Soldered brass, 11 x 10 x 8, 2008.
Extraordinary Rendition shows a hooded figure between two deserts. It slumps at the center with its legs stretched out in front, its head drawn up into a tall pointed hood pierced by two holes. Two blank plates stand behind it like a wall or a door. A palm tree on a small shelf stands to the left, and a cactus on a mound to the right.
The title names the practice of seizing a prisoner and transferring him in secret, hooded, to another country for interrogation. The pointed hood is the sign of it, and it recalls the hooded prisoner in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The palm and the cactus mark the two ends of the journey: the oasis of the Middle East and the desert of the American Southwest. Each is a miniature, a tabletop ornament of the kind that stands for a whole region, and each could be exchanged for the other. The figure sits between them, and neither tree shades him.
“Rendition” comes from the French rendre, to hand over, and it also means a rendering or performance of something. The sculpture is a rendition in both senses: a handing-over, made in brass. “Extraordinary” is the legal term’s own euphemism for action outside the ordinary course of law, and the plates behind the figure show no door and no window. The figure has been delivered to a place with no way out.
