Jason Rhoades: Pipe Dreams

Art in America, Jan, 2001 by Nancy Princenthal

In a recent installation, Rhoades recycled materials from a larger presentation in Germany to create two schematic models of Sutter's Mill, ground zero of the 1849 California Gold Rush. The result was his richest meditation to date on consumption and the dreams it inspires.

"The idea came from the cliche of taking it to the next level," Jason Rhoades says of Perfect World, the colossal installation he created last winter in the Hamburg Deichtorhallen.[1] There, Rhoades split the 22,000-square-foot exhibition space, with 52-foot-high ceilings, into two levels. The "below," freely accessible, was occupied most prominently by highly polished aluminum scaffolding (it referred in part to the false floor constructed for the Deichtorhallen when it was transformed from a train station concourse to a kunsthalle). The other, "above" realm, 25 feet up, was mostly off limits: two brave viewers at a time could be hoisted up to it on a hydraulic ramp, but mainly this area was reserved for the artist. Much was in progress over the course of the exhibition, so a comprehensive view of the work was prohibited in time as well as space, lending the installation a provisional quality that in no way constrained Rhoades's ambitions. If Perfect World invoked the memory of Chris Burden hiding in his locker or Vito Acconci lurking under the floor, Michelangelo lying atop scaffolding was not excluded either.

And yet, as always, this massive installation was not quite enough for Rhoades. "If you know my work," he says, "you know that things are never finished."[2] So, this fall at David Zwirner Gallery in New York, Rhoades recycled the aluminum pipes from the Hamburg piece to construct "of perfect world," an installation consisting of two identical Erector Set-like models, roughly life-sized, of the legendary Sutter's Mill. This 19th-century sawmill, built by Swiss immigrant John Sutter to mill lumber for American homesteaders, became the serendipitous point of origin for the California Gold Rush when a chunk of gold was discovered in its tailrace. Metonym for the many deceptive promises of instant, fabulous wealth that drove this country's development, the short-lived Gold Rush soon led to the demise of the mill itself, and subsequently to the loss of Sutter's own fortune.

Similarly, at Zwirner, one or another of the shiny aluminum models, each in a separate room, was always in a state of deconstruction, the disassembly of its parts starting as soon as it was complete. Evidence of this labor, including rags for buffing the aluminum, backpacks filled with hardware and wooden racks for storing the decommissioned pipes, was on display, along with flat-screen video monitors showing slowly changing images of the installation at the Deichtorhallen. Also shown on flat-screen monitors was documentation of a performance, for friends and family back home, in which a wooden model of the mill was built and unbuilt in a single day; participants dressed in period costume.

An additional element of both the New York and Hamburg installations relates to the vegetable garden that Rhoades's father maintains in California, near the site of the original Sutter's Mill. Roughly 3,000 1-to-1-scale photographs of the garden papered the wooden floor of the "above" level at the Deichtorhallen (which is roughly the same size as the garden). These photographs also appeared at Zwirner--partially covering the wooden platforms on which the aluminum mills stood, stitched into handmade paper sun hats draped over handmade shovels that leaned in the corner of each room, and slowly dissolving on two flat-screen monitors. Rhoades compares the garden to the Gold Rush: "It could be that you came one day and there is nothing, and the next day, there is a tomato. This always fascinated me about the gold discovery myth," he says.[3] But the admittedly weedy, unkempt garden also raises the question of what is deliberate and what circumstantial in Rhoades's work. In "of perfect world," he cultivates chaos less than is his wont; this is much the tidiest, most coherent installation he has made so far. But he continues to make unpredictable choices about what is constructed and what bought (why the rather crude handmade shovels, for instance?) and to court ambiguity about whether what we see is part of the work or an incidental accessory (metal folding chairs in each room at Zwirner, for instance, could have been either).

This indeterminacy extends to the work's physical characteristics: "of perfect world" was shiny, irresistible and expensive-looking, but never completely or reliably "there." Rhoades explains that he favors the chromelike "hot-rod esthetic" for the same reason that he admires Brancusi's stainless-steel and bronze sculptures: they are polished to a finish so reflective they seem to nearly vanish. He also explains that he rejects that part of the Minimalist legacy that stands as a last line of defense for the sufficiency and necessity of concrete objects. Hence, in his own work, the tendency toward disappearance that reaches paradoxically epic proportions at the Deichtorhallen and at Zwirner; hence also the largely invisible (to all but the most intrepid viewers) nature of the Hamburg installation's upper realm. But there was risk there for the artist as well. Conceding that Perfect World's jerry-built upper level was riddled with death-dealing "cracks, traps and soft spots," Rhoades says, "In a perfect world you don't build a handrail."[4]