Rodney Graham
Typewriter with Flour
New York City, USA: Self-published, 2003
40 x 50.2 x 10.2 cm.
Edition of 10 [+ 3 AP]
In 1996, Rodney Graham produced a four-minute 16mm film titled Coruscating Cinnamon Granules [see the mousepad multiple, here]. The work documents the sprinkling of cinnamon onto the surface of an electric stovetop cooking element, and the resulting sparks. The artist described it as "a glittering mini-spectacle that resembles a constellation of stars that appears before one's eyes after a mild blow to the head.”
A few years later Graham discovered a 1930's typewriter made by the German company Rheinmetall in a Vancouver junk shop.
"It was just this incredibly beautifully made, solidly designed typewriter. Not one key had ever been pressed on it," he said.
He used it to produce another work in which a powered cooking ingredient falls onto an object, like snow, or dust.
Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 is a 35mm film installation, in which flour falls onto and gradually covers the typewriter [see below]. I can’t recall where I first saw it, but the looping mechanism and projector (the 1961 Victoria 8 of the title) threatened to overwhelm the visuals of the film. This is apparently not accidental. Graham described the machine, designed by the Italian company Cinemeccanica, as "very beautiful, kind of overly powerful [...] It's these two objects confronting one another, two obsolete technologies facing off.”
Valued at over twelve thousand dollars US, Typewriter with Flour version is just a still from the film housed in a lightbox, but I suppose it allows the collector to own the piece and have it in their home, without all the racket.
"While the film itself is silent, the installation became a rackety-clackety affair as the footage passed through the attractively cumbersome body of yet another outmoded device: a 1950s Italian-made Cinemeccanica projector taking up a good portion of the front gallery. The ventriloquized sound track at once reemphasized the distancing obsolescence of both machines and made felt their effusively physical presence.
Undeniably beautiful, the progressive accumulation on the old typewriter’s pristine though antiquated surfaces employs the best effects of well-metered cliche—invoking nostalgia only to lay bare its very mechanisms with Brechtian panache. Employing an old special-effects medium—sifted flour—to simulate snow or dust, the film sustains a taciturn balance between staid earnestness and tongue-in-cheek pastiche. As in much of his work, here too Graham employed emphatic repetition. The typewriter, once fully immersed in the white stuff (and thus transformed into both burial mound and winter wonderland), was, time and again, resurrected as the film looped back to its start. Graham, a longtime Freud aficionado, here rendered the typewriter into an updated— if already outmoded—mystic writing pad, without once stroking its keys.”
- Johanna Burton, Artforum
