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.
Read more at Artforum.