JASON RHOADES: DRIVE
Now open at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles, Jason Rhoades’ exhibition, “DRIVE”.
February 27, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Recorded in a 1998 video interview with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rhoades explains the relationship of cars to his art (parking is equated with sitting in a sculpture) and to daily practice (driving between the house, the studio and stores is time and space for the mind to race and wander). He expounds on cars as icons of art history (Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia speeded modern art forward with their mechanized abstractions), identifiers of class (you are what you drive) and environments of control. The radio is tuned to Power 106 FM and as the world streams by to the propulsive hiphop beat, the romance of cars seems irresistible.
In April, the installation was reconfigured to accommodate a lounge and become “The Pit”. An influx of archival materials was key to unpacking the various episodes of Rhoades’ Car Projects, starting with the Caprice and the 1996 exhibition ‘Traffic.’ Not only did the artist cut a deal with CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France the organizers of the show, to go in on buying him the car as a transactional work of art, he later leveraged its symbolic value by trading the Caprice for a Ferrari.
This summer the exhibition’s focus swerved onto The Racetrack. A set of half-scale NASCAR-style cars, custom jackets and colorfully painted tire barriers are among what remains of ‘The Snowball.’ Staged in California as a daylong racing event at Willow Springs speedway, ‘The Snowball’ was ultimately destined for the 1999 Venice Biennale and Rhoades’ collaborative work for the Danish Pavilion. In September, “The Garage” covered the final stretch of “DRIVE” with a selection of framed works on paper and a major sculptural installation.
Organized as an investigation in real time, “DRIVE” invites people to approach the exhibition like a garage of art and ideas, in which cars are coming and going and tinkering is a productive state of mind. As an artist, Rhoades was keenly attuned to sources of cultural power and weakness. When he put the internal combustion engine on art’s pedestal, was he presciently placing the car where it belongs for a greener tomorrow? The car as a subject in Rhoades’ art continues to drive and trouble the imagination today.