Rashid Johnson, the "post-black" art movement, and a new take on Olympia
Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, August 9, 2007
Rashid Johnson's paradise is not lost. He lives it every day and seeds his work with its culturally coded signs: black-eyed peas as stars, shea butter as an altar, Afro-Futurism as a fact and "dark matters" (his show's title) as a deep well.
He doesn't need your water; he has a well.
In part she was thinking about David Hammons, who said once that if James Turrell's investigations of light had been done by a black artist, they would have been seen in the context of color, not light.
Golden hoped that the same might not be true of Johnson's generation, the artists in "Freestyle" who were, she wrote in the exhibit's catalog, "adamant about not being labeled 'black' artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness."
Interested in but not oppressed by.
Enter Johnson. He sees the subject of his people as a gift he was given, something like an intuitive understanding of quadratic equations or the ability to fly.
Instead of engaging the struggles of black people, he wants to explore their strengths, using himself as subject and finding a form for the fluid nature of his aesthetic aspirations on earth.
To create his sky spaces, Johnson laid three polyester gold cloths on the ground, sprinkled black-eyed peas across the surface and spray-painted each field black. When he lifted up the cloths and shook loose the peas, they left behind the impression of stars in a dark sky, three skies actually, hung in the gallery on three hooks. Together, these cloths recall early Sam Gilliam and Richard Tuttle -- Gilliam for their ecstatic sweep and Tuttle for their casual, almost throwaway, perfection.
Johnson began as a photographer, and he remains one. "White Girl" loosely mimics Manet's "Olympia," and pays tribute to the shock of the original. The precise details of the print make Johnson's model too specific to be a symbol. She's a person -- a girl with a cool gaze who has the viewer's number.
Across the room is "The Brother With Knowledge of Other Planets," a reference to John Sayles' movie "The Brother From Another Planet." It's a portrait of an astrophysicist -- a man who literally has the knowledge of the planets Sayles referred to in his title.
"White Girl's" knowledge is carnal and brazen. "The Brother's" is lofty and remote. In the shine on each of their surfaces, they are reflected, like interchangeable parts.
"Shea Butter Monolith" both leans against and stands on a mirror. What you see is what you get. It's an abstract form whose waxy surface asks to be taken seriously as form, and an emblem of the domestic sphere, used primarily by black people to protect their skin against the slings and arrows of a drying environment.
Is it joke? Yes and no. Lighthearted and heartfelt, it slides off the central stage of meaning to make its own cheerful way in the world. The audience can make of it what it wants. The shea butter monolith (and Johnson) will go on, with or without us.