Jason Rhoades; Guardian obit (American pop sculptor)
Hyfler/Rosner
The Guardian (London) - Final Edition
Jerry Saltz
August 12, 2006 Saturday
HEADLINE: Obituary: Jason Rhoades: Controversial American
pop sculptor famed for his colourful installations and his
restless, challenging spirit
According to Robert Rauschenberg, "the sex of art is
narrative": his fellow US artist Jason Rhoades, who has died
suddenly of heart failure aged 41, overloaded his sprawling,
testosterone-driven sculptural environments with so much
narrative that they were transformed into walk-in versions
of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. They were orgies
of narrative - Nevada's celebrated Chicken Ranch brothel
crossed with Wal-Mart and Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau, the
never-completed house filled with fantastical interiors.
Rhoades embedded his three-dimensional blowouts with id,
excess, obnoxiousness, rascally ambition and a rampaging
life force.
His sculpture ran rampant, and as close to amok as he could
make it in the 13 jam-packed years of his career. It started
with his New York debut at the David Zwirner gallery in
September 1993, with CHERRY Makita - Honest Engine Work,
consisting of a foam-core garage, an operating car engine
with the exhaust tube snaking through the gallery, and a
jungle of handmade items relating to power tools, motor
racing and the like. His last project, Black Pussy Soiree
Cabaret Macrame, was a series of private social events
involving massive sculptural installations in which people
would move about a huge Los Angeles warehouse filled with
Ikea-like shelves containing thousands of "dream catchers",
camel saddles and neon signs spelling out different words
for female genitalia.
This was a development of Rhoades' New York exhibition,
Meccatuna (2003), whose neon signs were accompanied by the
gradual building with Lego bricks of the Kaaba, the stone
structure venerated by pilgrims to Mecca. A related
installation, The Black Pussy . . . and the Pagan Idol
Workshop, was on show in London last autumn. Rhoades took up
the theme again, this time with many Spanish references to
the vagina, in Tijuanatanjierchandelier, on show at the
Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga, Spain, until
October.
Rauschenberg pointed to art's narrative sex drive, DH
Lawrence to the rebellion lying "somewhere deep in every
American heart". Rhoades' rebellion was mischievous,
raunchy, utterly out in the open. His work combined the
flagrancy of novelist and Dr Strangelove screenwriter Terry
Southern, the ungovernable, unrestrained gush of Walt
Whitman, the logorrhea of Allen Ginsberg and the cacophony
of William Burroughs with visual sources such as Dieter
Roth's pictures made with rotting foodstuffs, the satirist
George Grosz, subversive comic-book artist Robert Crumb,
Dali's whacked-out environments, Peter Saul's paranoid
intensities, Mike Kelley's culture-noir, and the
Dionysianism of his teacher and mentor, Paul McCarthy. All
this resulted in a sort of
obnoxious-impish-dissonant-sublime.
Born in Newcastle, northern California, Rhoades attended the
California College of Arts and Crafts (1985-86), took a BA
in fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute (1986-88)
and went to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture,
Maine, for its summer 1988 session. He completed his studies
with a fine arts MA at the University of California, Los
Angeles, where he met McCarthy. They stayed friends and
discussed the possibility of opening their own gallery in
the city, not least to balance the receptivity to their work
in Europe. In 1999 their collaboration Propposition,
highlighting the ultimately commercial character of a
gallery through a video of a hotel project meeting with
David Zwirner that adjourns to a porn-film shoot, was shown
at the Venice Biennale.
The first time I met Rhoades was in the Zwirner gallery a
few hours before his New York debut. He was pixyish,
distracted, engrossed, though with sufficient presence to
display a decidedly foxy, roguish streak. He questioned
almost everything he or I said. I was curious and put off at
the same time. His use of speech was so non-linear and
convoluted that while I picked up general threads, I do not
think I ever understood one word that he said to me on the
dozen or so occasions we met. This did not mean I thought
what he was saying was half-baked; in fact, I thought it was
fully baked, and that I was hearing a very original way of
thinking.
Even if you did not know what he was on about, if you found
his blatant sexism offensive, or were turned off by his
aggressive penchant for taking up space, while the drive of
Rhoades' art may have been narrative, his greatest gifts
were formal. Most of all there was his visceral feel for
volume, the sense that the space enclosed by a gallery was a
material in and of itself. Following in the footsteps of
Matthew Barney, who in 1991 turned galleries into bodies
that he moved through, and Karen Kilimnik, who two years
before that transformed them into private fantasies and
nightmares, Rhoades understood the gallery simultaneously as
a Pollock painting and a Donald Judd box. He created a
sculptural version of abstract expressionist all-over space
by filling rooms not only from wall to wall but from top to
bottom. This made his installations have the presence of
enclosed jungles or crash landing sites.
Then there was his colour: each installation seemed to have
a very planned-out palette. I recall the yellow of legal
pads for one, and pea green for another; there was the red
of a toolbox scheme, neon used in a Bruce Nauman style, and
the plastic primaries of Lego bricks. This ultra-ordered
deployment of colour saved Rhoades' work from incoherence.
Just as Jeff Koons once organised 60,000 flowers in a 30ft
topiary sculpture of a puppy, so Rhodes harnessed chaos and
made it work for him.
But there is a sense in which Rhoades art resembles not so
much sculpture as dance - once the dancer is gone, it
disappears too. Though from start to finish it was exhibited
in and purchased by museums and sought after by
mega-collectors, its future is less clear. Indeed, it may be
difficult for those who come to get an adequate idea of what
he did.
Rhoades was not the greatest artist of his generation. He
came after Barney, Kilimnik, Cady Noland, Damien Hirst and
many others, and created a lot of iffy work. But he was
larger than life, carrying off his exuberant juxtapositions
with great flair. As he put it himself, "To juggle the
impossible was always an issue throughout my work - to take
three objects, like a rubber ball, a chain saw and a live
African elephant, and try to juggle." He is survived by his
wife, the artist Rachel Khedoori, their daughter Rubi, his
parents and two brothers.
Jason Rhoades, artist, born July 9 1965; died August 1 2006