Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein

A controversial work from 2000, Leak, reveals much about the manner in which the young, South Africa-born artist Robin Rhode, now based in Berlin, has sought to fuse the swagger of hip-hop with the ephemerality of performance art. In it, Rhode controversially pissed on the charcoal outline of a urinal he had drawn on an interior wall of the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. The action alone was key, though it was recorded in a series of images taken by audience members at the one-time event and published in his slim monograph Fresh: Robin Rhode (2001).

At Perry Rubenstein, in his first solo exhibition in New York, Rhode extended his use of charcoal, chalk, found objects and photography, incorporating wall paint and video into his repertoire of mediums. The show, which included three DVD stop-frame animation projections and four series of wall-mounted photographic narratives, moved the actions--performed in private--away from specific sites (such as galleries and symbolically charged buildings) and into indeterminate urban environments. Not that Rhode completely shunned his earlier practices, as he also included a charcoal wall drawing of a telephone booth, residue from an opening-night performance. (Earlier in 2004 Rhode similarly "exhibited," at a group show at Artists' Space in New York, walls splattered with painted images of musical instruments, from a one-night-only performance.)

Once billed only as opening-night entertainment, Rhode has demonstrated himself, in more recent works, to be capable of producing thoughtfully described imagery. Combining real and invented material, in two and three dimensions, his work is at once absurd and meditative. One DVD projection shows real children playing on a chalk-drawn merry-go-round (Marongrong, 2002). In another work, a horizontally disposed series of four still photographs, Rhode purposefully tugs along a real wagon, positioned as if it contains a fictional weight, repeatedly drawn and erased on a wall backdrop to move it through the narrative (Pulling the Load, 2004). In Master Blaster (2004), a series of six photographs presented vertically, Rhode is seen against a wall, white on top and green below, struggling with an invisible burden. He gradually "lowers" his heft to reveal, against the green, a white-chalk drawing of a ghetto blaster that he had been "carrying," but that had presumably been camouflaged by the white wall.

Showing a nascent talent to full effect, the exhibition was the culmination of a busy U.S. itinerary that ranged from a residency at the Walker Art Center to participation in large group shows in New York.

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