Jason Rhoades

A paradox: Art history seems to have slowed down and sped up at once. On the one hand, the 1990s are already the distant past, surveyed in exhibitions such as the New Museum’s “NYC 1993” or the Montclair Art Museum’s “Come As You Are,” opening this February. On the other, that decade has never ended, everyone is still reading Relational Aesthetics, the social turn will never die. Walking into this essential exhibition of the late Jason Rhoades, you instantly feel its dual time signature. His PeaRoeFoam project of 2002, reconstituted here, reads a bit like a last gasp of crashed-and-burned “scatter art” of the late ’90s (though Rhoades, as his drawings reveal, was a far more rigorous contrapuntist than his sloppier buddies). But it’s also an economic and ecological collision course that feels wholly and disturbingly contemporary.

What distinguishes this project from later work, such as his id-above-all Black Pussy, 2006, is its economic dimension: A factory clock ticks away, while a work station for Rhoades’s assistants (or “factory workers”) sits in the center of the gallery, covered in PeaRoeFoam: a commoditized sculptural material Rhoades created by colliding two organic elements—gray-green dried peas and blood-red salmon eggs—with glue and eco-unfriendly white Styrofoam beads. The artist let his workers sing karaoke during production, and for its 2002 presentation at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in Vienna, he imported the workstation wholesale then invited viewers to serenade other museumgoers. These days, though, no singing is permitted. A decade ago, Rhoades’s mock-Fordist gunge factory was still a place to party—but with the posthumous sacralization of this artist and others from the ’90s, PeaRoeFoam is no longer a disposable commodity but something much more valuable, in both aesthetic and economic terms.