October 23, 2003
Jason Rhoades at David Zwirner
To be published in a forthcoming issue of Untitled magazine:
In a moment when politically- and culturally-hypersensitive artworks are ascendant, populating biennial exhibitions worldwide with commentaries on the fate of this maligned group of people or that –ism, Jason Rhoades continues to create exuberant, messy agglomerations of pop culture ephemera that display little of the self-consciousness now popular. Being a little bit out of synch with the moment has its advantages and disadvantages, but no matter how you look at Rhoades’ work—as refreshingly anachronistic or just plain stale—a strong reaction is almost guaranteed. This exhibition is no exception. ‘Meccatuna,’ Rhoades’ second solo show at David Zwirner in eighteen months, reasserts several generally agreed-upon ideas about his art: he is a master of accumulation, deploying myriad objects in mixed-media installations of considerable formal refinement; he likes to create rather ridiculous conceptual frameworks for these installations; and these frameworks are often off-putting to some visitors. For better and worse, these qualities are pushed to new extremes in this show. Drawing upon his earlier artworks and a globe-spanning collection of consumer and post-consumer goods, ‘Meccatuna’ is a spectacular confirmation of your earlier opinion about his art.
The claustrophobic nature of Rhoades’ bricolage gave the installation a palpable energy. (The reckless nature of Rhoades’ installation resolves into something altogether different when photographed.) Meccatuna is a euphemism for vagina that Rhoades found on the Internet; along with 549 others it was rendered in neon; the signs—and the wires needed to connect and power them—crowded the main gallery space. They ran along the wall just beneath the ceiling and were haphazardly stacked on pallets and rolling metal shelving units. Around the perimeter of the space were slapdash sculptures made of everything but the kitchen sink: tuna cans; PeaRoeFoam, the artist’s homemade building material consisting of whole green peas, white Styrofoam pellets, and salmon roe that was the center of his last New York solo show; wooden pallets; life size fiberglass donkeys; miniature ceramic donkey carts, some made in post-WWII Japan and some copies of recent vintage made in Guadalajara, Mexico; enlarged copies of a prehistoric camel toe bone purchased on eBay (the 551st euphemism); and dozens of camel saddle foot stools. At the center of this ring of sculptures was an in-progress one-third-scale replica of the cube-like Kabba, the circumnavigation of which concludes the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, rendered in one million Lego “Creator” pieces. An assistant spent eight hours a day building it up, Lego by Lego, around a metal frame pilfered from Rhoades’ 'Perfect World' exhibition.
The background to this unique confluence of objects begins with the artist’s desire to complete the Islamic pilgrimage with a live bluefin tuna in tow. Deciding that was impractical—and that meccatuna isn’t even a word—Rhoades found a Saudi Arabian man to go to Mecca, buy some canned tuna, document the endeavor and ship everything to the gallery in New York. It is ostensibly the documents of this journey that are on display. The immature “what if” nature of the tale immediately begins undermining the visual punch of the exhibition and raises suspicion at the manner in which Rhoades will handle the myriad subjects these objects and their juxtaposition will engage. A New York Times critic pegged the exhibition as a series of heroic battles: East versus West, religion versus sex. What he neglected to mention is the emaciated quality of Rhoades’ battalions.
The installation, couched as it is in Rhoades’ continued insistence on the availability of all objects for his art, including his own prior works, could very well make astute points about the changed nature of religious icons in a relentlessly consumerist society. Or about the vicissitudes of sex when it enters the realm of language. One of the main problems, however, is that these complex subjects are rendered inane by the back-story, which is itself not fully integrated into the objects on view. Any sense of intricacy is rendered mute by the buzzing of Rhoades’ neon signs.
The redeeming qualities of ‘Meccatuna’ are found in its details: several sculptures reveal surprising juxtapositions of material and formal balances that put Rhoades on par with the highest rank of contemporary sculptors. Two decades of postmodern installation art have taught viewers how to navigate exhibitions that lack coherence (or make a virtue of incoherence.) The unfortunate aspect of ‘Meccatuna’ is that it also lacks much of anything that could be described as compelling.