Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga)
Jason Rhoades
Jason Rhoades
Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga), 2005
Installation with Emmanuelle flatwork (computer, slideshow, magazines), Perfect World Bench (aluminum tubes, concrete), Wailing Wall (plastic, cardboard, metal table), Camel Toe Bone (synthetic resin), PeaRoeFoam Prototype Kebab (styrofoam), Meccavulva (metal), Stereo with Rod, (CD, player, amplifier, speaker, textile), Camel Seat, neon phrases, two chandeliers with glass objects, plexiglass, wiring, bucket lamps, publication "1724 Birth of the cunt"
Ca. 360 x 370 x 420 cm
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
Photo: David Zwirner, New York, NY
- Date
- 2005
- Medium
- Installation with Emmanuelle flatwork (computer, slideshow, magazines), Perfect World Bench (aluminum tubes, concrete), Wailing Wall (plastic, cardboard, metal table), Camel Toe Bone (synthetic resin), PeaRoeFoam Prototype Kebab (styrofoam), Meccavulva (metal), Stereo with Rod, (CD, player, amplifier, speaker, textile), Camel Seat (leather, wood), neon phrases, two chandeliers with glass objects, plexiglass, wiring, bucket lamps, publication "1724 Birth of the cunt"
- Dimension
- Ca. 360 (h) x 370 x 420 cm
- Credit
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
- This artwork is part of the donation and long-term loan from TBA21 to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Details
Californian artist Jason Rhoades’ Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga) is a characteristically bewildering assemblage of objects – the enlarged fibreglass cast of a petrified camel’s toe bone found in Florida and purchased by the artist on eBay, glowing neon phrases tumbling from improvised chandeliers above a Recession-era bench, and a trademark Meccavulva (an aluminum cast designed in the shape of the mount that holds the Black Stone to a corner of the Kaaba shrine at Mecca) – arranged in seemingly arbitrary fashion, framed within a haphazard structure of metal piping, and dedicated to the cult heroine of 1970s soft-core pornographic films. It is a dark, comic and knowingly perverse commentary on sex, money, religion, crudely blended into a quietly inflammatory whole, and a provocative critique of the often conservative yardsticks by which all art, high and low, is traditionally judged.
Mi Saga, U Saga (Emmanuelle Saga) can also be read as a critique of the forms of high art. Rhoades executes transformations and ideological investigations of objects. What might appear to be the giant, unstructured realm of a manic collector, is revealed to possess an order that is not completely transparent, but still seems to follow a system. The swelling accumulation of consumer goods and information materials that reaches monumental proportions becomes the content of the work. With his installation, Rhoades tries to express the idea that the artist a consuming and processing subject. Everything becomes the raw material of the art: plastic buckets, monitors, gadgets, machines, tables, rolls of cable, neon letters and sounds.
– Jasper Sharp