At its core, Rashid Johnson’s new exhibition of solo works
at Hauser & Wirth, “Fly Away”, is a cycle: four rooms of both flat and
sculptural works that work themselves out into a circular progression, spitting
the viewer from room to room and developing certain visual tropes along the
way.
The first room the viewer experiences upon entering the
gallery is a vast white space (surprise) filled with monolithic drawings, made
with a blend of black soap and wax and mounted on large rectangular chunks of
bathroom tile. The drawings are jittery asymmetrical grids of crude black faces
with teeth barred, giving off a completely ambiguous but ultimately
nerve-wracking and paranoid seeming emotional atmosphere.
What struck me upon seeing these works was that they looked
like feces smeared on a bathroom wall, not to their detriment. They seemed like
spontaneous works of art made by a person pushed to the edge of their sanity,
something someone artistically inclined might do in the midst of a nervous
breakdown, in a Punch Drunk Love-esque
fit of bathroom destroying ragev. They evoke the vile, and radiate primal
emotion and mark making, riding the line between abstract expressionism and
symbolic representation.
The door on the far end of that room leads to another space
where the viewer is presented with a similar set of works on tile, except in
this set of pieces the 2 dimensional space of the tile begins to deconstruct
itself. Primary colors invade the white space of the tiles, and diagonal and
ovular pieces of wallpaper give the viewers a peek into artificial depictions
of nature, lush forests, and palm trees.
In the other intermediary room, mostly 2 dimensional works
made of various different materials including mirrored glass, oak, and black
paint depict abstracted human figures that recall pixilation. In the center of
that room, large chunks of shea butter, which evoke dismembered pieces of
flesh, lie on top of a large oak table covered by a Persian rug.
However the climax of the exhibition lies in the back room,
where “Antoine’s Organ”, a gargantuan structure of black scaffolding, is loaded
with an overwhelming amount of icons, imagery, and objects, including potted
plants, fluorescent lights, books, and televisions upon which single channel
videos play.
Some books included in the sculpture have titles such as The Souls of Black Folks, The End of Blackness, and The Sellout. On one of the tv screens,
the instrumental to the song “Criminal Minded” by Boogie Down Productions, a
pioneering hip-hop group famous for making the first rap album to feature a gun
on the cover, is played over footage of a black church choir singing, combining
two elements of black culture that are traditionally viewed as polar opposites.
In perhaps my favorite element of this multi faceted
sculpture, potted plants are placed much of the time in custom made ceramic
pots, which mirror certain visual motifs present in other rooms of the
exhibition. However the simple formal experiments made in these ceramics push
this shape language of Johnson’s to much further and more intriguing places
than the rest of the works in the gallery, giving a respite from the
overwhelmingly conceptual aspects of the exhibition and simply providing the
viewer with some beautifully made formal pieces of art to look at.
As a white person it’s impossible for me to have anything
valid or insightful to say about how Fly
Away speaks to the black experience and how well it does so. However, as an
artist, I can say that the show left something to be desired.
Even though I found myself more satisfied with the show
after experiencing all four rooms, and seeing how each of them interlocks with
the next, I couldn’t appreciate the works in the other three rooms as much
after viewing the awe inspiring and overwhelming power of “Antoine’s Organ”.
The other works paled in comparison to that final piece, which could be
appreciated from a distance and circled like a classic monolithic sculpture, or
scrutinized to no end up close as the impressive synthesis of dozens of
different ideas, forms, materials and concepts. In addition, “Antoine’s
Organ” provided an excellent contrast
with the gallery’s first room, taking the viewer on a journey from the horrific
and terrifying space of the bathroom wall drawings to the sublime beauty and cultural consciousness of the nature engulfed “organ”.
Other rooms in the gallery suffered from contemporary art’s
current obsession with (expensive) materiality. Perhaps if the concepts and forms
they presented were explored further this would not be the case. Although this
short coming of the show rests mostly on Johnson’s shoulders, this may be due
partially to the greedy and decadent world of New York art galleries which lend
themselves only to easily sellable works and not to more immersive
installations, site specific pieces, and progressive 21st century
art.