Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Jason Rhoades
49
Performance Dates
Fridays, April 8–September 3
Learn more
Floor 5 and Pamella and Daniel DeVos Family Largo
Born 1965 in Newcastle, CA
Died 2006 in Los Angeles, CA
Assembled and dismantled over the course of the Biennial, Sutter’s Mill is based on the California sawmill where the 1848 discovery of gold set off the California Gold Rush. A decade later, this land was purchased by Nancy and Peter Gooch, a formerly enslaved couple who eventually owned more than four hundred acres that were ultimately taken by the state under eminent domain laws to build a public park. Jason Rhoades remarked: “Once they realized that it was gold, the whole world shifted. All of a sudden, they saw gold everywhere. . . . When something comes into focus, you see it. And this is like in a garden . . . where these things grow . . . when they become ripe, the whole system becomes literally and physically fruitful.” The installation brings the conditions of manual working-class labor into dialogue with the United States’s history of wealth accumulation and financial speculation. It also symbolizes the constant tension between order and disorder, creation and destruction, that is involved in the process of making art. The structure of Sutter’s Mill is built out of the wood platforms and aluminum poles repurposed from Rhoades’s monumental sculpture Perfect World (2001).
Rhoades made art out of a diverse array of objects and elements, including cars. He saw the vehicles, especially this 1992 Chevrolet Caprice—a common model widely used for state, commercial, and civilian purposes—as an extension of his studio. Operating as readymades, cars played an essential role in Rhoades’s thinking and in his work. The Caprice is part of a group of works he called “Autopursuits” or “Car Projects,” which also included a Fiero, a Ligier, a Skinned Fiero, a Ferrari, and an Impala. The Caprice was purchased in 1996 with the CAPC musée d’art contemporain in Bordeaux, France, for the exhibition Traffic and was later traded for a Ferrari. Of the central role of cars in his work, Rhoades said: “It’s not about an emotional attachment to all cars or one car. I have an attachment to certain machines and tools. I see cars as tools. They are very much part of my work, but also act like real things in the real world. The most important thing about cars in my work is that they are never decorated. It’s not about artists’ cars, it’s more like a pipe or a functional object in the real world. . . . What is also very important is that things have their own momentum, and they have their own perpetual motion. That’s the romantic idea with an engine or with a work of art that exists on its own.”
Sutter’s Mill, 2000
Jason Rhoades, Sutter's Mill, 2000 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Polished aluminum pipes, polished aluminum, wood, metal profiles, metal clamps, blue plastic barrels, wood trestle, cleaning rags, clothing, backpacks, construction helmets, lamp, and laminated color prints (from Perfect World, 1999). Photograph by Paula Court
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Jason Rhoades, Caprice
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Narrator: Jason Rhoades died in 2006. Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney. She says she selected his work for inclusion in the exhibition because it speaks to the current cultural moment.
Adrienne Edwards: The Caprice is a car that Jason was immediately drawn to, the fact that it had served as the car for so many federal and state employees, particularly the police, that it also was a car that was converted from a police car into taxis. And we think about how the gig economy has, in a city like New York, impacted the taxi industry. There have been real calamities around that, so here's a work that he created in the nineties that actually was quite prescient and relevant to today.
But also that it was about an almost romantic idea about the engine and mobility and expansion and the way it’s all bound up in our ideas of freedom and also individuality. And I think for Rhoades it’s not about a kind of emotional attachment to cars or any one car, but it’s about them as machines and as tools. Making the work, the car becomes this liminal space for him, between his studio and then all the places he would go visit to source materials all over Los Angeles for his installations.
It could be very easy to ask: why put Jason Rhodes in the Biennial at this moment? There was an article in The New Yorker in 2017 and the title of this piece is “An L.A. Artist Who Anticipated Our Trumpian Moment.” And I remember seeing that and thinking that that was precisely right.
Narrator: Rhoades described the project to the curator Hans Ulrich-Obrist, while driving in one of the cars.
Jason Rhoades: They are based in tools, the idea of a tool for perception or a vehicle for thinking. You know like a vehicle as a, not a motorized vehicle necessarily, but like a medium. You know like in paint is powder right and you use a medium which is either an oil or linseed, you know the vehicle which the color is transported in. So I use it, my interest is in how and what and why it transports things and how it can be used as a tool for certain perceptions. The tool for hauling physical things, a tool for hauling mental things and also a tool to be used to propel yourself through space. I mean I look at objects, I mean I’m incredibly interested in Duchamp in that way, I mean he put the readymade into an art context but then I believe we can put it back to work, to where objects can have simultaneous meanings, simultaneous levels, at all points in time, you know the object that you buy at the store, the gesture of buying it is an incredibly sculptural gesture, and the gesture of consuming it, putting it in your car, the gesture of opening the box, the gesture of putting it in the work of art, you know is all very, very important part of sculptural process.
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Jason Rhoades, Caprice
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Narrator: Jason Rhoades falleció en 2006. Adrienne Edwards es la curadora Engell Speyer Family y la directora de Asuntos Curatoriales del Whitney. Ella señala que seleccionó la obra de Rhoades para incluirla en la exposición porque da cuenta del momento cultural actual.
Adrienne Edwards: El Caprice es un coche por el que Jason se sintió inmediatamente atraído, ya que había sido el coche de tantos empleados federales y estatales, sobre todo de la policía, y también porque pasó de ser un coche de policía a ser un taxi. Y pensamos en cómo la economía de trabajos esporádicos en una ciudad como Nueva York ha afectado la industria del taxi. Ha habido auténticas calamidades en torno a eso, así que aquí tenemos una obra que el artista creó en los noventa y que resultó ser bastante profética y relevante para la actualidad.
Pero también se trataba de una noción casi romántica del motor, de la movilidad y de la expansión, y del modo en que todo eso está ligado a nuestras ideas de libertad y de individualidad. Y creo que para Rhoades, no se trata de una especie de apego emocional a los coches o a un coche en particular, sino que se trata de pensarlos como máquinas y como herramientas. Al crear la obra, el coche se convierte en un espacio liminal para él, entre su estudio y todos los lugares que visitaba en Los Ángeles para conseguir materiales para sus instalaciones.
Podría ser muy fácil preguntarse por qué situar a Jason Rhodes en este lugar o en este momento. Hubo un artículo en el New Yorker en 2017 titulado “Un artista de Los Ángeles que anticipó nuestro momento trumpiano”. Y recuerdo haberlo visto y pensar que se trataba de exactamente eso.
Narrator: Rhoades le describió el proyecto al curador Hans Ulrich-Obrist mientras iba en uno de los coches.
Jason Rhoades: Está basado en las herramientas, en la idea de una herramienta de percepción o un vehículo para el pensamiento. Ya sabes, no necesariamente un vehículo motorizado, sino un vehículo como medio. Así como en la pintura, que es polvo, se utiliza un medio que puede ser un aceite o semillas de lino; es el vehículo en el que se transporta el color. En ese sentido, me interesa el cómo, el qué y el por qué transporta las cosas, y cómo se puede utilizar como herramienta para determinadas percepciones. Una herramienta para transportar cosas físicas, una herramienta para transportar cosas mentales y también una herramienta para impulsarse por el espacio. Quiero decir, miro los objetos. En verdad me interesa muchísimo Duchamp en ese sentido, el modo en que puso el objeto encontrado, el ready-made, en un contexto artístico. Pero también creo que podemos volver a ponerlos en funcionamiento, hacer que esos objetos tengan significados simultáneos y niveles simultáneos en todo momento. Sabes, ese objeto que compras en la tienda, el gesto de comprarlo es un gesto increíblemente escultural, el gesto de consumirlo, de ponerlo en tu coche, el gesto de abrir la caja, el gesto de colocarlo en tu obra de arte. Todo eso es una parte muy, muy importante del proceso escultórico.