Jerry Saltz

Saturday August 12, 2006

The Guardian

According to Robert Rauschenberg, "the sex of art is narrative": his fellow US artist Jason Rhoades, who has died suddenly of heart failure aged 41, overloaded his sprawling, testosterone-driven sculptural environments with so much narrative that they were transformed into walk-in versions of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. They were orgies of narrative - Nevada's celebrated Chicken Ranch brothel crossed with Wal-Mart and Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau, the never-completed house filled with fantastical interiors. Rhoades embedded his three-dimensional blowouts with id, excess, obnoxiousness, rascally ambition and a rampaging life force.

His sculpture ran rampant, and as close to amok as he could make it in the 13 jam-packed years of his career. It started with his New York debut at the David Zwirner gallery in September 1993, with CHERRY Makita - Honest Engine Work, consisting of a foam-core garage, an operating car engine with the exhaust tube snaking through the gallery, and a jungle of handmade items relating to power tools, motor racing and the like. His last project, Black Pussy Soiree Cabaret Macrame, was a series of private social events involving massive sculptural installations in which people would move about a huge Los Angeles warehouse filled with Ikea-like shelves containing thousands of "dream catchers", camel saddles and neon signs spelling out different words for female genitalia.

This was a development of Rhoades' New York exhibition, Meccatuna (2003), whose neon signs were accompanied by the gradual building with Lego bricks of the Kaaba, the stone structure venerated by pilgrims to Mecca. A related installation, The Black Pussy ... and the Pagan Idol Workshop, was on show in London last autumn. Rhoades took up the theme again, this time with many Spanish references to the vagina, in Tijuanatanjierchandelier, on show at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain, until October.

Rauschenberg pointed to art's narrative sex drive, DH Lawrence to the rebellion lying "somewhere deep in every American heart". Rhoades' rebellion was mischievous, raunchy, utterly out in the open. His work combined the flagrancy of novelist and Dr Strangelove screenwriter Terry Southern, the ungovernable, unrestrained gush of Walt Whitman, the logorrhea of Allen Ginsberg and the cacophony of William Burroughs with visual sources such as Dieter Roth's pictures made with rotting foodstuffs, the satirist George Grosz, subversive comic-book artist Robert Crumb, Dali's whacked-out environments, Peter Saul's paranoid intensities, Mike Kelley's culture-noir, and the Dionysianism of his teacher and mentor, Paul McCarthy. All this resulted in a sort of obnoxious-impish-dissonant-sublime.

Born in Newcastle, northern California, Rhoades attended the California College of Arts and Crafts (1985-86), took a BA in fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute (1986-88) and went to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, for its summer 1988 session. He completed his studies with a fine arts MA at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he met McCarthy. They stayed friends and discussed the possibility of opening their own gallery in the city, not least to balance the receptivity to their work in Europe. In 1999 their collaboration Propposition, highlighting the ultimately commercial character of a gallery through a video of a hotel project meeting with David Zwirner that adjourns to a porn-film shoot, was shown at the Venice Biennale.

The first time I met Rhoades was in the Zwirner gallery a few hours before his New York debut. He was pixyish, distracted, engrossed, though with sufficient presence to display a decidedly foxy, roguish streak. He questioned almost everything he or I said. I was curious and put off at the same time. His use of speech was so non-linear and convoluted that while I picked up general threads, I do not think I ever understood one word that he said to me on the dozen or so occasions we met. This did not mean I thought what he was saying was half-baked; in fact, I thought it was fully baked, and that I was hearing a very original way of thinking.

Even if you did not know what he was on about, if you found his blatant sexism offensive, or were turned off by his aggressive penchant for taking up space, while the drive of Rhoades' art may have been narrative, his greatest gifts were formal. Most of all there was his visceral feel for volume, the sense that the space enclosed by a gallery was a material in and of itself. Following in the footsteps of Matthew Barney, who in 1991 turned galleries into bodies that he moved through, and Karen Kilimnik, who two years before that transformed them into private fantasies and nightmares, Rhoades understood the gallery simultaneously as a Pollock painting and a Donald Judd box. He created a sculptural version of abstract expressionist all-over space by filling rooms not only from wall to wall but from top to bottom. This made his installations have the presence of enclosed jungles or crash landing sites.

Then there was his colour: each installation seemed to have a very planned-out palette. I recall the yellow of legal pads for one, and pea green for another; there was the red of a toolbox scheme, neon used in a Bruce Nauman style, and the plastic primaries of Lego bricks. This ultra-ordered deployment of colour saved Rhoades' work from incoherence. Just as Jeff Koons once organised 60,000 flowers in a 30ft topiary sculpture of a puppy, so Rhodes harnessed chaos and made it work for him.

But there is a sense in which Rhoades art resembles not so much sculpture as dance - once the dancer is gone, it disappears too. Though from start to finish it was exhibited in and purchased by museums and sought after by mega-collectors, its future is less clear. Indeed, it may be difficult for those who come to get an adequate idea of what he did.

Rhoades was not the greatest artist of his generation. He came after Barney, Kilimnik, Cady Noland, Damien Hirst and many others, and created a lot of iffy work. But he was larger than life, carrying off his exuberant juxtapositions with great flair. As he put it himself, "To juggle the impossible was always an issue throughout my work - to take three objects, like a rubber ball, a chain saw and a live African elephant, and try to juggle."

He is survived by his wife, the artist Rachel Khedoori, their daughter Rubi, his parents and two brothers.

· Jason Rhoades, artist, born July 9 1965; died August 1 2006