Rockets to the Future: The Car-Consciousness Art of Jason Rhoades

“This is a used police car from Clint Eastwood’s police department. I also like that endowed history of it. But I also like the design of it: this kind of obese, bubbly design was a completely utilitarian car. It was only meant for state workers and for federal employees,” Jason Rhoades explains in a mobile video interview with art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist circa 1998 featured in “Drive II,” now at Hauser & Wirth.

In the late 1990s, when artist Rhoades drove Obrist through thick Los Angeles traffic in his Chevy Caprice cruiser, he talked about the many meanings of the automobile, car cultures, roadways and traffic patterns. The American highway, he explained, offers his preferred roadway type and direction of travel, a distinct path forward with “power, speed and confidence,” a contrast to the uncertainty when ambling down narrow, winding, rural roads and roundabouts commonly found in Europe. Even with their notorious traffic, Obrist reported that Rhoades didn’t mind auto congestion on L.A. freeways since the artist adopted the car as an extension of his studio—a place to think freely about his work.

As merely one member of the shuttling millions who have driven along countless greater Los Angeles throughways, I can attest that such road clog can present a rather different experience, one rife with prolonged annoyance and moderate suffering. But maybe Rhoades had more patience in a jam than most. He was certainly a little more forward-thinking—more visionary—than the rest of us. Besides their obvious “utilitarian” functions, that forward thrust was what he thought cars were good for: a vehicle that–giving us space to think—propels each of us into the future, like a “rocket ship into another world,” as Obrist put it. In some ways, Rhoades’ artworks, like cars to commuters, act as an instrument to help us face the folly and foibles of the day—but also to find our way through a future world, however fragmented, open-ended or, ultimately, unknown.

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Our choice of car—equally applicable to Rhoades as to any of us—reflects our daily needs and identities, especially true in sunny, auto-centric, personality-obsessed metro Los Angeles. Rhoades drove several different cars over the years before he passed in 2006 at the relatively young age of 41 from heart failure and accidental drug intoxication. In the video interview with Obrist, the stout, pontificating Rhoades fittingly drove his “obese” white 1992 Chevrolet Caprice Classic, a sturdy, gas-guzzling car found in most U.S. law enforcement fleets at the time. His was a retired cop car from Carmel, California, where serene, tough-guy, on-screen cop Clint Eastwood resided as mayor from 1986 to 2001. As Rhoades indicated, he loved that specific bit of extra history.

It’s quite possible Rhoades engaged in the faint power fantasy that most young white American males enjoy when identifying with policemen as protectors—or even antagonists—as much as he loved the workaday life that the service vehicle represented. As a day-in and day-out maker and servicer of images and complex object-filled installations, he recognized that our Western consumer choices—however unlimited they may seem—inform our discrete cultural mythologies and world-building. The cars he drove—and later exhibited as the art he anointed in car projects—help fill out most of “Drive II.”

The show is a reconfiguration of the artist’s work concurrently on view in the year-long Rhoades extravaganza at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles (on through January 2025). The New York City exhibition showcases eight pieces by Rhoades, including five readymade automobiles, from a tiny two-person Ligier Optima to an iconic curvy blue sports car—the Ferrari 328 GTS. The remaining works, Rhoades’ Fucking Picabia Cars with Ejection Seat, Sportscar Concrete Car Stop and Recession Era Perfect World Park Bench, constitute the other major portion of the presentation. Also included, interestingly, are two paintings and a drawing by the high-speed auto enthusiast and machine-obsessed Dada progenitor Francis Picabia, as per Rhoades’ express request years ago. But let’s start with the automotive elephants in the room.

“By going between places, [the car] will generate things. It’ll snowball, take on a mythology and a history, and then at some point, it’ll just stop. And that’ll be it. It’ll be a finished sculpture,” Jason Rhoades told Artforum in September of 1998.

Seeing all five of Rhoades’ cars in the gallery is fascinating. They separately convey what I imagine are different iterations of the artist’s personality, as well as the practical and ego-enforcing purposes they may have served the multi-classed and multi-tasked folk who originally purchased and drove them. The Ligier (Conversation Car), for example, is a simple, unequivocal, easy-to-park, French-made economy car. It’s a bite-sized white box on wheels––at once forgettable and almost disposable. Yet it gives us pause. Does it incite the titular conversation—maybe about size, fuel savings or even the owner’s social status? I try to not judge a book by its cover here. When I look inside, I see a feathery dreamcatcher, perhaps used to help a young, soul-searching traveler relish their unfolding interior journey, instead of a mere external destination they may have headed towards. Then I look at the passenger’s seat. It’s turned around, facing away from the road ahead, perhaps an indicator this car was meant for solo missions or a nod to putting the past behind us. Who knows? The power, in part, is in the mystery. Surprises like this abound in the work.

The maroon IMPALA (International Museum Project About Leaving and Arriving), while like the Caprice in form, presence and use, may be just the smallest increment cooler—at least for a middle-aged, middle-American man in the late 1990s. The artist formulated a playful acronym expansion from the auto model name, which again hits upon the idea of cars as machines that come and go, facilitating transformations on each voyage in between destinations.

Next, of course, there’s Rhoades’ showstopping Ferrari piece. It’s a sex symbol, a design deity, an escape ship—the sheer emblem of self. While it may, in countless ways, seem pretentious, in other important ways, it is the real deal.

To counter the ostentatious presence of the Italian supercar—and finally bringing us back to earth—there’s the feisty, poorly paint-jobbed Yellow Fiero, a wish-for-wealth, ‘80s, half-pint, American two-seater that should have been a sports car. But it never quite had the form or power to demonstrably haul ass or look as good as any European performance luxury auto that it aped––although embroidered Ferrari insignias Rhoades slapped on the fenders and nose of the car make a jokey attempt to claim otherwise.

Then, there are the curious Picabia pieces. Lano, from 1938, a handsome oil and gouache on cardboard, presents a transparent, outlined, profile portrait of sorts. Inside the gold and black headshot lines, frolicking animals kick and play—from a red fox to a horned bull—ostensibly living in the imagination of the subject. The work comes from Picabia’s Transparencies series, which dealt with ideas about simultaneity, likely picked up from his extended brushes with Dadaism, Cubism and emerging theories about special relativity.

Another Picabia piece on hand, Ilma’s Paris Horizons (1951), made of ink on cream-colored paper, features a text series of long cultural hit lists including chic French personalities like fashion icon Christian Dior and notable social hubs like Le Dome and Café de Paris. Each quasi-ordered list—tucked within overlapping, curvilinear, nearly figurative strokes and forms—fills the page, highlighting the ebullient days and nights of an early twentieth-century American journalist abroad, Viola Ilma, cribbed from her newsletter Ilma’s Paris Grapevine. In this drawing, Picabia has taken his late-life, renewed interest in neoclassic forms from Christian angel imagery and juxtaposed those with what might be hints of Ilma’s face and her pop cultural milieu list, members of which he possibly knew in life. The spoked layout of some name lists in Ilma’s Paris Horizons reminds me of Rhoades’ informal scribbly notebook drawings—especially one featuring a central planet and galactic orbits around it with the hilarious text “the artist” and “everything else,” featured in Rhoades’ Illastrastions (yes, that’s the artist’s spelling), published by Hauser & Wirth. I love the Picabia choices that are included in the show, however, if I had my druthers, I would have featured a stronger, funnier mechanomorphic work by the artist, like his Amorous Parade painting from 1917, to show us the overlap between sexual bodily functions and analogical machine operations more in line with the show’s centerpiece installation, Fucking Picabia Cars with Ejection Seat.

Rhoades’ whizbang Fucking Picabia Cars with Ejection Seat, from 1997/2000, is a precarious collection of tubular aluminum scaffolding, sheet lumber, rubber car tires, fluffy folded lambskin, plastic buckets (à la Marcel Duchamp’s urinal sculpture) and sundry other items that initially look like an in-the-round Cubist portrait of both a car and a garage. It’s like we see an otherworldly auto restoration in process—highlighted by the wheeled creeper beneath the irregular aluminum latticework and upside-down wooden car profile cutouts that would allow a master mechanic (or an artist) to roll on their back under the piece’s frame-like structures and get to work. There’s a mock plywood tire in the back of the piece plastered with about a dozen photocopy images of Picabia, his cars and artworks, including one of his famous erotic kitsch paintings, which looks like an innocuous nudie porno still frame. Close by, atop it all, sits a massive black bean bag-like seat with a red blanket, a kind of crow’s nest for looking out on the world, thinking about life, generating ideas or maybe just jerking off—offering various available proverbial escape routes. The angle of the whole darn contraption makes it seem as if it may take off into outer space—like a “rocket ship,” as Obrist might say. Or perhaps fly into the future, as I might say. The topside-looking-down position of the bean bag—however dangerous—plays into what artist Paul McCarthy, Rhoades’ mentor and teacher, referred to as a perfect place of “freedom” from the masses and their morality, which shows up in many of the artist’s installations. It’s the driver’s seat, that throne from which a competitive motorist speeds past the stragglers on the raceway or an astronaut controls a rocket that blasts up, up and away through the stars. Perhaps this position of freedom is the closest metaphor for Rhoades’ view of himself as an artist and individual.

After I look at the remaining works, it’s break time. I watch the short video of Rhoades discussing, creating, orchestrating and participating in his work—and I realize what a vigorous and deeply involved artist and storyteller he was. To him, it was all very personal. From my understanding, he was a guy who imbibed life, so it probably couldn’t be any other way. And the story, the process of the work meant as much or possibly more to Rhoades than the evidence it rendered. But the art is still remarkable.

To me, the spare collection of auto readymades, Picabia wall art, assemblage sculpture and the remaining two works in “Drive II” give audiences space to breathe and relate to the show more easily than Rhoades’ signature, high-density, non-linear, overwhelming “scatter art” installations. And while it may come as a shock to uninitiated crowds who find that a room full of now-historic cars is actually art once they see the critical details—the unique, lived-in traces found along the aging auto interiors that elicit the narrative hints Rhoades relished—then step back again to compare the sculptural idiosyncrasies and symbolic values among the different makes and models on view, I imagine audiences will welcome and warm up to the intimacy of private lives in transit offered in these self-contained dioramas.

“Jason Rhoades: Drive II” is on view at Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, through October 19.