How would Jason Rhoades's desire to offend go down now, in this era of call-outs and open letters? Many of the late artist’s raucous installations are like elaborate exercises in trolling: They appear orchestrated to provoke, conjuring the specter of an overactive macho id, preoccupied by cars, power tools, guns, pornography, dick jokes, cum jokes, pussy jokes, religious jokes, junk food, and celebrity.
The Brant Foundation—which has mounted a focused presentation of Rhoades’s work, including three major installations—has an obvious fondness for those who have at one time or another taken up the mantle of bad boy. Most of the Foundation’s solo exhibitions have showcased men, among them Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, Rob Pruitt, Josh Smith, and Dash Snow. And yet the very exclusive environment of the foundation—a converted historic barn in Greenwich, Connecticut, amid polo fields and mansions—has the effect of taming such work, making this ostensibly transgressive male energy seem consequence-free, like little more than titillation for the ultrarich. Rhoades’s premature death in 2006 additionally gives his antics a subtle pallor of loss, and serves to contain the work of an artist who strove to never be contained, and who often made himself present in his own installations. Despite this absence, and beyond the macho role-play, however, Rhoades’s work addresses a timely subject—the confused, postindustrial landscape of California, which has, in the intervening years, come to define American cultural life. Rather than demonstrating a return of the repressed—a strategy more readily identified with Rhoades’s influential teacher at UCLA, Paul McCarthy—the younger artist sought to capture the aftermath of desublimation, tracing the psychodrama of products already in circulation.
In 1995’s My Brother/Brancuzi, first shown at that year’s Whitney Biennial, Rhoades squared the figure of the suburban DIY tinkerer with that of the canonical modernist artist. It’s still exhilarating to see the joy that he took in carefully positioning workaday objects taken from his brother’s wood-paneled bedroom in arrangements that recall famous photographs of Constantin Brancusi’s Paris studio. In place of elegant wooden and stone sculptures and plinths, Rhoades presents a calculated mess of gasoline engines, foam-carpet padding, extension cords, tinfoil, cheap veneer furniture, and endless doughnuts. (The baked goods commemorate a childhood doughnut-business scheme dreamed up by Rhoades’s brother; here they even form a Brancusian “endless column” that reaches into the air.) On the gallery walls, Rhoades placed photographic diptychs juxtaposing images of the two “studios”: In one pairing, his brother stands before a huge fish tank, looking as proud and authoritative as Brancusi amid his sculptures. Piles of Legos in the installation suggest the early joys of the child builder, and the installation as a whole summons the raw, near-universal thrill of fabrication and construction. As in many of Rhoades’s works, he controls the act of looking, in this case forcing viewers to circle an inaccessible center, encouraging them to lose themselves in the detailed drama at the periphery.