Frank Rodick — artist statement - Arena and Faithless Grottoes

Arena / Faithless Grottoes

Frank Rodick, 2017

Long before smartphones and YouTube made digital video inescapable, there was that brief golden age of videotape. Videotape—in its dominant format VHS, which vanquished the technically superior Betamax—wasn’t an underground phenomenon, but for a short time it was new and not so common as to be taken for granted or fade into the humdrum of mass culture. You might even say there was a thrill to it back then. Anyone with a player that sucked in those chunky black plastic VHS cartridges could entertain themselves with a private movie viewing, an experience previously reserved for the rich or aficionados of those seedy porn booths that you found in Times Square and 42nd before Disney laid waste to reality.

in her hand, a cupful of whispers
From the series Arena, ©Frank Rodick, 2005

I loved the creepy camp of Cronenberg's 1983 Videodrome (on VHS, of course). A hand clutching a pointed gun stretching out of what looked like a veined eyeball that itself was extending out of some old television panelled with faux wood. Debbie Harry playing electroerotic Nicki Brand, the sadomasochistic radio personality; James Woods as Max, wigging out yet again as he enters one more circle of a what-the-fuck-is-happening-here hell. All that with a good dollop of moral apocalypse fever that seems like a constant drumbeat including right up to today.

In real life, it turned out you could have lots of fun and even commit a little mayhem with video. Of course, everyone knows this now, though today’s mischief feels sadder, meaner, and more grim. You could also tape stuff that was on TV thanks to video recorders, a big deal back then. (No way was I was missing an episode of that first Twin Peaks). And you could make tapes of your own with bulky VHS videocameras you propped on your shoulder like sawed off bazookas, or, in my case, one of the early models that used the short-lived Hi-8 format. These cameras were clunkier but easier to use than the old 8mm movie cameras that came with all the hassles of film stock.

Room 36 (time on earth)
From the series Faithless Grottoes, ©Frank Rodick, 2007

And so it was that around the late 1980s I’d begun programming my VCR nightly (that’s videocassette recorder for the less aged readers) to tape a couple of hours (that’s how long the tape could run at high quality) of television programming scheduled for the wee morning hours. It was semi-random, with luck beating my stabs at clever intent every time. The morning’s catch could include anything from old movies, reruns, and the impossibly bad commercials that ran for the insomniac or tragically desperate. And there was porn, electronically scrambled to prevent specialty cable channel non-subscribers from getting off for free.

I continued this routine on and off for years, accumulating bankers’ boxes of tapes, hundreds of hours. it wasn’t until around 2000, years later, that I got around to taking a deep dive into this stuff.

That was when I got into a new routine. Four or five nights a week, alone and after midnight, I’d plunk in an unlabeled unedited tape, kill the lights and watch what turned up on that screen.

the longest night has twenty faces
From the series Faithless Grottoes, ©Frank Rodick, 2007

What came pouring and stuttering out was a nocturnal parade of weirdness—some of it farcical, some horrific, some quasi-erotic, the rest just, well, weird. Many images were already skewed and distorted (as when the programming was scrambled) but I learned that I could distort them some more, or make them a little more readable, with a twist or two of one of the knobs on the archaic television set, my parents’ discard that weighed a metric ton and, yes, was decorated with ghastly simulated wood panelling.

Really though, most of the stuff was utter crap—banal or stupidly incomprehensible or both. But once in a while, something would flash onto that twenty inch cathode canvas floating in the dark—a primal scene that looked like it was retched out of someone's brain stem (perhaps mine). And with another tweak here and there, I could make it blossom just a little more.

So it was that every few nights my TV and I would hook up and go full Videodrome.

fragments of a celestial abattoir
From the series Arena, ©Frank Rodick, 2004

What I was also doing: Making photographs of anything and everything that caught my eye on that TV screen. No plan except to watch and wait, like a John Huston big game hunter, Bronica mounted on tripod. Something looked good? Bang, take the shot. Of course, if I missed the moment, which was often, I’d just rewind and try again. I went through a lot of tape and a lot of rewinds, including all the tweaks, to come up with, well, lots of film. As I went along, I learned other ways, within the camera, to transform the image some more—not through design of course but via accident, including one glorious technical malfunction that I won’t bore you with.

Hundreds of negatives, then thousands. And that next step, in my darkroom, turned out to be the perfect place to get lost in the images (getting lost is always important), not just by printing them, but also by sequencing and resequencing them, and by transforming the prints (again! more!) with the techniques I was experimenting with—metallic toners, homemade filters, focusing hacks. Via whim and instinct, I was, as I’d say to myself, “putting the image through its paces.”

Serious analog printers know that darkrooms have a mystical vibe. (I consider myself superstition-free, which is bullshit as I followed this solemn ritual, a supplicant’s request, of asking each negative, out loud, to "tell me your secrets.") You're in this dark windowless room dimly lit in red, with music playing (here did I fall in love with Portishead, Philip Glass, and the acoustic Kurt Cobain). In the background is that most primordial of sounds: streaming water. One of the privileges, great and many, of the darkroom is that it forces you to spend mad amounts of time with a single image—alone (very important)—obsessing on that image, being with it, caressing the print in all the right spots (such objects of desire become sensual and erotic, printers knows this). I’m grateful for it all—not only did it force me to learn a patience to which I wasn’t naturally inclined, but it helped me become respectful of time (both extremely important back then but especially so when I turned to digital, with its attention destroying qualities, a few years later). The darkroom forced me to become far more contemplative and sensitive towards what makes an image work, which was important for me because, when it came to Arena especially, I had no comparator.

I printed and printed, I filled garbage cans with what I’d call the largest-scale five and ten and twenty dollar bills in circulation. What kept me working, and moving in a direction that felt deeper as opposed to further, were the images themselves. They killed me and thrilled me and kept signalling the way, however cryptically.

What was coming together was an amped up, primal opera-come-nightmare. The images blessed me with a sensual directness that reflected (betrayed?) the darker landscapes sequestered inside my life: primeval emotions swirling around issues of sex and pain and death. Visceral, unremitting stuff. Emanations of memory appeared, particularly the physicality of memory, the way it feels when memories move down from your head towards your belly and intestines.

Though it wasn’t important in the impulse to create, it occurred to me later on that the processes through which the images were wrung—video, myriad darkroom interventions and, later, in the case of Faithless Grottoes, digital manipulation—were analogous to the the prisms of consciousness, those internal filters that make individual realities so diverse not to mention mysterious and unpredictable. And that same subjectivity could also turn up, or turn down, the emotional voltage of those experiences, regardless of their source and its apparent potency.

So, Arena was created first—26 works, many of them multi-image—the title coming from something I'd read somewhere about the "movable arena between pain and pleasure." That title also meant something else: an act rendered public, in this case a plurality of intimate acts brought into the public realm, which is a reasonable description of a fair amount of art itself.

In 2006, I incorporated digital imaging into my practice. New possibilities for scale, colour, and nuances of manipulation became available and from that came Faithless Grottoes. I stayed with the original stills I’d made years earlier as my starting points. They’d become like totems for me; they had a magic and history I was bound to.

Through it all, the human figure remained the uncontested reference point. To this day there's nothing for me so devastatingly expressive as the human face and body, no visual element—in all its iterations—more capable of piercing and splaying open the human heart.. Of course, there were other injected elements—surface detailing, melding of foreground with background and subject (a perpetual inclination), the bending of form and colouration—these acting as supporting agents and accelerants. But the core setting for this work remained the same: those dark cathedrals of inner life, an architecture mapped out by partners: patience and obsession.