A collection of Chinese scholar’s rocks is just one component in the immense clutter of California artist Jason Rhoades’s installation “The Black Pussy...and the Pagan Idol Workshop” (2005), which also includes hundreds of hookah pipes, cowboy hats, and dream catchers. Rhoades acquired many of these materials in bulk on the Internet, from seized shipping containers, or at closeout sales. The jumble of cultural detritus expresses the leveling effect of globalization, the overabundance of objects available on a moment’s notice, and the sickness of indiscriminate collecting.

The banner elevates the stones by presenting them in bubbles, as if they were floating above trash in a landfill. The image suggests that despite Rhoades’s irreverent display of the scholar’s rocks as cultural kitsch, they are never brought down to the same plane as the other objects in the installation’s flat ontology. While the dream-catchers, cowboy hats and hookah pipes come off as commercial degradations of traditional beliefs, the scholar’s rocks retain a certain gravitas, perhaps because of their stoniness, their sheer lithic materiality, coupled with their unique, intriguing forms and textures.