A world furred with bright-pink, hand-knit “pussyhats”; a President who said, “When you’re a star . . . you can do anything” to explain his approach to non-consensual sexual contact; Ivanka’s perfume reaching No. 1 on Amazon; a Muslim ban; a wall—if it were not our political reality in America in 2017, it could be a long-form immersive piece by the late Los Angeles-based artist Jason Rhoades. Infuriatingly provocative, diabolically generative, charismatic, beloved, punkish and yet sincere, Rhoades, who died of an accidental overdose in 2006, at the age of forty-one, was known for producing enormous, messy pieces that ran rough over the tender spots of our fragile national experiment.
At the time of his death, Rhoades had just completed a series cohering around the ideas of the Middle East, Mexico, shopping, and female body parts, including an exhaustive (but forever incomplete) lexicon of “pussy words,” which he fashioned in neon—the medium we use to sell but whose in-lit design has the numinous quality of Tinkerbell. Taken together with the work of his teacher and sometime collaborator Paul McCarthy and his near-contemporary Mike Kelley, Rhoades’s installations stood at the core of what the art critic Jerry Saltz memorably named “clusterfuck aesthetics.” “Whatever the subject—be it bodily fluids, pop culture, or politics—terms that describe this sculptural strategy include grandiose and testosterone-driven,” Saltz wrote. It was an aesthetic formed in Los Angeles, the postmodern megacity defined by combustion engines and soft power. But as #clusterfuck continues to trend and #grabyourwallet (a Rhoades-like term if ever there was one) exerts real force on the consumer marketplace, Rhoades begins to look less like a product of his time and place, and more like a harbinger of this absurd and unforeseeable moment in which nothing is unspeakable.
Unafraid of awkwardness, Rhoades tweaked art-world sensibilities with a relentless energy. As a student, when Nascar was a synonym for political regression, he staged a mini Indy 500, calling it “Young Wight Grand Prix.” (Rhoades spelled like a backwoods William Blake, and had a weakness for puns and breadcrumb-style crossword clues: Milt Young was the director at the Wight Gallery, at U.C.L.A., where the show was held.) The material was often uncomfortably direct. In Rhoades’s first solo show, at David Zwirner’s then-new New York gallery, in 1993, he built a garage workshop, including a homemade basketball hoop, and crammed it with pinup posters, scrap lumber, a fire extinguisher, tin-foil tools, and—so you understood that this was an excavation of a dead culture—a book by Howard Carter on King Tut’s tomb. The sculpture’s heart was a Makita precision drill rigged to a V8 engine, which gave the piece its name, “CHERRY Makita.” Blue-collar semi-rural white male heterosexuality: In a downtown New York gallery in the early nineties, could anything be more inflammatory, more “wrong”?