Plastic Toys & the Meaning of Life

Working plein air, Susan Arthur-Whitson stages adventures for her collection of plastic toys--as well as the occasional piece of candy. Her miniature worlds--tiny horses galloping through a lawn, a quintet of Peeps peering up through a field of thyme--seem, at first, simple fantasies channeled from childhood. No more, no less. They are indeed delightful images, giving viewers the kind of pure pleasure generally associated with picturebooks. That said, it's striking how evocative these scenes are.

Arthur-Whitson describes her animals as avatars. In Hindu theology, an avatar is an incarnation of a deity, a god come to the world in animal form for a special purpose. In highly simplified terms, the avatar is a god descended to the earth to raise us up. Seen with that idea in mind, many of these images become curiously profound: the rabbit who chases the fox; the horse, standing high up on a ridge, who peers down at us below; the family of elephants making its way through the deep jungle; another fox, alone in the wood. Somehow, Arthur-Whitson manages to make these creatures--plastic figurines!--resonate with meaning.

And so the rabbit chasing the fox turns the tables on the powerful, the horse beckons to us from above, the elephants invoke the power of kinship in a strange forest, and the jaunty fox reminds us of what it is to be on one's own in the wide world.

Sex, Death and Videotape

The child of booksellers, Frank Rodick was tutored early in the life of the mind—his parents’ store was a gathering place for artists and intellectuals in downtown Montreal — and in the 1980s, he found himself at Berkeley as a Ph.D. candidate in political theory. But the rarefied air of the Ivory Tower stifled him, and Rodick suffered what he describes as a “terrible epiphany that everything I was doing, everything I had been doing, was meaningless, dishonest, and pretty wretched in a rather elegant and prestigious way.”

But he was also the child of an amateur photographer, and upon his disillusionment at the hands of academics, he turned to the camera. “I had grown up with the downtown city streets, so street photography felt comfortable,” he says. “And then I got totally turned on by Robert Frank’s The Americans.” Taking to the streets, he spent his time riding the subways and buses, watching “the fantastic moving theater of the city, that cornucopia of impossible gestures and ambling souls.”

Those opening shots were, in Rodick’s telling, unexceptional. But some of them—the blurred, out-of-focus imperfect ones — sparked his imagination and grew into his first resolved body of work. That series, which he called Liquid City, has the mythic power of the best science fiction, the high fever of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of the monsters who live among, and within, us. Broken souls trudge up subway stairs, like the damned straining toward the light of day. On a brilliant, sunlit afternoon, a death’s head, seemingly grafted onto the body of a random passerby, stares out at the viewer. Even that old standby of street shooters worldwide — the homeless man ignored by the passing traffic — is transformed into something otherworldly: in Rodick’s hands, the beggar huddled on his blanket levitates above the sidewalk, cutting through the bulk of the solid citizens stepping over him.

A grim collection, Liquid City offers only tight-fisted moments of grace, too meager to provide any but a cold comfort: a trumpeter plays a melancholy air as an office worker stands, defeated, waiting to cross the road; a woman stares up longingly toward the heavens as though recalling a time of happiness.

Having started out as a conventional street shooter, Rodick veered with these images into expressionism, having more in common with a painter like Francis Bacon than a decisive moment guy like Henri Cartier-Bresson. As he says, “At one level, this series is about ‘the city’ the way that The Americans is about America. But more than that, it serves as a keyhole into myself, into a slice of my experiential history, into the other world that’s there, humming and buzzing behind the Rational and Everyday.”

From the ambiguities of Liquid City, it was a short hop to his next project, a series of nudes called sub rosa. With this new body of work, Rodick transferred his sensibility into the studio. Also blurred, these images share the dreamlike quality of the earlier work and the same introspective impulse. But with the move inside, Rodick began to dig deeper down, abandoning any vestigial commitment he may have felt to realism.

For all their haze, the street shots are firmly grounded in place: however obscured they themselves may be, Rodick’s city dwellers make their way through recognizable urban sites — subway stations, sidewalks, street corners. With sub rosa, though, the space has become indeterminate. Says Rodick, “This work moved more directly toward what I call ‘mediating elements’—a merging of foreground, subject, and background. This fusion appealed to me on aesthetic and emotional grounds…. I’ve always thought of experience as a totally subjective thing in which subject, object, and context exist as one integrated and mysterious field.”

If sub rosa stepped indoors, Arena — his latest series — has slammed the door and bolted it shut. As Rodick puts it, “The phenomenological field is still there, but it’s claustrophobic now. I often say to people that I no longer photograph the world, only what’s inside myself. I’ve finally turned the blade on me.”

Strong stuff
When I first saw the Liquid City pictures, I thought they looked like Robert Frank on acid, and I was curious to meet the person who’d made them. I got my chance when Rodick came to suburban Philadelphia in 2001 for a short visit. During that trip, he was planning a day trip to New York to shop his work to the galleries. But having arrived a few days before September 11, he never made it to Manhattan. The city was sealed off. Indeed, the country was sealed off: borders closed, airplanes grounded, and travelers stranded. It wouldn’t occur to me until much later — until well after Rodick was safely back in Canada — just how eloquently Liquid City spoke to that moment. He had been seeing displaced people wandering city streets long before the Twin Towers collapsed.

Several weeks after he had returned home, I got a letter—not an e-mail, but a physical letter with a stamp — from Canada. I responded electronically. What ensued was an exemplary modern correspondence: two people who live some 500 miles apart — indeed, in different countries — writing back and forth, sometimes at a great clip and sometimes at a leisurely pace, about the things that go largely unexamined in the give-and-take of daily life. Distance and the demands of the page combined to create an arena for yakking like a late-night collegiate talkfest.
And then the CD arrived: it was full of some of the most disturbing images I’d seen in a very long time—dark scenes from a charnel house, hard-core images that alluded to sex and pain and death. “Looks like strong stuff,” my e-mail sounded alarmingly chirpy. Not knowing how to respond, I extemporized and asked simplistic questions. “How do you make them?”

“They’re toned silver prints,” came the reply. “The images are originally recorded on videotape. At times, I have videotaped live people, but I prefer to record bits and pieces of existent imagery and film. I can engage more powerfully when I am seeing the subject matter for the first time completely alone. It’s as though I’m engaging with myself as much as with the image, whereas live subjects draw a tremendous amount of energy.

“Going over the tape, I can take my time and replay images, consider things back in time, as it were. Then I make a conventional photograph of the moments that strike me. Sometimes I disrupt the video images electronically to produce unpredictable effects, and more often than not, I crop in the viewfinder and then again in the darkroom. I make aesthetic decisions about which processes to inject into the traditional darkroom process. Toning is an obvious such choice: up to now, I’ve used three kinds — iron, copper, and selenium. But I have an entire notebook filled with ideas for other darkroom manipulations.

“I consider this work a trip inward. After years of carrying my camera with me wherever I went,” he concluded, “I travel without now. It’s very different—like having subject, studio, and darkroom inside one’s skull.”

“Yes, they seem much more interior than Liquid City,” I piped. I was playing for time. Later, I would find out that I was not alone in finding the Arena pictures strong stuff. Much later in our correspondence, he would describe the experience of shopping this work to several curators whose reaction fluctuated between fascination and fear, “as if they were saying,” he wrote, “‘If I’m attracted to this, what does it say about me?’”

I like a clean house
Months passed while I thought. Then, one day — while house-cleaning, of all things — I remembered the old Greek notion about the opposition between divine reason, as exemplified by the sun god Apollo, and unholy madness, embodied by Dionysos, the god of the vine. Maybe the Greek gods could provide a useful framework for thinking about Arena.

A later introduction to the Greek pantheon from the East, the upstart Dionysos is nonetheless a tyrant. To deny him leads to madness and, as often as not, a gruesome death: those who resist him are generally torn to pieces. The god’s most famous adversary — the Theban king Pentheus — is torn limb to limb by Agave, his mother and a devotee of the god. In ecstatic frenzy, she kills Pentheus and brandishes his head in triumph only to collapse in mortal grief when she comes to her senses and sees what she has done. This grim tale, rewarding neither convert nor skeptic, suggests that there’s no way out: either yield to the divine madness voluntarily or be driven to it by force and, both ways, you lose.

As a rule of thumb, the world favors the Apollonian — order, reason, sobriety, keeping your house clean — but people are drawn, and powerfully so, to the ecstatic, the loosening of inhibitions, the yielding of the self. Ekstasis, literally “standing outside oneself,” provides the opportunity to partake of the divine, to transcend. The distinction between the discreet individual and the godhead breaks down and blurs.

But what if the god is really a devil, and the universe isn’t the benign Sunday School picnic cooked up by liberal Christianity? The plunge into the irrational carries a pricetag: initiates into the mysteries of death and sex experience the seduction of yielding, of giving way, but risk losing their way back, disappearing into the abyss, tearing apart their own issue.

The Arena pictures somehow manage to get inside the ecstatic experience: they get into the skin of people in the state of animal frenzy that the rituals of Dionysos inspired. Creatures psychically beside themselves, these are people, like Pentheus, traveling on a one-way ticket, people who aren’t going to make it back home in one piece. Or, perhaps worse, they’re like Agave and about to awaken from a nightmare.

Consider Reveries (dusk), a triptych sequenced like a film clip. It starts with a tight close-up of a scream. The central panel then pulls back to a long view that depicts the subject of the piece — a woman — seemingly full of movement and, at the same time, pinned. You can’t tell whether she’s fleeing or being crucified. The whole resolves in the final panel with a middle shot of the same body falling. (Or is she collapsing?) The sequence suggests a narrative, but not a linear one with characters who act on one another. To me, the action seems all internal, self-referential, with that initial scream serving as a demonic force that flings the figure across the picture plane. It’s a description of possession, of the self destroying the self.

Or take In Pain There Burns a Secret Joy, a four-piece description of the masochistic urge. The side panels, identical twin images of a distorted face, clamp you in, locking your gaze on the two central figures — one in the act of fellating and the other baring its teeth at you. Together, the assemblage acts like a vortex, sucking you deeper and deeper into the void until you too begin to drown.

Both dynamic and claustrophobic, the characteristic imagery of the Arena pictures describes a dark passion playing out in the locked chamber of the artist’s psyche. Even an image like Untitled (hand on breast) — with what ought to be an explicit acknowledgement of interplay between people — is ambiguous. Again, something in the closed-up quality of the image reads as though the breast and the hand that touches it belong to the same person.

Pressed for a one-word description of what these pictures are about, what would I say? Sex is indeed the currency — you can’t talk about them without addressing the issue — but there is something far more at stake than mere orgasm.

They bear a superficial resemblance to Thomas Ruff’s Nudes series, images appropriated from Internet porn sites and manipulated through the standard computer tricks. Like Arena, Ruff’s stuff is blurred — in his case, through the agency of Photoshop — but other than the general subject matter and that one aesthetic choice, they seem engaged by different ideas. Ruff’s fornicators are juicy and pink—hard-core Renoirs. He seems preoccupied by a cultural construct, the Nude, whereas Arena is after bigger game: the existential notion of nakedness.

But real nakedness, stripped-to-the-bone, end-of-the-world nakedness. These aren’t demure little pictures to complement the décor of the living room. Rather, they are blunt, some of them deliberately awkward, even ugly. The two Vertical Triptychs both set out a hierarchy of orifices — eye, mouth, genitalia — but the vertical orientation imposes a clumsy kind of rhythm on the sequence. The movement in the “upper regions” — from eye to mouth—has a certain grace, but the final panel, the one that delivers the goods, is a shocker. The frisson comes not simply from the subject matter being presented but from the way the sequence is composed: in both cases, that last panel seems visually out of place. Like a shout or the blow from a blunt instrument. Or an assault.

So what are they about? Sex, certainly. Their bluntness reminds us, again and again, that these pictures are about fucking.

And death, yes. Because there is nothing life-affirming about the sexuality depicted here. This is sex as death, sex as self-immolation.

Beyond that, one ends up with clichés: the heart of darkness, the beast within, what lies beneath. Maybe I would say they are about tragedy.

Difficult terrain, this — for viewer and artist alike. One’s first response is to flinch, to turn away. I take one look and ask Do I really want these images lodged in my brain? Once you’ve crossed over into the mysteries of life and death, can you get a return ticket? Wouldn’t I rather be vacuuming the living room?

What Rodick is up to
Employing the sharp-focus medium of photography, Rodick makes images that are all a blur. At its most basic, this obfuscation renders their content difficult to decipher. The viewer is forced to peer into these spaces, to read the images on the most literal level. You become a voyeur twice over: once just to figure out what they hell everyone is up to and then again to take in its larger meaning, to get at what Rodick is up to.

And as you study the Arena pictures, you are struck by just how printed they look, how constructed. So much photographic training has traditionally gone to creating the illusion of transparency that, even decades after the Starn Twins burst on the scene, it still comes as a bit of a surprise to see images that call such aggressive attention to their own surface. The video grain is more than simply the inevitable byproduct of the choice of source material but, rather, something that Rodick revels in, something he plays up.

The electronic disruptions he introduces into the original process of acquiring the images, coupled with his darkroom and toning decisions, accentuate the particulates that make up the grain of the photographic image. That brimstone grain is one of the defining characteristics of the Arena series: pick up any one of these pictures — from an early piece like Reveries (dusk) right through to Fragments of a Celestial Abattoir — and you find yourself wading through them to get at the subject matter.

That physical atmosphere — literally the space depicted in the pictures, the air these people are breathing — is a miasma. While Arena’s environment is indisputably sensual — you feel as though you could reach out and touch it — it is also toxic. The surface of each picture seems to be of a piece with the image itself, as though the people depicted are fusing into the very atmosphere that surrounds them.

The effect is amplified by the repetitions that also characterize the work, both the stuttering quality of some of the multi-image pieces and the recycling of particular images throughout the series. In the polytych La Pucelle (The Maid), Rodick marshals nearly the same image (or perhaps the exact same image, but ever so subtly altered) to capture a soul in torment. Never completely defined, the face revealed moves in and out of focus: in some panels, it almost resolves into a recognizable human countenance, only to dissolve at the next instance into something feral.

Then, too, certain images recur across the series: the negative of Revisitation No. 2 reappears in the second panel of Porneia, and at least three individual images have been incorporated into the compendious Fragments of a Celestial Abattoir. Reworked to satisfy the aesthetic demands of each individual piece, the images aren’t simply plastered into place. In fact, you may not even notice the recycling, but the repetitions have their impact nonetheless, creating a netherworld where our cherished notion of identity, of individuality, is up for grabs.


All these tricks of the trade — the blurring, the stuttering, the recycling, the indeterminate space, the grain — conspire to erode identity: who are we looking at? what exactly is happening? where are these people located in time? and where in space? More than merely ploys for punctuating his narratives, the technique points directly at what Rodick is up to.

Confronted with the conventions of erotica, you imagine early on that what he might very well be up to is, well, eroticism. But for all their sexual charge, these images are too grim, too pitiless to provide much to get off on. In some, like In Pain There Burns a Secret Joy or either of the Vertical Triptychs, we get a vision of sexuality — bared teeth, despairing glances, sinister leers, screaming, sucking, lurching, falling — that could put the most determined sybarite off his paces. Others, like Untitled (reclining figure) or 3 a.m. (engram), feature people who are utterly bereft, and even pictures like Porneia that suggest the act of coupling impart no sense of union. Rather, the vision is one of isolation and despair: sex as exile, sex as loss.

“When I look at Reveries (dusk),” Rodick writes, “I see a depiction not of desire, but of something more tragic: the memory of desire, the memory of a longing however inelegant or untoward. I think of an aging self clinging to erotic memories or daydreams (one crossing into the other) with the single-mindedness of a sick animal looking for a dry patch of earth. Dusk is the twilight of death, and blue is the color of its deceptively tranquil light, the reminder to me that one day soon I will lose everything.”

To expand on his intentions, Rodick — the philosopher still — quotes Wittgenstein: “We are not concerned with arguments to establish a position, as in much traditional philosophy or therapy. We are interested in a ‘way of thinking’ or a skill that is critical and destabilizing, seeking to fracture the artificial unities we construct with our minds, so that we can see the difference. ”Wittgenstein’s notion of fracturing artificial unities, like Rodick’s of mediating elements, undermines our conventional understanding of meaning itself — that shorthand we enlist to make it through our day-to-day lives. Again, Rodick: “When I look at Revisitation No. 1, what strikes me is that the hand is almost melding into the woman’s body. This whole issue of questioning unities and distinctions has been central to my concerns, not only intellectually and philosophically but emotionally as well.

“I’ve never been at home with the world as it appeared to be,” he continues. “Reality always seemed like such a lie. Or I hoped it was. So I’ve searched for alternatives not that seemed less real, but rather more real — and that meant reality imbued with the question mark, the mystery, and the ambiguity. Maybe that makes me a terribly religious atheist.”

That aspiration — to seek alternatives to the mundane “realities” — is a direct descendant of the Dionysian project: to stand outside the self, to “dissolve the boundaries,” to transcend. For all its stench of corruption, Arena has a mystic’s heart—although, as Rodick himself points out, his is not a believer’s mysticism. When the followers of Dionysos celebrated his mysteries, they sought the promise of rebirth in spiritual union with the godhead. For Rodick’s subjects, the rituals are barren, and the only communion they achieve is with death.

Our Lady of the Cold Comfort
Some two years after receiving those first Arena images, I begin hearing rumblings about a new multi-image piece — a polytych called Fragments of a Celestial Abattoir. Rodick writes, “I’m terribly excited about a very simple process I’ve been experimenting with in the darkroom. It’s this way of producing an illusion of texture that I find rather hard to describe (and even harder to say why it turns me on so; perhaps one reason is that it goes yet further to compounding a kind of mysterious richness to the image).”When he sends me the first results of this experiment—Elegy for a Writer and Homo Sapien no. 1—I have to concur: their texture, which resembles hand-crafted paper, does indeed set them apart from the earlier photographs. And while their subject matter places them squarely in the Arena fold, both seem somehow quieter than their companions, as though recollected, if not in tranquility, then in resignation. In Elegy, a hand, presumably that of the writer — the last civilized man? — is caught at the final moments of dissolution, while the even more elemental Homo Sapien suggests a face, perhaps the soul itself, leaching back into the primordial earth.

When I finally see the fully realized Fragments of a Celestial Abattoir (a grid of 25 images, including versions of both Elegy and Homo Sapien as well as a detail from And on the Eighth Day Laughter), what strikes me as much as the richness of its surface is the magnitude of its ambition. The piece is a phantasmagoria, a guided tour through the lower precincts of hell: full of madness and terror and debauchery. The mayhem signals that we are in familiar Arena territory: the gaping mouths, the sense that every vestige of life has been swamped, the aura of despair, and the taint of violation — they’re all there.

The polytych’s central column — reading from top to bottom, a Madonna, an eye, a void, a drowning figure, a satyr — anchors the whole: these five images form the central support, the pillar, of Fragments and perhaps of the entire Arena series. It’s all laid out for us: the suffering, the witnessing, the yielding, the rutting, and, at the heart of it all, an emptiness.

That central void — the panel is literally blank — is a shocker: it’s a brazen choice for an artist to gouge out the heart of a tour de force image like Fragments. Along with the photogram of a razor blade that rests at the base of the grid, it resounds through the whole like a death knell. And while the central panel provides our first glimpse into the void itself, the blade at the bottom of the piece — the first inanimate object featured in the series—threatens like an instrument of martyrdom.

But the inclusion of the Madonna — strung-out though she may be — seems to strike a new chord. Gazing down on the loss and destruction, she resembles one of the mourners at the Crucifixion depicted in a Medieval altarpiece. Her acceptance of the inevitability of tragedy — the stoic’s serenity in the face of brutality — provides the only comfort available in a bitter landscape.

It is a cold comfort, but this Madonna image — and Rodick and I, independent of each other, identify her as such—marks, for me, a tiny shift in the Arena landscape. Deeply generous, she contemplates the suffering that threatens to swamp her and, even there at the edge of doom, bears witness.

No good reason at all
Early on in our correspondence, I asked about the title —Arena— so seemingly at odds with the claustrophobic quality of the work. It was inspired, Rodick tells me, by John Berger’s description of eroticism as “the movable arena between pain and pleasure.” For Rodick, the title suggests “a place of spectacle, a place of combat and/or entertainment, a place where we come together to watch other members of our species encounter each other in ways that perhaps take us simultaneously outside of ourselves and deeper within.”

For me, the title underscores the tension inherent in this work, the tension between the extreme intimacy and the very public act of presentation. The work may, in fact, be defined by that ambiguity: it is the most deeply held secret shouted out in the public square.

For many of his viewers, looking at these pictures is like gazing on the Medusa’s face. The act of exposure at the heart of the series — this insistent stripping away of the human face to reveal the furtive beast within — carries a palpable threat: look on these images and you’ll turn to stone.

And indeed, responses to this work have, at times, verged on the panic-striken. In Houston, someone tells him that she hopes he has a normal life. Another time, the New York art consultant John Bennette tells him, “This work becomes darker and more disturbing as the years pass.... It would be a nightmare to wander in your mind without a guide and a sword.... I wonder how far you can take this work until it caves in on you.”

Speculating on the root cause of all this anxiety, Rodick suggests that the images “somehow undermine any notions of underlying human virtue. For some viewers, it’s as though these pictures strip humans of what they perceive of as humanity, as though they’re the final statement that this ‘family’ to which we belong is somehow beyond redemption.”

When Liquid City was exhibited in Buenos Aires, quite a few Argentines saw in the work memories of their country’s civil war. Just as I had seen echoes of the survivors of the World Trade Center in these shambling souls, Argentines saw the ghosts of the “disappeared.” Likewise, Arena elicits comparisons to yet another of history’s horror shows. Responding to one curator’s queries about the influence of the Holocaust on the work, Rodick takes pains to explain that he has “never made any Arena images with conscious reference to the Holocaust in mind.”

The camps have, nevertheless, cast a shadow over his life and work. When his maternal grandfather emigrated to Canada before World War I, most of the family stayed behind in Europe. “One of my earliest memories,” Rodick writes, “is seeing, on television, footage of the bulldozing of skeletal corpses of concentration camp inmates into mass graves and my mother telling me, ‘Take a good look, your family is in there.’”

Of course, Arena is no more about the Holocaust than Liquid City is about the Disappeared or September 11. But both call such associations to mind because both are relentless examinations of what Rodick calls “that acid feeling” that arises from any close study of human wickedness: “I cannot understand,” he writes, “why someone more or less just like me found himself scratching the wall of a concrete room as gas came in from the shower heads. I know intellectually why I can’t understand it, which is that on one level there’s simply no good reason at all.”