-organized the pleasant 25-year survey “Rodney Graham: A Little Thought,” which opened Sunday at the Geffen Contemporary. Graham was born, went to school and lives in British Columbia, and MOCA has collaborated on the show with the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Vancouver, led by artists such as Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas, has been an epicenter for artistic investigations of the way camera-vision and mass media have shaped modern perception. In addition to Graham’s meditation on “Dr. No,” 11 film and video projections made during the last decade are in the exhibition, along with costumes, props and production notes. Photographs, sculptures and models for large-scale projects round out the show.

Graham’s photographs often refer to the camera obscura, the darkened room with a lens-covered aperture that got the photographic ball rolling way back in the Renaissance. A number of enormous black-and-white photographs, each nearly 8 feet tall, show single trees of various species upside down, the way the image would be reproduced after light passed through the camera obscura’s lens.

They’re mildly funny. There is, of course, no reason a portable photograph can’t simply be turned right side up, unlike the wall on which a camera obscura projects its upside-down picture.

But Graham’s visual pratfalls have a serious side. His subject matter recalls the famously exquisite photographs of oaks and beeches by 19th century pioneers such as Gustave Le Gray and Sir William J. Newton, who worked at the beginning of the modern era. If the illusion of reality created by their cameras was once thought capable of bringing us closer to nature, Graham’s topsy-turvy photographs insist that the illusion inevitably takes us farther away.

This aesthetic critique of camera-vision has been standard for a long time, however. Graham’s handsome 1989 trees stand like the noble raw material for diplomas proving matriculation from art’s post-structural academy.

More charming is the odd film installation “Coruscating Cinnamon Granules” (1996), in which a distant spiral galaxy of stars seems to flicker magically into view -- courtesy of cinnamon (note the cinema pun) sprinkled on the coil of a kitchen stove. And more powerful is “Edge of a Wood” (1999), which sets the flickering light into dramatic motion.

What a difference a decade makes. In this side-by-side projection, first shown at MOCA in the 2001 show “Flight Patterns” and now part of the museum’s permanent collection, the forest and the trees still cannot be penetrated -- and something of a relief it is.

“Edge of a Wood” was shot at night from a helicopter. During the nearly eight-minute projection the ominous, amplified roar of whirring rotor blades rises and falls on the soundtrack. Occasionally the nighttime blackness being projected is pierced by spotlights whose startling illumination slides across grassy fields and bumps up against the exterior of a dense forest. The aura of surveillance -- of straining to see something concealed (and potentially wicked) behind an everyday surface -- is strong. Creepy, too.

And, not least of all, ravishingly beautiful. The fuzzy glimpses of landscape illuminated by slanting light recall German artist Gerhard Richter’s field paintings from the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, Graham’s painterly references slide back all the way to the end of the 19th century and Cezanne. His subtly shifting perspectives anticipated a world where moving pictures and aerial views would become commonplace.

Because the moving spotlights in “Edge of a Wood” pick out only bleary landscape fragments, it’s hard to tell whether a single horizon continues across the work’s two big screens. Maybe it’s one slightly overlapping view, or maybe two completely separate ones. Human vision is binocular, but here perception shatters. The aura of surveillance turns inward.

Graham often embeds pop culture references in his work -- especially the Hollywood vernacular of costume dramas. “Vexation Island,” which made the artist’s reputation when it was shown in the Canadian Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, is as glossy as a 1950s epic filmed in CinemaScope.

The theme of a desert island castaway is suggestive of Daniel Dafoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” which has been filmed more than a dozen times, starting with Georges Melies in 1902. Even Surrealist Luis Bunuel filmed the story, featuring a famous dream sequence. Graham’s nine-minute film was made the same year as the most recent version, which notably starred Pierce Brosnan -- today’s James Bond.

Nothing much happens in “Vexation Island.” Graham’s narrative is not located in the script as much as in the self-consciously artful composition of the images, the carefully contrived editing and the intentionally hackneyed sequence of lush visual cliches. Movie memory is a subject.

A man (the artist) in 17th century dress lies spread out on the sand, a bloody wound on his forehead and a parrot perched on a wooden barrel washed up at his feet. Most of the film is a sequence of images setting the scene and isolating details: the unconscious gentleman, a looming palm tree, fronds swaying in the breeze, pounding surf, the brightly colored bird, sun beating down between fluffy white clouds, etc. It’s a virtual index of Dream Factory establishing shots.

Suddenly the parrot squawks. The man awakes and, sluggishly spying coconuts up in the palm, staggers toward the tree. He grabs the phallic trunk and shakes it, dislodging a fruit.

The coconut falls and -- yes -- beans the hapless castaway, laying him flat-out in the sand. The bloody wound on his forehead and his prior state of unconsciousness are at once explained and renewed. The film loop repeats the shaggy dog story in perpetuity.

The film is a Buster Keaton-style short subject, worthy of Sigmund Freud. In “The Interpretation of Dreams” the Viennese psychiatrist gave an example of dream analysis in which a letter -- a message -- is a puzzling symbol for vexation. Graham’s looping “Vexation Island” is a wry tale of the repetitive daily cycle of enigmatic sleep followed by waking troubles -- Bill Murray’s “Groundhog Day” for an analysand. It deftly pulls the plug on Dafoe’s book, which chronicled the fantasy reunion between a civilized man and raw nature.

Graham, as both the artist and the actor, is the eye of the camera and the “I” of the film. Significantly, our hero is unconscious during most of the movie, which repeats its gorgeous and elaborate array of vivid Hollywood cliches over and over, ad infinitum. One dubious implication is that consumers of popular culture are unwittingly narcotized by it, while consumers of Conceptual art are happily enlightened.

This questionable narcotic element is also suggested by the most recent installation, the lovely “Rheinmetall/Victoria 8,” made last year. The 35-millimeter film is projected by an enormous, clattering, commercial film projector -- the Italian-made Victoria 8 model -- that stands atop a pedestal as if a monumental modern sculpture. A nearly 11-minute film shows a 1930s German typewriter, the brand-name “Rheinmetall” written in elegant script across the front, shot in static black-and-white views and loving close-ups.

From today’s digital vantage point, the typewriter and the movie projector are brackets for narrative in the Industrial Age. Both are obsolete -- the typewriter as a flickering phantom on the screen, the movie projector turned into a pedestal-bound work of art.

Suddenly it begins to snow. The typewriter and its keys and hammers are gradually covered by drifts of white powder. Projected as a loop, “Rheinmetall/Victoria 8” suggests the inevitable winter of our mass-media vexation.

The snowy loop makes a sly, affectionate nod to the Canadian master of structural film, Michael Snow. But the snowfall also recalls classic scenes from the heart of the Hollywood repertoire -- like the refreshing, unexpected blizzard that revived Dorothy and her companions to consciousness on the road to Oz, after they succumbed to intoxication in a field of opium poppies.

“The Wizard of Oz” was made in 1939. Rheinmetall -- short for Rheinische Metallwaaren und Maschinenfabrik AG -- is a German company founded in the late 19th century as the Kaiser’s arms manufacturer. By the 1930s it was producing, in addition to high-style typewriters, lethal weapons for the Axis powers. Rheinmetall helped Hitler sweep across Europe and the Japanese Imperial Navy ply the Pacific.

Works like “Vexation Island” and “Rheinmetall/Victoria 8” refuse a simple-minded rhetoric of good and evil, recognizing moral ambiguities as more authentic to cosmopolitan experience. Graham is a deft and ingratiating artist, with a gift for powerful and complex imagery -- and an apparent love/hate relationship with the movies.

Where his work gets sticky is in its insupportable inference of popular culture as a stupefying agent. If so, it’s no more so than art, which today isn’t separate from mass entertainment.

When snowfall covers the typewriter in his film, you also can’t help but recall the ultimate critical loop in cinematic history -- a dying Charles Foster Kane, who lets a snow globe slip from his hand as he expires. Between the opening and closing shots of “Citizen Kane,” another wartime epic, the pathos and corruption of a print-media titan is chronicled. I greatly enjoyed Graham’s vexed installation, but if I had to choose between them, I’d see the 1941 movie again.

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‘Rodney Graham: A Little Thought’

Where: MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary,

152 N. Central Ave., downtown L.A.

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Ends: Nov. 29

Price: Adults, $8; students and seniors, $5.

Contact: (213) 626-6222