Jason Rhoades' mysterious death (Excelllent)
Hyfler/Rosner
Los Angeles Times
Diane Haithman
August 18, 2006 Friday
Home Edition
He left behind one last puzzle;
Jason Rhoades filled his work with codes and remained
enigmatic about his life. His death at 41 is his latest
mystery.
When Los Angeles artist Jason Rhoades died suddenly this
month at age 41, most published obituaries said the cause of
death was unknown, pending autopsy results. Others cited the
cause as heart failure, per one of Rhoades' primary art
dealers.
For this enigmatic artist -- known for large-scale
installations that often incorporated performance or
interactive aspects -- postmortem rumors about a fast-lane
lifestyle seemed to overwhelm the discussion about his art.
Indeed, Rhoades may be a target for speculation about the
cause of his Aug. 1 death because he left so many blanks to
fill when it came to explaining himself and his work.
Despite critical acclaim, he is hardly a household name.
Gossip, suggested Rick Baker, 35, an assistant to Rhoades
for four years, has come along to fill the void.
The debate will most likely continue until the autopsy
results, including a toxicology report, are made public in
six to eight weeks. The fact that the county coroner's
office plans further investigation seems to exacerbate
rumors -- though the department's Capt. Ed Winter said that
the unexpected death of any man younger than 50 -- or woman
under 60 -- usually becomes a coroner's case.
Rhoades, Baker said, never saw the value in cultivating a
particular public image, like Andy Warhol or Salvador Dali.
Baker believed that Rhoades regarded the world's perception
if him as an artistic medium itself, like so much paper or
clay, to be manipulated just to see what might happen. "If
someone misunderstood what he was doing, he found that was
as interesting as if they got his intention," Baker said.
"He would let misconceptions sort of bubble and grow; he was
fascinated by the myth that surrounded him."
The sense of Rhoades as a human puzzle also may have more
than a little to do with the work itself. Large
installations were filled with smaller installations,
artworks within artworks. His chaos, colleagues said, was
carefully calculated -- delighting those who could crack the
code, frustrating those who could not.
Rhoades' mother, Jackie Rhoades, 67, speaking from the rural
family home in Newcastle in Northern California, painted a
picture of a "4-H kid who raised sheep and pigs" and charmed
his way through school without studying much. And although
he'd recently found a new circle of friends in the
entertainment industry, she said, her son never adopted a
Hollywood lifestyle.
Jackie Rhoades recalled the moment when she and her husband,
Jack, took their son to begin his education at the
California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (he earned
his bachelor of fine arts from the San Francisco Art
Institute and a master's from UCLA). "He showed pigs, and we
took his pig and dropped it off at the livestock sale on the
same trip," she said. "Didn't want to waste two trips."
Art dealer David Zwirner of New York's David Zwirner
Gallery, who represented the artist for 14 years,
acknowledged that Rhoades was no poster boy for a healthy
lifestyle; he was overweight, overworked and stressed out by
marital problems. He had been separated for a year and a
half from his wife, artist Rachel Khedoori, with whom he had
a daughter, 3-year-old Rubi. Zwirner also represents
Khedoori, along with her twin sister, Toba Khedoori. Rachel
Khedoori declined to comment for this article.
While his mother called him a good boy, there was a "bad
boy" character to Rhoades' work, which often played with
images of cars, sex, women and conspicuous consumption.
Jackie Rhoades said he was poking fun at those images, not
celebrating them. "His art could be off the edge, but it
appeared to us that he was laughing, because the world was
so taken with that stuff," she said.
A longtime collaborator of Rhoades agreed. "The work was way
more complicated than this idea that it was about
California, or about America," said artist Paul McCarthy,
who taught Rhoades at UCLA and later worked on pieces with
him.
"There was kind of a fog in it -- there was, like, a lot of
\o7stuff\f7 in it, this pile of stuff. People would sort of
stop at the idea that it was about consumerism, or
consumption, or American stuff," McCarthy said. "But the
pieces were overlaid like communications wires, like a
labyrinth that went nowhere. It wasn't so easy to find your
way into it sometimes."
Rhoades further complicated the labyrinth by sometimes
integrating people and characters into the artwork.
L.A. audiences may associate Rhoades with a series of
interactive art exhibitions earlier this year at his studio
in Filipinotown. Included were a series of unpublicized,
invitation-only events, including the "Black Pussy Soiree
Cabaret Macrame," a combination exhibition and dinner party
that featured violet neon signs with African, Caribbean,
Creole and hip-hop slang for female genitalia.
Rhoades had established himself in Los Angeles with his 1994
show "Swedish Erotica and Fiero Parts" at Rosamund Felsen
Gallery. The piece included scores of assemblages cobbled
together from mundane items such as cardboard, scrap wood,
yellow legal pads, paper clips and staples. The artist's
car, a fiberglass Pontiac Fiero, was parked out back as part
of the artwork.
At the time of "Fiero Parts," the Felsen gallery was in a
yellow 1950s building in West Hollywood. When the gallery
moved to Santa Monica's Bergamot Station, Rhoades ended his
association with it -- not because of a disagreement, Felsen
said, but because he felt the original building had played
an integral role in his art. The structure had been the site
where photographer Tom Kelly had shot famous nude
photographs of Marilyn Monroe. Plus, she added, the
building's yellow exterior was in keeping with the yellow
legal pads and other yellow objects in the show -- including
the yellow Fiero.
One who was particularly impressed was former Los Angeles
City Councilman Joel Wachs, now president of the Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts. "It was incredibly
inventive, and really ambitious to pull off, and gutsy,"
Wachs said.
Wachs bought a piece of the massive installation and donated
it to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art because "I
didn't have room for it in my little place." The museum
plans to hold a private memorial service for Rhoades in
September.
There was a 12-year span between the two prominent L.A.
shows during which Rhoades mostly exhibited in Europe.
German journalist Roberto Ohrt, who has written about the
artist, said one reason American galleries shied away from
exhibiting Rhoades' work on a more regular basis was that
Rhoades was difficult to please, demanding that his complex
work be presented to his exact specifications.
Not that Rhoades was always all that easy to exhibit in
Europe. At a memorial service for Rhoades last week in
Northern California, Zwirner spoke about a work his gallery
asked Rhoades to create in 1993 for the "Unfair," an
alternative art fair in Cologne, Germany. Drawing a teasing
parallel between tony art fairs and old-fashioned county
fairs, "13 Booth Cologne County Fair" collapsed 13 county
fair-style booths into each other and incorporated paintings
Rhoades' mother had done of fruits and vegetables for fairs
back home.
Rhoades caused a public stir by smuggling a pistol into
Germany with the shipment of the art. "Jason kept the gun
with him at all times, firing occasionally at lamps and even
more disconcertingly firing inside the art fair at his own
piece, in which he had set up a shooting gallery with dozens
of carefully stacked glasses," Zwirner said.
Rhoades also insisted that Zwirner play the role of narrator
in the art piece, wearing the old 4-H Club uniform Rhoades
had worn to county fairs in his youth. "It barely fit, of
course I looked ridiculous," Zwirner said. "Only later did I
understand the importance of this gesture. While Jason had
so far been a clown in his own work, he was now finding a
substitute to do this work for him. He would from this time
forward always designate a principal guardian and/or
communicator for each of his pieces."
Zwirner told this story to explain the decision that the
gallery will to go forward with its planned New York
exhibition of Rhoades' "Black Pussy," to open in November.
In New York, the show will not be a "soiree" with live
participants but will include audiotapes and photographs of
the interactions that took place in Los Angeles. Zwirner
said that this was Rhoades' intention anyway.
And Rhoades' spirit, he said, will have an almost ghostly
representation in the form of a white suit he wore in a
recent photo he had taken of himself inside one of his
installations. The photo was inspired by a similar photo
that the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat had taken of himself
in front of his own artwork, in a black suit.
"His final gesture was to take this white suit that he had
had tailored for himself and hang it in the middle of the
work -- he sort of signed off, boom," Zwirner said. "He
never signed his work, because they weren't that kind of
pieces. But that is in lieu of a signature."
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: ASSEMBLY: Rhoades established his reputation
in Los Angeles with the 1994 show "Swedish Erotica and Fiero
Parts." Its scores of assemblages were cobbled together from
mundane items. PHOTOGRAPHER: Courtesy of David Zwirner
PHOTO: THE ARTIST: Rhoades, photographed in June 2004.
PHOTOGRAPHER: Regina Kuehne EPA PHOTO: BRIGHT IDEAS: A
Lego-inspired piece was part of a large-scale installation
by Jason Rhoades in 2003. PHOTOGRAPHER: Courtesy of David
Zwirner PHOTO: HOST: Jason Rhoades, in white suit, records
attendees' responses to one of his invitation-only "soirees"
this year -- part exhibition, part dinner party.
PHOTOGRAPHER: Christine Cotter Los Angeles Times