Frank Rodick — artist statement revisitations

Revisitations

Originally written 2011; revised 2024

uncovering, no. 1 (horse in barbed wire)
©Frank Rodick, 2010

In Arena and Faithless Grottoes (2002-2009), I shifted my practice to a more explicit treatment of themes around mortality, eros, and pain. In Revisitations I remained faithful to those themes, but engaged them from a different angle. This work was the first in which I wove together elements from personal and family histories. In Revisitations, I used my family archives for the first time as a foundational element, fusing them with my own collections of visual materials. It also marks the stage in which I more directly addressed the issue of memory and its experience.

When I write the words, the "fall of 2004," it feels like just that. In late September of that year, I watched the last stages of my father's death (described elsewhere, and which became the basis for the work I'd call The Last Words of Joseph). Almost to the day of my father's death, my mother—living with acute dementia—broke a hip, leaving her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, which she would spend in a geriatric facility.

In October, I began the process of selling my parents’ home. I had to empty that house—where they’d lived 44 years—of, well, everything. My parents spent over four decades of their 58 years together as booksellers, dealing in new, used, and antiquarian books and pretty much anything else that found its way to paper. It's no exaggeration to say that their collection—items dating back decades and even centuries—was vast. And among these materials were pictures of all kinds: from books, magazines, pamphlets, scrapbooks, and postcards. This visual archive chronicled not only the lives of two people whose time on earth spanned from the First World War to past the watershed of 9/11, but also the society that transformed around them.

untitled
©Frank Rodick, 2010

Though I approached them with trepidation, these archives were a revelation. So many pictures were historical—in particular those of the two World Wars—but also, for me, personal. One after another, I’d remember seeing these images decades earlier as a child exploring alone in my parents’ home. I remembered them as solemn magnets to that boy, attracting me with their drama and power, their sins and transgressions, at the same time as they frightened me with what was often their stark horror. The images were also personal on another dimension: they were, I see now, a graphic chronicle of my parents’ existential disquiet—their deep fears that came from living through traumatic historical events. And, as we know happens, such disquiet would be passed on, in unique configurations, to a child, curious and secretive, who would weave it into the tapestry of his own life.

The bathers
©Frank Rodick, 2010

These archival materials make up the literal and psychological substructure of Revisitations. To create this series, I deconstructed and reconstructed these found images, combining them with my own pictures. Revisitations became not only an intersection of the personal and historical, but also an expressionist mnemonic—a representation of what defies conventional ordering: namely, the world of tenebrous memory, including the primeval fears and impulses that so often, I realize now, circle death. Witnessing my father die and witnessing the devastation of my mother’s body, mind, and memory—all that gave the project a febrile immediacy. Of course, there's nothing unique about such witnessing—millions endure it. Which makes it no less savage.

One work as an example: the piece Three studies for a mouth (Explorations in statecraft, love, and the passing of woes) shows a trio of faces, each of a state in extremis. The first image shows a disfigured soldier that appears in a WWI pacifist pamphlet. His mutilated mouth has been crudely reconstructed such that it becomes an infernal grin perhaps or, more likely, an expression that defies description. (A similar photograph is used in the piece When I dream, I dream of you, shown below.) In the second panel, I reworked a photograph of a person bound with a ball gag commonly used in BDSM. The last image is my father, a half-hour or so after his death. Together, the triptych became a personal ode: a Holy Trinity of violence, sex, and death.

Formally uniting each image is one element most of all: the human mouth. The most primal of organs, we use our mouths to survive by ingesting food, water, and air. We use it to fight and we use it to fuck. We tell bedtime stories with it, make song with it, inspire others to love and to hatred. And through it we expel our last breath as did my father minutes before I took that photograph.

Each image in Three studies for a mouth also represents a personal rite of passage. Discovering as I did those war pictures as a child of perhaps four, that first image became my initiation to the world of mass violence—planting another seed of knowledge, not the first, that the adult world would offer no sanctuary from the dangers of childhood. The second image represents the exploration of the sexual and transgressive, pornography from different eras forming an important part of my parents' exotic collections. The third comes from that personal knowledge of death—always existent as a construct but exploding through flesh on life-changing occasions.

About the presentation: I installed each Revisitations image in its own wooden case, each of those unique and made by the hand of skilled woodworkers. I wanted the images to be small and physically cloistered, permitting only one viewer at a time, encouraging a more intimate engagement with the work. The presentation also reminded me of old daguerreotype cases—for me, these carried a sense of the past and, in this context, a feeling of elegy and loss. It was important that the wooden box be able to open and close—a reminder of what often accompanies our most intimate and potent experiences: their secrecy and submersion.