Return to Ruin
Return to Ruin
Stephen G. Rhodes
The art of Stephen G. Rhodes is best described as historical re-enactment gone wrong. Perverse, fragmentary, and ruined, each sculpture, video, painting, collage, and installation resembles a scene pulled from Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion or a piece of historical fiction made for public television. When the disparate bodies of work are assembled together, they form dense tableaux that slip in and out of the past they often parody and the present moment of which they are a part. Rhodes, who was raised in Louisiana and now lives and works in Los Angeles, bears the cultural burden of both regions; ruins and remnants of American colonial history appear in the guise of artifice, as Hollywood props and stage-sets, robotic presidential actors, and diluted literary characters. In many ways, the work is biographical and geographically specific, but Rhodes has developed, over a relatively short period of time, a theatrical and dramaturgical relationship to history that has emphasized the bizarre rituals and visual manifestations many of these histories have taken in the role of the American cultural imaginary.In 2008, Rhodes was invited to participate in the inaugural iteration of Prospect.1 New Orleans, a biennial exhibition organized throughout the city by Dan Cameron in an effort to benefit the local community in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Not only was it the artist’s first inclusion in a major international biennial, but it was also the first time Rhodes exhibited such a significant body of work in his native state. Interregnum (2008) presented audiences with a sprawling, diffuse seven-channel installation that mimicked and mined the display strategies of the Hall of Presidents at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. The series of mixed-media sculptures and videos that referred back to the popular site and its animatronic personas were situated within a larger visual system that conflated administrative, presidential, electoral, and colonial iconographies. The scene reflected the disorder and happenstance of a post-election celebration. Confetti and balloons were strewn about alongside overturned objects and partially gutted furniture; it represented both the aftermath of a raucous party and the ransacking of some official headquarters. Red carpet and velvet drapery retained the sense that the original environment bore some political significance, but that the room’s austerity and purpose had been defiled by its own reenactment and transformation over time into depraved spectacle entertainment.Interregnum also featured an ongoing series of Vacant Portraits, ethereal paintings that Rhodes first used in 2007 to frame his solo exhibition at Overduin and Kite in Los Angeles. The portraits have since become central to Rhodes’ work. They are suggestive of both the paranormal and painting’s proximity to another world beyond representation, to a world that is, at its best, mystical and intangible. The glowing green color of Rhodes’ Vacant Portraits has permeated throughout much of his videos and sculptures, and here it is used to illuminate absent figures from within gilded baroque frames. The paintings are both haunted images and images of haunting. In the context of Interregnum, the ghost-like presence that these portraits convey was brought into greater focus around the history of America’s former heads of state—specters of the American past, enshrined in no better place than Disney World’s Hall of Presidents, and then put on the wall of Rhodes’ installation as if to imitate the eerie sense of death that looms over a conventional portrait hall.While his participation in Prospect.1 New Orleans provided the work with its most befitting context to date, Louisiana, as a place wrought with history and artifice, has held a central place in Rhodes’ practice. It has hovered above and throughout many of the objects, images, and scenarios Rhodes has created over the course of his short career. If nothing other than a set of readily available signifiers, Louisiana exists far beyond its geographical borders. It is a place where historical fact rubs up against forgeries and fakes. The cultural exportation of New Orleans, especially, has proven to be a shorthand way of signifying an American past, and Rhodes has been an astute observer of this phenomenon as it has appeared in literature, entertainment, and the amusement park industry. Through this form of analysis, Rhodes recasts the logic of popular models of appropriation and brings us closer to the ruinous fragments that belie history. More recent works have introduced these themes to other geographical settings, and, in June 2010, Rhodes will produce a significant installation, curated by Ali Subotnick, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, a city where a sense of elsewhere pervades daily life. Aram Moshayedi is writer and curator, Los Angeles
Aram Moshayedi