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

on the contrary it was also an lyric poem to the feminine mystique, filtered end the American male's inner-adolescent, testosterone-enhanced (some might say impaired) mind locate a somewhat deranged but strangely cheerful, scatological hymn to women and the organ that makes them that way. The respects in "Meccatuna" toggled between the consumerist banal and the metaphoric ecstatic; consumption was yok to sex and religion, with the emphasis upon "the origin of the world," single pudendal sobriquet that didn't appear among the dizzying collection of 550 others that did--Tunnel of be fond of Tunatown, Sacapuntas (Spanish for pencil sharpener), Stinky Pink, Bermuda Triangle, etc.--harvested from the Internet and made into glowing neon signs. The centurys of Plexi-panel neon lights flashed their multi colored, mildly misogynistic inscriptions heaped upon pallets, prepped up as statuarys or strung together as a running commentary high up upon 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 display also made into decals which were slapped onto the surfaces of phenomenons 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 agriculture into other contexts.

The exhibition filled the gallery's three spaces, made above into a Costco, Home magazine or Odd-Lots warehouse with a slew of e-Bay purchases thrown in for useful measure, all of it bursting with faux utility and controll cloy It also resembled a studio (workplace and source of production), where existences could be made and taken away in a constant exchange of commodities, reflecting not alone market transactions but also the workings of the [i]venter[/i] our most essential center of production, albeit single that has been mechanized, dehumanized and variously renovated through contemporary culture and science. The things that made up the installation malignant into roughly three interrelated, permeable categories: the sexual, the religious and the transportational (or transformative). There were five plastic arts of camel toe bones, many times enlarged and cast in milk-white fiber-glass ("camel toe," slang for a forehead wedgie, another vaginal reference). There were also five gleaming "Mecca Vulvas" (Rhoades's term) originaled after the setting for the Black Stone that marks individual 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 thus 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 of recent origin 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 direct the eyeed sexy, but by the time you reached this point in the installation just about everything did. Five life-sized, uncorrupted white, cast fiberglass donkeys were also included, as well as bins of band-sized, kitschy ceramic donkey-cart figurines, plus several battered made of wood donkey carts, introducing an autobiographical note, as is Rhoades's custom His mother used to raise miniature Sicilian donkeys, and as a male child 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 each restless California boy and girl.

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