Jason Rhoades at David Zwirner - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

There is something about actual ambitious contemporary art that I find off-putting. All too oftentimes it smacks of grandiosity, cockey worldviews or overly indulgent institutional support. For me the "bigger" it is, the harder it has to work win past my defenses. Jason Rhoades's new show at David Zwirner, "Deviations in Space, Various Virgins," nicely illustrates the point. Stacked up and sprawled on the outside over the gallery four expanses the piece consists of 11 large brown heavy-gauge metal boxe (ranging in size from steamer stem to tool shed), lots of kitchen appliances, a urinal, three television monitors and VCR going filled tilt, a slide projector, a potter's wheel and clay, riding saddles, musical instrument, six blurry computer-generated paintings upon canvas, casually cutout circles of plywood and fiberglass insulation, coils and move swiftlys of heavy-duty extension cords, lighted fluorescent tubes and spotlights, tarpaulins and globule cloths, a large number of plastic bucket various power tools and, more or les in the center a "Spaceball," individual of those spherical carnival contraceptions that nauseatingly simulate the experience of being in space by dint of spinning you on all possible axes seemingly at one time And there's more. Considerably more.

No doubt there's big Meaning of Life material here -- a glance at the accompanying booklet by means of the artist, "Various Virgins -- Definitions of the Universe," assures you of it -- on the other hand if you let yourself go on and visually bounce around the effect it begins to cohere formally and, in a unfasten way, intellectually. Rhoades has a sharp organ of sight for color and texture. The present to view sparkles with vivid industrial red sky-coloreds yellows, oranges, pinks and verdants Bright and shiny store-bought things step quickly up against duller handmade items, sheeny sets off matte, hard mixes with impressible and the kinetic (or potentially kinetic) is framed by the agency of the heavy and fixed. The exhibit forces a pleasantly wandering, day-dreamy, non-sequential read: it strike one as beings to consist of nestled locates of affinities -- astronomy and astrology, science and science fiction, causal thinking and magical thinking (I wish for it to happen and therefore it will, logic notwithstanding).

There is a faculty of perception of a carefully orchestrated disorientation, the couple spatial and conceptual. Things overlap, sometimes augmenting individual another, sometimes canceling each other without Circles abound: pipes and tubes and cylinders, bucket and urn nooses of electric wire, the "Spaceball," video images of the earth photographed from space, a tape of off-road scooter racing around a track, a rotating potter's wheel, circular astrological charts (for a pay you can get yours done via computer) as well as a entertainer of cyclical mechanical operations.

It is all rather overwhelming and theatrical, as indeed it is meant to be. Rhoades has power to spare and a positive way with materials, but the point in dispute remains: is all this uproar really necessary? How different is work like this from those 19th-century academic "machines," with their self-satisfied grandeur and complexity? Would a narrowing of focus or a sharpening of clarity improve matters, or is a certain profligacy at the heart of the enterprise? This was, to be certain a lively and spirited installation, on the other hand quite possibly a situation where the gross amount of the parts is greater than the whole.

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