The Black Pussy is the third in LA artist Jason Rhoades' trilogy investigating -- among other things -- pagan idols, Islamic pilgrimage, Eastern mysticism, Western materialism, vulgar slang, soft-serve ice cream and high thread-count sheets. At the opening Rhoades, clad in a white pin-stripe suit, escorted a six-foot-tall Agent Provacateur model from the Cook Islands who wore a "tube-like" dress that glowed in the gallery's black light; together the two "illuminated" the opening. KultureFlash met up with Rhoades the night after the opening to try and work out what all this might add up to -- and left with more questions than answers.

Jason Rhoade's is currently exhibiting The Black Pussy at Hauser & Wirth (till 29/10).

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Adrian Searle review (20/09/05)
Art in America review (12/2003)

This interview was conducted in person at Hauser & Wirth on 21/09/05.

Melissa Gronlund: Congratulations on the show -- it looks amazing. Tell me a bit about how it works together.

Jason Rhoades: It's a poetry between my five core elements, and the 35 sub-elements, and how they relate, and don't relate, and form cliches, and form new ideas. I try to get a rhythm. Cowboy hats and hookah pipes and dream catchers and Chinese rocks and black pussy words -- these are coming from culturally different angles, but if I can find that common place where they intersect, it takes a form and becomes a thing in the real world. And you use that material to make a sculpture. You're just accumulating and you have this process and you just want to put some glue there (pllmmmff), and put wire there (shrrrring). It's like you're at a restaurant, and you're bored, and you start stacking glasses -- making an assemblage sculpture, and by the end it becomes an icon of the night. Do you ever do that? Does that ever happen to you?

MG: Well, sure, I mix the ketchup and mustard.

JR: Yeah, and the salt, and you put it all together. It would be great to take that home -- but it's too fragile. We do have one from all the desserts at Claim Jumpers, which is this weird restaurant in LA -- a super obese American place, where they serve giant banana splits, and huge brownies. I was there with Paul [McCarthy] and Eva Meyer, and we couldn't figure out what dessert we wanted so we ordered them all. We could not finish them so we dumped the remains in a bucket and took it home. It's been in the freezer for about six years.

MG: Yuck!

JR: No, it looks perfect – it doesn’t have any crystals on it or anything.

MG: Are they all mixed together, or can you still tell which is which?

JR: Not the banana, but you can make out the ice cream and the brownies -- they're so full of preservatives. There's no lid on it and it looks like it was made yesterday.

MG: They say Twinkies have a shelf life of three years.

JR: Yuck!

MG: So -- how about this segue -- you also tried to send a tuna to Mecca.

JR: Yeah, we tried live tuna, and that didn't work. So we tried sushi tuna, and then there were so many problems that it became canned tuna in the end.

MG: What was the tuna meant to do when it got there?

JR: Just see it. And then come back to show in New York.

MG: The tuna went on a pilgrimage.

JR: Exactly.

MG: How did the tuna get around?

JR: I had this guy Khalid. It's an amazing story. A friend of mine knew some friends in Jeddah. We got Khalid to buy the case of tuna, take it to Mecca, take it round the city, take some pictures of it and then DHL it back to me in New York so I could have it there. We knew Khalid in Saudi Arabia through his friend Pavel, who'd met him at a couple dinner parties they'd hold – where people just coming to America would get together and make traditional meals, so that life goes on. Well it turned out that two of the 9/11 bombers had been at these same parties. They all knew each other -- even the guy in Saudi Arabia knew these guys.

MG: That's a really frightening relevance.

JR: And what was really weird was that I can send this box of canned tuna all the way around the world, to Mecca, with no problems at all.

MG: And you exhibited that tuna in New York, right?

JR: It was in New York, yeah. We put it into several pieces -- we're trying actually to get some more. Some of it replaces the black stone of the Ka'bah. I have this piece called Mecca Vulva, which is a reproduction of the thing that holds the black stone in Mecca. We glue these tuna cans together and then put them in this vulva, so it's a place holder for the black stone. The black stone was actually stolen a couple times and then broken up. A couple tribes have hidden these holy pieces of the stone and it wasn't until after Mohammed took over the Ka'bah that he brought them together again. Apparently when Mohammed was still young -- in his 20s -- they were rebuilding the Ka'bah after a flood, and no one could figure out how to put the stone back into the holder. If one person did it, they would have too much power in the community. Mohammed suggesting putting the stone in a big blanket and having four or five people from different tribes put it in together, equalising its power.

MG: I had no idea.

JR: They said it was a footstool of Abraham. Have you seen the hair of the beard of Mohammed? That's one I really like a lot. It's amazing -- surrounded by gold ropes and silver, and then lying in the centre is this little hair.

MG: Is the black rock on the poster meant to be the rock in the Ka'bah?

JR: No, the pussy-rock is one of the scholar's stones. The actual rock from Mecca, no one even knows what kind of rock it is -- they won't allow anyone to test it. They think it's a meteorite. The rocks in this installation are similar though -- they're very hard, made of iron and mineral.

MG: How come they’re called scholar's rocks?

JR: Scholar's rocks is just a broad term for a rock that invites you to contemplate it -- the name comes from China. Not all of the stones in the show are scholar's rocks -- I bought an entire collection from this guy, and he would often find rocks on his own.

MG: You bought his whole shop? Was he pleased?

JR: Well, he was older, and he had a younger wife who looked over the shop. It wasn't so easy to say: I want everything. But I would just go in there all the time and think, God, this is so interesting. And then the black pussy rock, the one we used on the poster -- once I saw that, I knew we had to use it. But in order to take it I had to buy all of its family.

MG: That's a really happy accident for you -- you've been collecting the pussy words for a while, and to find a rock shaped like that...

JR: These rocks are Rorschach-y things anyway. You see in them what you're looking for. People use them to situate themselves in the world. You set it on your desk, and you realise that your place in the world is very small, and nature's the dominant being. There's a cave you can go into, you can sleep under a tree.

MG: Kind of a higher version of going to your happy place.

JR: But very different from the Western way of domineering over nature. Here you carve the sculpture out of nature, letting the form grow out of the rock. They actually carve the rock, and then throw it back into nature, let it get reshaped -- more naturalised -- and then go back and dig it up.

MG: Why did you take them all?

JR: How do you decide which one you like, which one's more beautiful than the other one? How can you objectify beauty or an idea? Each one has their unique personality, why would you try and say this one is better?

MG: You're being very democratic.

JR: I'm a very democratic artist. I want to have so much of the stuff that I get sick of it.

Melissa Gronlund is a freelance writer based in London. She contributes to frieze, i-D and ArtReview among other publications.