“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.
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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.
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