Fleming and RODFORCE

            I appreciate Stiles’s article on Sherman Fleming, particularly for highlighting the concentrated amount of details and layered meanings that Sherman puts into his performative pieces. I imagine it would have been near imperceptible to be aware of them embedded in the work while witnessing it in person. I think he intended it this way, as Stiles explains “his performance to be ‘populist’ in orientation…. He considers that artists… who refuse to conventionalize their work in any manner, run the risk of failing to envelop the audience and thereby gaining wider understanding.” (36) His work also seems to perceptively evolve over time and to current social concerns, likely through his constant ambitions to learn: ‘I am concerned with history, a part of history that is always left out. I am always doing research into … phenomena that have been ignored.’ (35)

            The discussion of his persona, RODFORCE, illuminates an aspect of the creation of art that I find intriguing, and have never actually thought before. This name as a response to the hypermasculine ideal represented by the Abstract Expressionists, who mostly acted like “spoiled assholes” and whose lives were out of control, begs the questions: ‘Why do you have to be on the fringe to make good work? Why do you always have to piss people off and literally hurt yourself?’ (36) I think these are good questions for us to address. Also, considering our last discussion of “Couple in the Cage,” how effective is Fleming’s embodiment of a personification that he also means to critique?