Library

The Brant Foundation’s Library features selected resources about Jason Rhoades (1965-2006), whose work will be on view at the Foundation from November 2017 – March 2018.

These materials offer a deeper understanding of Rhoades’s body of work, and are available for the public to utilize while experiencing the sculptural installations in person.

Jason Rhoades Exhibition Page

About Jason Rhoades

Jason Rhoades (1965-2006) is known for his highly original, large-scale sculptural installations, which incorporate miscellaneous materials inspired by Los Angeles car culture and his rural upbringing in Northern California, amongst other sources. Until his untimely death in 2006 at age 41, he carried out a continuous assault on aesthetic conventions and the rules governing the art world, wryly subverting those conditions by integrating them within his practice. He conceived his works as part on an ongoing project to which objects were continuously added—dream catchers and oriental carpets, neon signs, power cords, building materials, and his own newly fabricated products were assembled and re-assembled in different configurations and also enlisted as part of performances and happenings within the installations. Underpinned by a unique combination of strong conceptual vigor and humor, his practice redefined and expanded the space in which artworks are both made and exhibited. Believing in ultimate freedom for artists, Rhoades circumvented notions of taste and political correctness in a candid pursuit of the creative impulse itself.

About The Brant Foundation Library

The Brant Foundation’s library program was established in 2009 to facilitate the appreciation and understanding of contemporary art and to advance our mission of promoting arts education. As both a museum and art study center, the Foundation’s library serves as a crucial resource for students, scholars, and educators by providing access to a unique collection of hard-to-find materials. After noticing the difficulties of obtaining contemporary art publications, typically as a result of rarity or expense, the Foundation was inspired to make efforts to broaden their holdings and increase accessibility to the public.

By reaching out to the surrounding arts community for help, the Foundation has accumulated an actively growing, rich collection of contemporary art books. With the contributions from the many organizations and institutions that share our vision, the public gains access to a wider range of materials used for the scholarly study and examination of contemporary art. Housing over 1,000 volumes – from exhibition catalogs and artist monographs to art criticism texts and periodicals – the library reflects the Foundation’s collection and admiration of contemporary art. Because of the rarity and value of the materials, our library is non-circulating, but we welcome and encourage the public to make use of the study center during operating hours. Please contact info@brantfoundation.org to make an appointment to visit The Brant Foundation’s library.

Volume A: A Rhoades Reference

By Jason Rhoades & By Eva Meyer-Hermann

Jason Rhoades, Four Roads

Hardcover – 2015

By Ingrid Schaffner , Martha Buskirk, Chris Kraus, Paul Schimmel

This volume examines the remarkable legacy of Jason Rhoades’s complex body of work. The Los Angeles–based sculptor Jason Rhoades was widely celebrated for sprawling, ambitious, and daring installations, editions, and events prior to his untimely death in 2006. This volume, accompanying the first US survey of his works, centers on four highly sensory, large-scale pieces that incorporate neon, radio, smoke rings, and even a model train into large environments that engulf the viewer. The book also features illustrations of each major work dating from 1991 to 2006, accompanied by explanatory texts that illuminate Rhoades’s materials and methods as both highly accessible and artistically complex.

Jason Rhoades: PeaRoeFoam

Hardcover – 2016

By Julien Jonas Bismuth, David Zwirner, Lucas Zwirner, Dylan Kenny, Linda Norden

In 2002 Jason Rhoades (1965–2006) introduced the world to PeaRoeFoam, a “brand new product and revolutionary new material” created from green peas, salmon eggs and white foam. When combined with glue, they transform into a versatile, fast-drying and durable material that he intended for both utilitarian as well as artistic uses. This publication examines and situates the PeaRoeFoam project within Rhoades’ career and acknowledges its importance within the framework of his practice. It discusses and reproduces its initial three public presentations and includes archival documents and photographs, installation views of all three shows, as well as diagrams and drawings related to their creation. Also featured are a revealing personal essay by David Zwirner, who began showing Rhoades’ work in the early 1990s, new scholarship by Julien Bismuth and selected interviews from the Jason Rhoades Oral History project, conceived by Lucas Zwirner and Dylan Kenny, who have interviewed over 50 artists, curators, friends, collaborators, art historians and others who knew the artist.

Jason Rhoades: Collector's Choice Vol. 9

Hardcover – February 28, 2010

By Eva Meyer-Hermann

Despite his untimely death at the age of 42, Los Angeles-based artist Jason Rhoades (1965–2007) left behind a large body of sculpture that seized the imagination of a generation of artists, curators and collectors in the 1990s. In this substantial new survey, Cologne-based independent curator Eva Meyer-Hermann traces the unfolding of Rhoades’work and provides revelatory interpretations of his large and intricate installations. Rhoades’ art has its roots in the late 1980s and early 1990s L.A. scene fostered by Richard Jackson and Paul McCarthy at the University of California, Los Angeles, at a time when the Southern Californian Performance scene in general had begun to open itself up to international exhibitions and the art market. Like his predecessors, Rhoades included performative elements in his installations and produced epic thematic cycles, drawing on mass culture to develop a dense weave of images and forms. This is the first comprehensive study of Rhoades’ vertiginously sprawling oeuvre.

Jason Rhoades: The Big Picture

Hardcover – November 30, 2012

By Paul McCarthy, Eva Meyer-Hermann, Ralph Rugoff

The Big Picture documents Perfect World, a 1999 installation that Jason Rhoades (1965–2006) created for the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg―an installation regarded by many as his most important project. This publication examines the work through photographs of Perfect World’s 1999 and 2000 iterations and its posthumous exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in 2010, when it was shown complete for the first time.

Franz West

Paperback – April 29, 1999

by Robert Fleck

Emerging from the 1960s generation of Viennese Aktionists, who used their own bodies in their art, Franz West (b.1947) is an internationally renowned Austrian artist who incorporates the bodies of his spectators into his work. Often inviting visitors to participate in or even wear his sculptures, West encourages us to explore our involvement in contemporary art and its presentations. The resulting works are not always aesthetically pleasing. His oddly-hued plaster forms called Passtücke (Adaptives) – ordinary objects wrapped in gauze and dipped in plaster – are sculptures to be worn by the viewer that contort the body into bizarre positions.

His public works include his contribution to Documenta IX in 1992, in which he set out row after row of metal-framed couches, draped with rugs and fabrics, for public use in an open square behind the Fridericianum: a new kind of public art for weary museum visitors. Drawing inspiration from the history of art (reclining icons such as Manet’s Olympia), psychoanalysis (Freud’s sofa in West’s native Vienna) and a socially interactive type of art, these works are at once both introvertedly personal and extrovertedly public.

Austrian critic and curator Robert Fleck surveys West’s work and discusses the influence of such thinkers as Freud and Wittgenstein. The founding editor of Europe’s most influential contemporary art journal, Parkett, Bice Curiger interviews West in one of the artist’s furniture installations. In the Focus, Assistant Director of Art and Public Programs at Washington D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Neal Benezra concentrates on West’s Etude de couleur (1991), an important signpost for West’s oeuvre of the past decade. West has chosen a text by Kathryn Norberg on the history of prostitutes, historical figures who, like artists, occupy an ambiguous public position in society. West’s writings include a sculpture/text published here for the first time.

The Brant Foundation Art Study Center