Stephen G Rhodes

(NON) POSSE (NON) PECCARE
By Andrew Maerkle



Installation view of “The Twelf Hobby : Lober xxbbyj, Religious Freedom Sex Magick” at Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, 2015. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Stephen G Rhodes and Misako & Rosen.

Starting with references ranging from myths about the first president of the United States, George Washington, to the biographies of historical thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Aby Warburg, or films like Walt Disney’s The Song of the South (1946), William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Stephen G Rhodes builds up immersive multimedia installations that collapse the distinctions between immediacy and representation, history and fiction, conscious and unconscious. Using Hollywood green-screen technology, Rhodes might insert himself into a preexisting filmic source, while also using the cinematic apparatus as a sculptural element, whether by projecting it onto or through disparate surfaces, or by setting the projector itself into motion. These mechanisms destabilize our relations to cultural conventions, and throw even the position of the viewer into doubt.

Held from May 31 – June 21, 2015, Rhodes’s most recent exhibition at Misako & Rosen in Tokyo, “The Twelf Hobby : Lober xxbbyj, Religious Freedom Sex Magick,” explored the intersections of Christian extremism, occult practice and the reproductive rights of women through the topos of Hobby Lobby, the American arts-and-crafts store that challenged provisions in the Affordable Care Act requiring employers to provide employees with health insurance covering emergency contraceptives, arguing that the mandate interfered with the exercise of religious freedom. Constructed out of Hobby Lobby supplies, “The Twelf Hobby” revealed the perverse, libidinally-charged logic behind the company’s arguments.

Following his return to Berlin after the exhibition opening, ART iT conducted an e-mail exchange with Rhodes to discuss his work in greater detail. The exchange is reproduced below, along with a text written by Rhodes for the exhibition.

I. Interview
II. The Twelf Hobby



Libyan Intervention Study (2011), acrylic on flag, 84 x 147 cm.

ART iT: To start with, one of the works that made an impression on me was actually from a group show – the green-painted US flag in “Happy Mind” at M&R in 2011, “libyan intervention study.” I think this work crystalized for me, as a viewer, certain themes that were also present in a more diffuse form in “There is No Bear Bear Ladder,” namely, the idea of America as an ideological projection and historical construct, something that is both projected outward and projected upon, something that operates both in time and retroactively. Is it fair to call this one of the driving themes of your work? How do you understand your position in relation to America, and what led you to study it as an object of critique?

SGR: Green was especially pervasive in my process at that time, and I wanted to perform an exorcize that eradicated the colour from being associated only to the green screen chroma mediation effect. I wanted to illuminate the associative dynamic of the colour, and ways to see connotations morph. Currency, ecology, toxicity, repression. So with the intervention of Libya I took the opportunity to mourn the Green Flag by taking another flag and painting it green. Formally, this resonated with collaborative imperialism. Projections is an apt term with its affiliation to psychoanalysis, the historical unconscious. I think colonial could be alternated with projection. With America you have rampant and redistributed colonial transgressions,formulations, founded in enlightenment, rebellion, stacked full of misleading ideology. Perhaps the hubris of an Artist’ practice of decisions and transgressions is an allegory for that. I also painted a French flag green.

ART iT: But in your work does America have the possibility of standing in for other countries/ideological constructs as well? For example, could your treatment of America accommodate a critique of the French, German or Japanese states as well, or do you see it as ultimately being really specific to America?

SGR: Sure, of course Its open to accommodations. I don’t see things fitting in one to one for another.. Rather than an imposition it should be morphological, cross relational. I’d hope a reading of the work is not literally about America. In so far as my work may revolve around uprooting neurosis, and sometimes psychosis, I may have to resort to untangling my biographical identity so as to work my way out of an identitarian territory. America makes up part of the resources I know to circumnavigate the process.


Above: Installation view of “The Twelf Hobby : Lober xxbbyj, Religious Freedom Sex Magick” at Misako & Rosen. Below: Bad Hobby Chasuble Amendment: Man Cave (2015), paint, silkscreen, zippers, Hobby Lobby doll on Hobby Lobby fabric.

ART iT: Seeing your current exhibition so soon after a relatively substantial earthquake [on May 30, 2015] suggested to me the possibility of reading your work through the phenomenology of the earthquake. Formally, things can appear shaken up or messy, but also in terms of subjectivity, with an earthquake there’s always a moment where you’re not sure whether it’s originating from inside or outside of you, and I wonder whether this confusion of the boundaries between exterior and interior is something you also pursue. Under the blacklight, the humping beds were doubly disturbing because they were an incessant reminder of the earthquake – an indefinitely continuing earthquake.

SGR: I was on a ladder in the gallery mounting something when the earthquake came through.. I thought I was just delirious from fatigue and jet lag, but then turned around to see the sculptures swaying. It would have been kind of nice if they were swaying the whole time to articulate this temple of material disaster even more. I had not really been thinking of the prevalence of earthquakes in the region explicitly when planning to have the vibrating mattress but that, quite literally, started to resonate. There is an element of the natural catastrophe, ecological decay, extinction that I was trying to instill beyond the erotic materiality of Hobby Lobby Merchandise. That is one aspect of piling the Fauna from the store on the vibrating mattress, folded into the ludic terror of automated inanimate sexual reproduction. The mattress and the merchandise fucking itself or mother nature rebuffing life. I have started to sneak in some subtext of environmental disaster in the work a bit lately so I’m glad you had thought about this even if it did take an earthquake.

ART iT: In 2011, after the big earthquake, we had aftershocks almost every day. I would be working at the table and periodically feel the vibrations coming through the chair and table, but then it got to the point where sometimes I would bump my leg against the table and get alarmed, registering the vibrations of the collision as an earthquake. I was implicated in some sort of weird, object-mediated feedback loop. Maybe that’s the kernel of how animation/automation works as a subjective experience: it’s a kind of self-perpetuating, hyper-vigilant psyche out – not just with the beds but also extending to things like Disney’s Hall of Presidents?
I’m also curious about the role of Hobby Lobby in your broader practice. It seems more explicitly topical than what you’ve done in the past, where the critique generally appears to be mediated through a preexisting form, like Song of the South or Meeting of Minds or the Exorcist, etc. Do you see a distinction there yourself?

SGR: Topical anxiety is the law pretty much with all the projects, often to absurd and defamiliarized extremes. The Hall of Presidents project you mention, Who Farted!?!? had virtually 43 (George W. Bush was serving president) lumpen topics automated upon arrival with microsystems of topics within those topics. Yet I was shifting much of the anxiety towards the terror of the impending presidential election, which Obama went on to win and now more topics are interminably dumped on that animatronic platform. Meeting of the Minds likewise takes micro systems of thought constituted upon arrival with each subject/Mind. Then the trick might be to empty it out. I’d say there is something like an ecosystem of Topics circulating in all the works, in one given project one topic will repress or predate another. In this way the topics, sources, the identities of the information floating in the the work, have a Scale interaction that, on the one hand, I liken to Sculpture. The topics are experienced in haptic spatiality. The real difference is in Tense.
Hobby Lobby is used as a text like Song of the South and the Exorscist before it, and even in those projects there were more texts circulating. The Shining competes levelly with Song of the south But true enough, in those works you have poetic texts that have been mediated many times over already and lodged in the past. I treat Hobby Lobby as a text as well but in this case the text is a hyper contemporary topic and one that will probably not be enshrined in some artistic legacy. I’m quite interested in the shelf life of a topic, the repression of a source in any work, so the the contemporary ephemerality of the Hobby Lobby law, which while there is some discourse on this now and with ramifications pertaining to America.. how would this work age, what are the entropic dynamics of using such a fleeting topical issue, how will this survive in further contexts? The law of forgetting is as significant as recollection. Also, I believe this abduction of a contemporary debate resonates with the introduction of environmental disaster discourse.

ART iT: Is there some kind of generative logic that you derive from the topics/texts you work with? For example, the form of the Hobby Lobby installations seems to be informed by Hobby Lobby itself – the materials that it sells, as well as the ideology it promotes – but how about with other works?

SGR: This seems to be redescribing the previous question so my answer might be redundant. There might be a libidinal descent into a subject, which becomes discarded or deviated into other sources. This might appear as a program of evasion or unconscious anarchy reared by guilt. I’m on record relating the process to the mechanics of Trauma. Hobby Lobby provides a ridiculous departure as it is a literal stock house of creative supplies for empty signifiers.


Above: Interregnum Restoration Repetition (Who Farted!!??!??!!!?!) (2008), installation detail of two-channel video, mixed-media and voting booths, dimensions variable, as exhibited at Prospect.1 New Orleans, 2008. Courtesy Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin, and Misako & Rosen, Tokyo. Below: Film still from Grundlegung Zur Krankisch Grundrisse Kopf bis Magen Innere Wirkung Natur Kapputt Aus Gemacht (2011). Courtesy Stephen G Rhodes.

ART iT: How about the theme of scatology, which appears in titles like “A.S.S. American Short Story” and “Interregnum: Who Farted?,” or the bare-assed bear in the “Bear Bear” videos, as well as the constipation of Kant referenced in “Grundlegung Zur Krankisch…”? If at first glance your installations appear “messy” and therefore scatological in a classically excremental way (I guess the Hammer Museum installation would be the prime example here), they also seem to contain a precise, underlying anal-retentive structure…

SGR: Right, scatology really might be the law. The first significant poetic work I can recall is a joke I made up when I was 5. Why did George Washington Die? He Never used the bathroom. This was also the generative filter for Your Shit Is in My Mouth: Instructions For a 16 Sided Barn….In which I conflated an under documented slave narrative, popular myth Biography, all forced through bathroom poetic recollection. I’m more engaged in this tradition than beauty, and it is particularly Constipation that is recurrent. As far as anal theory, I don’t see there being anything precise or anal retentive, aside from the condition of constipation. I’m not sure that being precise in Anal Retention is possible. Constipation is a repression of the lawlessness of the bowels. What is metabololized will be transposed, not delivered precisely. While I may point to a set of coordinates of what’s been consumed I do not see a prescriptive structure for how its externalized and reinternalized.

ART iT: In the text accompanying the exhibition at M&R, you question, “Is the Commandment a Rectum?” but of course it is the dildo/phallus that figures prominently at the entryway of the installation, as well as in the video. Is the rectum a kind of anti-phallus – a Satanic inversion of the authority of the phallus – and the darkened, submerged interior of the installation a kind of “rectal” space? In any case, why all the dildos?

SGR: I like the spatial allegory you describe and although i’m not precisely aiming to depict one master thing I often try to treat the space as a bodily allegory. First, that quote is a playful rephrasing of the classic Bersani text. Its a conflagration of the pillars of hobby Lobby’s meddling with reproductive rights (against the affordable healthcare act) and Gay marriage/freedom of religion, both of which are not uninterconnected in the quasi Hobby Lobby ruling. While the Dildo has a function its symbolism is loaded and diffuse, and its purpose in regards to orifice is promiscuous. But its important to consider the dildo in relation to the Pegboard. The Pegboard walls are lifted from the pegboard display walls used in Hobby Lobby, and I accelerate the form of penetration and orifice in erotic Pegboard commodity sacrifice. The dildo can be looked as the satanic ludic anti phallus, or the agent of the impotent phallus. Maybe the oppressive phallus of male lawmaking fantasy, or Hobby Lobby’s phallic infatuation with sex and reproduction, particularly the predatorial control of the female body. Lost in Hobby Lobby’s obsession with Sex is the effects of over fucking and overpopulation. This is what I was getting at with the “Carbon Footprint of Sex”, when considering the delirious turnover of junk and the sinister predominance of synthetic Fauna. In cruising the aisles of Hobby Lobby I focused on the objects of worship and phallic, perverted merchandise – crosses or doll supplies.. and even in the previous show, the eleventh hobby, clearly racist merchandise, the Dumbo black bird scarecrows, confederate flags. The inanimate merchandise all always intermixed with the artificial Fauna. Much of Hobby Lobby’s alienated crafts are commissioned and authored by the company. An example of the irony Hobby Lobby’s production is on display in this show where you see merchandise repeating the phrase “Man Cave.” Man Cave first connotes evolutionary process, the primitive law, homoerotic party, the hobby of hunting, predation, all of which explicate Hobby Lobby’s premise. All over the Hobby Lobby CEO’s book he talks about the target customer being Female, and the clarity is that the Health Care they rebuff is on the grounds of a woman’s access to contraception. The voice you here in the videos is me reading from that book over the very Healing muzak they pipe and sell at the store. Body parts excavated in the merchandise in a space that could be a rectum temple or a wild introverted inventory incubator.

ART iT: That’s the thing – would you say your works have an object as such – an object of critique/contemplation – or are they more about deterritorializing things that would otherwise only be encountered in specific contexts? For example, Bear Bear’s use of Song of the South and the Shining might suggest a critique of American culture/psyche, but for me there’s also something that escapes comprehension or narrative analysis. It’s like I can’t see where it’s coming from, and that makes it all the more disturbing.

SGR: Yes, I’m not laying down a thesis to follow when I make art, I’d say i’m more engaged in the poetics of the latter. A text may have a determined discourse upon arrival and I might try to dislodge discourse into the terror of the unknown. Then its apprehended bodily in space. Nevertheless, I still hope to generate discourse, even if its reverberations of discourses, haunted discourses. I think in my species of work i’m more in the practice of generating questions.


Above: Installation view of “The Law of the Unknown Neighbor: Inferno Romanticized” at the Migros Museum, Zurich, 2013. Courtesy Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin, and Misako & Rosen, Tokyo. Below: Installation view of “Hammer Projects: Stephen G. Rhodes” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2011. Courtesy the Hammer Museum.

ART iT: What’s your attitude toward the idea of universality?

SGR: Contingent on what? the Golden Rule, Death, hunger,. perhaps you are alluding to the Occult..

ART iT: I was thinking of your referencing of figures like Kant and Warburg. Maybe another way of putting it is, what’s your attitude toward the possibility of art?

SGR: My treatment of Kant was less Categorical Imperative. Quoting On the Illnesses of the Head, it was really more about constipation, which also may be universal, and writer’s block. Art is tethered to possibility. Regarding possibility and constipation, I would lust more for the power of the emancipation from the bowels of Art.

ART iT: Are there any artists, past or present, who you feel you are in dialogue with?

SGR: I believe in the possibility of community. I find collaboration among the undead, even with the living.

ART iT: This is a bit of a strange question, but the first time I encountered your brother’s writing was in the Migros Museum catalog. The name looked so similar to yours, with a similar cadence, and obviously the same surname, and was yet different. What is the likelihood of two people from the same family both engaging at such a high level in similar fields? What is the likelihood of two people who are not related but share the same surname intersecting in the same catalog? I thought it could almost be an alter-ego you had invented. Even after finding the bio info in the back, I felt compelled to go online and double-check. So I wonder, is the idea of the alter-ego or doppelganger something you actually explore in your practice?

SGR: We are really cyborg agents of our Genealogy. Not Really. Is it possible to be an artist without producing a doppelgänger? I”m regularly exhuming the fetish genre of biography, and dragging autobiography backwards. Or I like to talk about alienation, alienated labour, when over exhausting the vanity project of art. But I don’t really see any purpose in capitalizing behind disguised authorship, I’m more likely to negate it.. .


Hobby Lobby Merchandise Exempment I (confederate) (2014), Hobby Lobby
Dumbo crow and acrylic on Hobby Lobby fabric. Courtesy Stephen G Rhodes.

ART iT: I am assuming you are in Berlin. I am of course in Tokyo, but follow the US media. As this correspondence has been taking place, there have been momentous shifts in US society, with the Supreme Court decision on marriage equality and the Charleston killings and subsequent debate over the appropriateness of the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of state heritage.
It’s interesting to see how opponents of marriage equality use arguments that mirror those of the segregationists. They assert the “liberty” to discriminate. On the other hand, it’s been surprising to see how even conservative politicians are taking a stand against the Confederate battle flag, and it’s possible the flag will be removed from display in all government spaces – something I honestly never expected to see happen. Maybe at this point it’s more politically expedient to oppose the flag than to implement more sensible gun regulation, or address real social imbalances.
Maybe it repeats what we already discussed about Hobby Lobby, but what’s your take on these develoments?

SGR: When I was stuck in Berlin finalizing the Eleventh Hobby show (2014), I reached out to see if some friends back in the states would pay a visit to Hobby Lobby and send some merchandize that I’d sacrifice for reinterred consumption. Barry Johnston recovered a Confederate Flag from the shelves of a California branch. I incorporated it into a work along with with some of the aforementioned racially charged scarecrow black birds(featured in Disney’s Dumbo) that populated some Louisiana stores. And yet in spite of knowing that it was the inherent inventoried offenses of Hobby Lobby I was exposing, even in expropriating for reversed consumption, the symbols, however resublimated, still produce a taboo that distrubs. Some old debts cant be balanced. There’s a self fulfilling prophecy of defeat in critiquing Hobby Lobby by means of consuming and perpetuating commodity worship. That is also the conundrum of Hobby Lobby’s public/private campaign.. There’s no way around collaborating with the Devil.


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