"By going between places, it will generate things. It’ll snowball, take on a mythology and a history, and then at some point it’ll just stop. And that’ll be it, it’ll be a finished sculpture." —Jason Rhoades
THE MYSTERIOUS “it” in my epigraph is Jason Rhoades’s IMPALA, 1998, the car-cum-sculpture the artist loaded up with cheese and Chanel No. 22,1 drove across Europe, and eventually parked outside the Kunsthalle Zurich, where it remained for the entire busy art month of June. But Rhoades might have been talking about any number of his “sculptures,” not least of all his last and, I am convinced, greatest work: the multi-episode dinner-in-an-installation he staged in a Los Angeles warehouse and christened with the delirious, toxic, altogether Rhoadesian title Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé.
By the time I showed up, the party was over, which, in the Rhoadesian scheme of things, is another way of saying it had turned into a sculpture. Of course, this is not entirely fair, as each work in the expanded field of his art is a sculpture before it is anything else. But this sculpture’s essence—its numen, as the ancients would say—is inseparable from the festivities that filled it with life. When the lights went up on the tenth and, by the artist’s own decree, final soiree, the sculpture was officially finished. That the final good-nights were followed a short month later by Rhoades’s untimely death on August 1, 2006, lends the proceedings a heartbreaking sense of closure, but, in truth, the afterlife of the party had by then already been scripted by the artist. As it happened, I slipped in under the wire: The entire prodigious morning-after mess was about to be packed up and shipped off to New York, where it goes on view this month at David Zwirner Gallery right on time for auction week—just as the artist had planned it.
It is a fact of life, or rather art, that any work with a real-time dimension depends for its existence—or survival—on that old-fashioned compromise: documentation. To this end, Jason Rhoades’ Black Pussy Cocktail Coffee Table Book, complete with an essay by bona fide gossip writer Kevin West (significant for a sculpture that is also a party), is due to show up soon in a bookstore near you. But oral history inevitably plays a part as well; in this case, as I discovered on my belated visit to BP headquarters, a certain Alex Israel is ably tending the flame.