A wise Indian saying has it that one should demount from one's horse once having noticed that it is dead. In an ironic diptych caricaturing blind belief in progress, Rodney Graham draws artistically on cultural history. Whereas, the picture title “Folly” is reminiscent of the satire moriae encomium [In Praise of Folly], its author, Erasmus of Rotterdam, is staged astride a mechanical nag: the presentation recalls the portrait of the polymath by Hans Holbein the younger. Rather than perusing a standard work of the early modern period, the revenant reads through the telephone book of Vancouver, Graham's adopted home. In Rodney Graham's work conceptual references are decisive. Established canonical elements undergo congenial revision and transformation. This two-part picture may be conceived as the mirror of time being in consonance with the cited wind vane: this rotates to a bearing of least meteorological resistance, hence precisely counter to the direction of the wind's source. The view ahead is mechanically constantly in view. [...]


Catalogue excerpt
fast forward 2. The Power of Motion
Media Art Sammlung Goetz
Editors: Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek
Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz, 2010

Rodney Graham, Allegory of Folly: Study for an Equestrian Monument in the Form of a Wind Vane, 2005
Leuchtkasten-Diptychon