Jason Rhoades

Since the beginning of 2002 Jason Rhoades embarked on three interrelated projects: PeaRoeFoam, My Special Purpose and The Liver Pool. The last was an inflatable pool in the shape of a liver with audio and pumping equipment, green peas, white virgin Styrofoam beads, salmon roe and white glue. The work displayed Rhoades’ preoccupation with fabrication and construction, pursued with a compulsive obsession that contested the dominant logic of efficiency and supplanted it with a personal vision of how reality operates.

The Liver Pool (2002) project evolved out of the artist’s visit to Liverpool, exploring its many different areas and history and hearing about C. G. Jung’s description of the city as ‘the pool of life’. The installation at Tate Liverpool consisted of a large, ‘fully automatic inflatable/deflatable pool in the shape of a liver’ in a ‘beautiful purple brown liver colour’ (Rhoades looked at calf and lamb livers and also had his own liver scanned as a possible model). The idea forThe Liver Poolwas for an original ‘Half-Finished Above Ground Dry Liver Pool’ with thick walls featuring viewing holes at different heights for public use.The Liver Pool hosted either Grand PeaRoe Actions PeaRoeFormances, in which ‘PeaRoeFoam [wa]s mixed together to create volume. It is a kind of a positive form of the negativeLiver Pool. Then the pool deflate[d] and you [we]re left with a PeaRoeFoam Pool.’

The Liver Pool (2002) created multi-layered visual allegories of productive and sexual processes permeated with autobiographical, historical, literary and pop-cultural allusions. It displayed Rhoades’ overarching preoccupation with processes of creation, fabrication and construction which was pursued with a compulsive obsession that contested the dominant logic of efficiency and supplanted it with a personal vision of how reality operates: ‘All pieces of mine are kind of models or metaphors for the physical world,’ Rhoades stated, ‘It is a strange kind of system, which I wanted to create by “orchestrating” a construction. I wanted to build a system, like a Lego system.’

The Liver Pool (2002) embodied perfectly the ‘in-between’ state of a process that the artist had been trying to capture in his oeuvre – it was simultaneously a stage for action, theatre and sculpture.The Liver Pool (2002) existed in a state of continuous incompletion, also reflecting the underlying the ‘out of control’ theme of the International 2002. Mutating and changing over the course of the show, ‘it [was] a kind of perfect control/uncontrolled dysfunctional readymade … a do-it-yourself backyard kit.’

The Liver Pool, 2002
Mixed media installation
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2002
Exhibited at Tate Liverpool