Rhoades abroad: in his most recent installation, Jason Rhoades considers sanctity, fertility, beasts of burden and the 550 names of Woman - both Eastern and Western

Californian Jason Rhoades, artist and agent provocateur, likes to put anything into the mix. Speaking of Paul McCarthy, his former teacher and later his collaborator on projects like "Propposition" (1999), he describes him as always pushing things, not afraid to take chances or screw up, even though he is also very precise. The same might be said of Rhoades, particularly in light of his latest gallery-filling installation, "Meccatuna," which appeared hl New York this fall at David Zwirner Gallery. This most recent in Rhoades's ambitious series of large-scale, sometimes violent spectacles amounted to a meditation on the mechanical and the organic, on Mecca and the increasingly tragic rift between impassioned Eastern spirituality and Western rationalism and materialism.

But it was also an ode to the feminine mystique, filtered through the American male's inner-adolescent, testosterone-enhanced (some might say impaired) mind set, a somewhat deranged but oddly cheerful, scatological hymn to women and the organ that makes them that way. The references in "Meccatuna" toggled between the consumerist banal and the metaphoric ecstatic; consumption was yoked to sex and religion, with the emphasis on "the origin of the world," one pudendal sobriquet that didn't appear among the dizzying collection of 550 others that did--Tunnel of Love, Tunatown, Sacapuntas (Spanish for pencil sharpener), Stinky Pink, Bermuda Triangle, etc.--harvested from the Internet and made into glowing neon signs. The hundreds of Plexi-panel neon lights flashed their multi colored, mildly misogynistic inscriptions heaped on pallets, prepped up as sculptures or strung together as a running commentary high up on the walls, rimming the gallery and recalling strip-mall or strip-joint enticements--as weI1 as the friezes of Arabic script adorning Islamic architecture. The announcement for the show, also made into decals which were slapped onto the surfaces of objects and given away as handouts, was a black-and-gold electrical-transformer label in English and Arabic, alerting the viewer to Rhoades's often-used strategy of blithely--with more irony than arrogance--inserting American culture into other contexts.

The exhibition filled the gallery's three spaces, made over into a Costco, Home Depot or Odd-Lots warehouse with a slew of e-Bay purchases thrown in for good measure, all of it bursting with faux utility and controlled glut. It also resembled a studio (workplace and source of production), where objects could be made and taken away in a constant exchange of commodities, reflecting not only market transactions but also the workings of the womb, our most essential center of production, albeit one that has been mechanized, dehumanized and variously renovated by contemporary culture and science. The objects that made up the installation fell into roughly three interrelated, permeable categories: the sexual, the religious and the transportational (or transformative). There were five sculptures of camel toe bones, many times enlarged and cast in milk-white fiber-glass ("camel toe," slang for a front wedgie, another vaginal reference). There were also five gleaming "Mecca Vulvas" (Rhoades's term), modeled after the setting for the Black Stone that marks one corner of the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam's holiest city; these were cast from aluminum tubes previously used in Rhoades's installation "Perfect World" (1999). Environmentally correct if not always politically so, Rhoades often recycles.

There were, in addition, 48 cans of Geisha tuna that had been bought in Mecca, their provenance documented before they were shipped to New York as artifacts of a pilgrimage. Also prominently in evidence were steel-wire shelving, folding metal tables and a pile of post-WWII camel saddle footstools, which also looked sexy, but by the time you reached this point in the installation just about everything did. Five life-sized, pure white, cast fiberglass donkeys were also included, as well as bins of band-sized, kitschy ceramic donkey-cart figurines, plus several battered wooden donkey carts, introducing an autobiographical note, as is Rhoades's wont. His mother used to raise miniature Sicilian donkeys, and as a boy he once asked her to buy" him a camel; a Honda 2003 XR50 was also parked here. Transportation of all kinds is, as everyone knows, a must-have for every restless California boy and girl.

There were countless Ivory Snow detergent boxes, imprinted with the smiling image of Marilyn Chambers--the Ivory Snow girl who in the 1970s became a porn star--holding an infant; Rhoades is a recent father. The boxes were filled with PeaRoeFoam, a Rhoades invention, concocted from freeze dried green peas, fresh salmon roe and small white Styrofoam pellets mixed with Elmer's Glue-All--fertility on hold, perhaps. Other sculptures made from this signature substance were a PeaRoeFoam Wedge, Ramp and Wheel, recycled from "Impetuous Process" and "The Liver Pool," both installations from 2002. As an organic and inorganic seedbed, PRF was a fitting binder for this orgy of product placement, consumer lust and techno-creation.