Möbius Trip

Even more revealing are the works that don’t reference much of anything. The gorgeous, silent, black-and-white film loop Coruscating Cinnamon Granulesis as much about scraping spent hash off hot knives as it is about any French film theory. Halcion Sleepconsists entirely of a single half-hour shot of the unconscious pajama-clad artist being transported in the back of a van through the rainy nighttime streets of Vancouver. And the haunting, foliage-illuminated-by-police-helicopters surveillance tape Edge of a Woodbends the arc of Graham’s art career into its own loop, recalling such early works as Two Generators(being projected intermittently at MOCA Grand Street theater space) where patches of dark forest were lit with portable industrial lights.

What is revealed is that the real power of Graham’s work has nothing to do with shout-outs to the correct vaporous conceptualistisms (art that uses the clichés of conceptualism without having any actual concepts to back them up) but rather with the affirmation, superseding the despair of ceaseless repetition, of the hard-wired pleasures that are the vocabulary of all art and which have defined art history. I’m sorry, but should our species somehow survive another 1,000 years, nobody will be looking at the art of our era, nodding sagely and murmuring, “Ah yes, Deleuze.” If they’re lucky, though, they’ll still be mesmerized by or guffawing over Rodney Graham willfully chasing his own tale.

Photos courtesy (respectively) Lisson Gallery, London, Musés D’Art Contemporain, Montréal, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago.

RODNEY GRAHAM: A LITTLE THOUGHT |MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., downtown |Through November 29