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Rodney Graham
born 1949
How I Became a Ramblin’ Man
1999
35 mm colour film transferred to DVD, audio, 9 min., loop

Purchased from Donald Young Gallery, Chicago with funds provided by the Mary Joy Thomson Bequest 2005
T12055

How I Became a Ramblin’ Man is the second in a trilogy of short costume dramas Rodney Graham produced between 1997 and 2000. The film is a musical-Western genre piece in which the artist, dressed as a benign wandering cowboy, rides his horse through a prairie landscape, eventually stopping to sing a melancholic song about his solitary country life. He then rides away, with each shot mirroring the sequence of his arrival. Like much of Graham’s practice, the film explores the structure of the loop and the playing of a role. The film’s circuitous structure denies the possibility of narrative resolution, suggesting instead an endlessly repeated journey.

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Click on images for more about each highlight

• Francis Picabia
  1879–1953
  Otaïti
  1930
• Michelangelo Pistoletto
  born 1933
  Venus of the Rags
  1967, 1974
• Louise Bourgeois
  born 1911
  Mamelles
  1991, 2001
• Lawrence Weiner
  born 1942
  Spheres of Influence
  1990
• Rodney Graham
  born 1949
  How I Became a Ramblin’ Man
  1999
• Fiona Tan
  born 1966
  Saint Sebastian
  2001
• Carlos Garaicoa
  born 1967
  Letter to the Censors
  2003
  Carta a los censores
• Olafur Eliasson
  born 1967
  Your Double-Lighthouse Projection
  2002
• Francis Alÿs
  born 1959
  Guards
  2004