Jason Rhoades

Jason Rhoades's duct tape and foam-core installations push the viewer into an unstable field where apparent strength breeds a proliferation of doubt. Pre-fab suburban detritus melds with his bricolage-style sculptures into monster machines which spew out endless streams of warped Americana and machismo. The metallic core of Rhoades's expanding rings of information proves mobile as well; a jacuzzi turns into the fountain of life, a massive car engine becomes a phallus, then a drill. These cross-bred home improvements invite viewers to cobble their own meanings out of Rhoades's scraps of sex, gears, and furnishings, for a joy-ride through the manifold bends and contours of his gadget-ridden universe.

Macho Man
Whether building a conveyor belt titled The Theater in My Dick or erecting a giant drill from a Chevy V-8 engine, the exploration of masculine identity lies at the heart of Rhoades's project. Rhoades mines the turf of men's work - from the mechanic's shop to the hobbyist's garage - where the tropes of virility are lovingly reenacted and violently dissected.
Many critics have questioned whether the steadfast machismo in Rhoades's installations is sincere, or if his goal is to deconstruct the conventions of masculinity. In fact, both interpretations are correct. From his delight in tinkering with mutant go-carts and potato pop guns, it's clear that Rhoades has a gung-ho relation to his male potency. On the other hand, in jerry-rigged pieces like Cherry Makita, the manly spectacle which Rhoades so valiantly upholds appears precariously perched, patched together, and ready to fall apart at any second.
The working stiff in Rhoades's oeuvre engages in rituals of masculinity, not because he feels so in tune with his virility, but to keep working during his leisure time, and as a reminder that he is a "man" even if occupying that position isn't very satisfying. Rhoades's tools of the trade are created out of useless junk to signify that men's work is simply an unfulfilling waste.

The Bachelor Stripped Bare
The incessant connection between industrial product and phallus Rhoades evokes descends from Duchamp's bachelor machines, with their automated male sexuality and perverse relation to the Oedipus complex. Rhoades's Theater, 1996, re-modeled the Large Glass's mechanical auto-eroticism into a conveyor belt operating like a spermatic duct, with chairs provided for the observing grooms. In a similar vein, the Swedish Erotica in Rhoades's auto installation turns out to be a pin-up photo of the artist's mother, a juxtaposition which offers a dissonant contrast between his jockish inventions and repressed inclinations.
A machine with a phallocentric bent would logically be designed to dominate its space, but his homages to the male member consistently fail to define their surroundings. This inability of the central metaphor to provide stable meaning reflects Rhoades's membership in a post-60s generation lacking both the reliability of the nuclear family and the sense of conviction bequeathed by a sturdy socio-economic foundation. The big picture seems a dim memory in the 90s, replaced by shadowy conspiracies and electronic surveillance systems whose movements can only be vaguely grasped in brief, dissonant linkages. That shaky cultural ground gives birth to the fractured consciousness and unorthodox sensuality that underscores Rhoades's manly machines. When Rhoades's Swedish Erotica installation covers the entire gallery in urine-yellow, the ghost of unified masculinity has bubbled up to cover the world with its new-found waste.

Back-lot Aesthetics
As is the case with many L.A. artists, a makeshift theatricality infects the aura and authenticity of Jason Rhoades installations - a model taken from backlots like those at Universal Studios. In counterpoint to his nihilistic sexuality, Rhoades's stage-set aesthetics both knock down and unabashedly celebrate traditional mid-western know-how and the American dream.
Rhoades's use of constantly reconfigured ephemera and grungy pop icons owes a debt to the scattered precedents of Robert Morris, Cady Noland, and Karen Kilimnik, while his kinetic motifs reflect his work with mentors Paul McCarthy and Richard Jackson. This young L.A. artist further condenses his predecessor's strategies through his patriotic allegiance to functionality and trash culture. Metaphor, associated by Rhoades with a Euro-Modern sensibility, is rejected in favor of objects which have a one-on-one relation to the world. His machines mean what they do - guns shoot, cars drive; the installation's metonymic structures frequently incorporate unaltered purchased goods. With consumer shopping and real-time labor as the heart of the artistic object, the literal and mundane has replaced the visionary core of the metaphoric act.
These pop collisions lay the groundwork for Rhoades's Hollywood motifs - from the conceptual armature of the film Car-Wash in Uno Momento to his disposable props and maquettes in The Creation Myth - to re-enter the picture. Rhoades presents a grand prairie-fed vision of speed, unlimited expanses and American ingenuity, but by putting the back of the film-set up front, lets us know that only the flimsiest of constructions support such transcendent fantasies.

The Spinning World
Rhoades's ephemera are always created from half-formed materials connected by slippage and whirling displacements. This strategy operates most succinctly in the Various Virgins installation, 1997, with its overlapping puns on outer and inner space and circular motion. Constructing a working spaceball, a rotating sphere for weightlessness, Rhoades spins the viewer around a series of non-sensical associations ranging from astrology to creation mythologies and outer space travel.
Rhoades constantly reverses and turns information inside-out in order to replicate the way the human mind wanders and associates in the process of cognition. To synthesize a mental construct of objects in the world the brain shatters their forms into codes, bytes, and other partial forms of data, then reconstructs them into a tenuous simulation. On a ride in his space ball, passengers can literally experience that sensation of items and information dissolving under their gaze. And if the object could look back, the observer's own identity would spin into view, x-rayed, chopped up and recoagulated, giving a double meaning to the scattered look of Rhoades's installations.
Particle Man
According to Gilles Deleuze, a body is not a form, but "a complex relation between differential speeds, between a slowing and an accelerating of particles."1 Rhoades's installations coagulate as fragments of a larger mainstream culture while continually deconstructing against that flux. As the viewer is immersed in Rhoades's morass of perspectives, his interpretive process also both congeals and destabilizes the work. However, the overwhelming pace of Rhoades's accumulation cannot synch up with the ponderous patriarchal power it seeks to emulate. His incessant outpouring of objects and significations are valiant attempts to fill the void, to be dad, but in the end he best exemplifies a 90s pop-era defined by a lack of resources, center, or authority.

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