Minimalist artist Steve Roden, whose discipline-spanning work explored the interstices between sound, form, and color, died at home in Pasadena, California, on September 6 at the age of fifty-nine. He had lived with Alzheimer’s disease since 2017. Concerned with concepts of time and with the visualization of sound, Roden was profoundly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s notebook symbols and by the work of composer John Cage, whose 4′ 33″, a 1952 composition of silence stretching the length of its title, he once performed daily for a year. Roden created what he called “lowercase music,” a form of radically minimal ambient sound in which noises that are typically barely perceptible are amplified to excessive levels. His “system paintings,” explosions of color created according to a prescribed set of instructions, possess a similar lushness born of sparse means. “It’s not about reverence for the source, the biography, or someone else’s work,” he told Artforum’s Courtney Yoshimura in 2012, referring to these paintings’ origins in the brief text encapsulating Cage’s famous score. “It’s about conversing with these sources, developing a connection between things through a process that is less logical and more intuitive.”
Steve Roden was born in Los Angeles on April 27, 1964, and from the start was unafraid to name the sources of his inspiration. At the age of fifteen, while attending Beverly Hills High School, he became, as he termed it, the “screamer” of the punk band Seditionaries, named after the pathbreaking London clothing shop opened by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. Opening for luminaries of the day including Circle Jerks, the Damned, Social Distortion, and T.S.O.L., Seditionaries released a seven-inch titled Wherewolf before disbanding in 1982. Roden earned his BFA from the Otis Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design) and his MFA from Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design—at the latter studying under artists including Mike Kelley, Gary Panter, and Stephen Prina.
Roden began exhibiting publicly in 1986, his work first appearing at LA’s James Turcotte Gallery. Seeking to move beyond those who had taught him, he aimed “simply to exploit experimentation as a necessity . . . to do less of what I knew and more of what I did not.” During this period of trial and error, he made a group of paintings meant to be displayed on the floor and in another instance created a painting by holding the brush in his mouth. As the decade wound down, he began incorporating performance into his practice; by 1993, he had begun releasing CDs, which he would continue to do consistently over the following decades, and in 1994 he created his first sound installations, collaborating with musician and photographer Kevin McHugh on a pair of works at a brewery and an abandoned section of the Los Angeles zoo. Roden initially began working with an eight-track recorder, considered the top end of accessible home recording equipment in those days, documenting sounds such as that of himself driving, or the natural noises occurring in Joshua Tree. The increased availability to consumers of the contact microphone, which picks up audio vibrations through contact with solid objects, greatly influenced his sound work around this time.
In 2001, Roden moved away from the eight-track and made his first digitally composed and recorded work, Forms of Paper, a nearly hourlong album comprising a single track of the highly amplified and distorted sounds of paper being crumpled. The work was commissioned by the Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, which for a month hosted a group of eight speakers playing a 10-minute version of the work on repeat—quietly, of course. For his 2005 body of work Transmissions, he took as his theme John Glenn’s first transmission from space in 1962, creating a series of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and an installation that responded to Glenn’s awed description of the cosmos: “I am in the middle of a mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they are luminescent. They are bright yellowish green, about the size and intensity of a firefly on a real dark night. I have never seen anything like it. They look like little stars. They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window.”
Concurrent with his art career, Roden taught graduate and undergraduate courses at various California colleges and universities, including ArtCenter College of Design, Cal State Long Beach, Claremont Graduate University, Otis College of Art and Design, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara. His work is held in the collections of major institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. His work will appear in “Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific,” to be held next year at Chapman University as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Time initiative.
“[My practice is] a very personal way of moving through the world,” he told Sharon Mizota of KCET’s Artbound, in 2012, “to connect things that really weren’t meant to be connected.”
