Jason Rhoades
Hauser & Wirth, London, UK
Visiting exhibitions about exhibitions can be disconcerting. You can be caught between two contexts, flitting between a reading of what’s in front of you to an imagined – even recycled – response to the original. When the show in question centres on a 1:12 model of what has been described as ‘the world’s largest sculpture’, the experience becomes harder still. You are forced, reluctantly, to appreciate scale from the position of gallery-going giant, peering on but unable to step inside. And then, when said exhibition is the first posthumous European show of an artist whose practice and persona was as conceptually complex as that of the late Jason Rhoades, you could be forgiven for being left in a disjointed state of simultaneous wonder and sad reflection.
How, then, to react to ‘1:12 Perfect World’ at Hauser and Wirth’s Piccadilly space? The first point to make is the obvious one: this is not the 15,000 square-foot Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, where the original was installed; the immersive quality of the 1999 installation is mostly, if not entirely, lost. That landmark is physically (if not conceptually) reduced to a model that, though meticulously constructed, invariably loses some of Rhoades’ beguiling, West Coast punch. You are restricted to looking at – rather than walking through – the forest of stainless steel poles that comprises the work.
The photographs of Rhoades’ father’s garden that cover a giant canopy (or ‘next level’ as the artist referred to it), which were viewed two at a time via a hydraulic lift in the Frankfurt installation, are here shown as near-standard photo size. The vast Eden of photographs (the ‘Perfect World’) was originally printed on a 1:1 scale and is here reduced to a table-top of scattered snaps. The drawings, which lined the walls of the converted German market, are reproduced in a vast notepad and placed on plinths with visitors encouraged to flick through. The video, playing in the gallery’s basement vault, shows the process of erecting the gigantic structure of poles, brackets and triangular wooden platforms; in the upstairs gallery, an installation which draws on noises of the steel pipes being polished and a printer churning out images, aims to recreate the aural environment of the 1999 exhibition. All in all then, we have the original show reduced, re-packaged and re-evaluated, allowing the uninitiated an introduction to this extraordinary feat of exhibition-making and for those lucky enough to visit Frankfurt, a second look, of sorts.
Yet, a reading of ‘1:12 Perfect World’ as a mere reduction of the original would be, well, reductive. In fact, it is through the re-sizing that we can get to grips with the scope of Rhoades’ ideas as one is forced to treat ‘Perfect World’ as concept rather than experience – and Rhoades’ concepts were big. What the artist was attempting was nothing short of a manifestation of his ‘Perfect World’, an elevated Eden from which he could situate himself and his art work and others could enter. He saw the raised the canopy, constructed out of wooden triangles whose forms were based on the golden mean, as a giant picture plane. Visitors who wandered through the bamboo-like forest (apparently inspired by Duchamp’s 1942 exhibition ‘Sixteen Miles of String’), viewed this picture from below, or behind, and could rise through it via the lift. By treating the art work as a place one had to physically get to, Rhoades successfully negotiates the cliché of art and artists as operating at one level removed. What’s more, by drawing upon Eden, the personal, paradisiacal and mythological become inextricably entwined within the work of art itself.
In Frankfurt this ‘next level’ would see Rhoades, or his assistants, feeding vast sheets of paper in and out of the printer and laying them on the floor to recreate his father’s garden. However, the wooden triangles were interspersed with holes where you could potentially fall through, plunging you back down from mythologized Utopia to terra firma. It was Romantic landscape painting gone turbo, forcing you to re-evaluate your relationship to art, space and nature in one fell swoop.
Returning to the exhibition at hand, though, one senses the 1:12 model afforded Rhoades the opportunity to come to terms with his ideas and strands of inspiration. The Mephisto boxes (the name of Rhoades’ preferred brand of trainers, as well as a reference to Goethe’s literary demon) that house the model seem like a nod to Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise (1934–41). This sense of playful trickster runs throughout this version, from the box itself to the mini televisions scattered throughout the model, showing visitors walking through the original work. As with Duchamp, by reducing his work to a portable(ish) container, Rhoades condenses his practice to a more physically manageable scale; the scale of his ideas, however, remains vast and it is these ideas to which ‘1:12’ provides a fitting memento.
Nick Aikens
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