A Lightning Rod of Material. An Interview with Rashid Johnson

Oliver Kielmayer

The oeuvre of Chicago-born artist Rashid Johnson (born in 1977, lives and works in New York) is abundant in references to African-American culture: Shea butter, African animal skins and icons of African-American literature and music are the subjects that appear in ever-changing constellations. Often they are combined with objects that make a reference to a more general domestic background, such as Persian rugs, mirrors or indoor plants. Over the years, these references have merged with an opulence of materials and developed into an individual iconography; the result is a universe that behaves autonomously, mysteriously and in a completely sovereign way while also maintaining a strong connection to the viewer.

I met with Johnson for several days in New York to work on a publication featuring a comprehensive interview with him. The following is a short excerpt of the complete interview, to be published later in 2015 by Mousse Publishing, Milan.

By Oliver Kielmayer

Oliver Kielmayer - What does your name tell us about you? You were born in Chicago, but Rashid is not a traditional American name.

Rashid Johnson - Rashid is a Muslim name. My parents grew up in a generation after the first wave of Afrocentrism, when it was really important to a lot of Afro-Americans to give their children what were perceived to be African or Muslim names. A lot of emphasis was placed on using names to establish a relationship to unknown African roots and avoiding names that could be identified as simply Western or American. My parents’ generation was deeply invested in Africanism and the acquisition of Africanness. Because they felt so disenfranchised from the American experience, so incapable of the acquisition of the American dream, they started to distance themselves from a Western, American identity.

Exhibition view “Three Rooms,” Kunsthalle Winterthur, with Everybody’s a Star (2013) (left), Daybed 6 (2012) (front), and The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Shvitz Shaman) (2009) (back). Courtesy of Kunsthalle Winterthur. Photo: Christian Schwager.

O.K. - Being able to identify with a particular group can provide shortcuts to some tedious discussions and can be an option for certain opportunities. You have access to the American discourse and within that, you also have the black community. So even if this option is connected with a lot of problematic history, it still offers you something extra; it can be a bonus.

R.J. - I can’t speak for everyone because each experience is an individual one. My work certainly speaks to the fact that I was raised in an environment where I identified myself as middle class. This is an important point for me because there are many ways that I have related to questions about my identity. It’s larger than just being a black person. It’s also about being a man and an artist, about the full range of my interests and concerns. I think we all have similarly complex definitions of our identities even though we often get stuck with labels that produce a monolithic experience or that don’t reflect our individual histories. I guess that’s fine if it doesn’t lead to damaging prejudices.

Rashid Johnson, The New Black Yoga, 2011, 16mm film transferred to video with sound, 10:50 min. Exhibition view Kunsthalle Winterthur. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Joëlle Menzi.

O.K. - In Switzerland there are a lot of immigrants from the Balkans. They speak with a particular accent that became popular for other Swiss kids; they imitate or appropriate it. Is there something similar here in the States, when white guys ‘speak black’ to sound cool?

R.J. - Definitely. Over time, black culture was adapted to form the basis for a lot of U.S. pop culture, including music and popular expressions. There’s a lot of mimicking, and in some circles there’s cachet or respect from the imitation of contemporary black speech. So I think many people were surprised that I didn’t employ that vernacular, that it wasn’t mine. My parents were very specific about my speaking a certain way; it may be cool in the street, but it’s not gonna work in an office, it’s not gonna help you get a job, and it’s not gonna help you to be understood and taken seriously in other contexts.

O.K. - In 2004 you moved to New York. I think this changed your life a lot.

R.J. - Yes it did. Chicago was more segregated, as far as how strictly neighborhood boundaries defined who lived where. I happened to live and grow up in a fairly mixed area of the city: black, white, Latino, Asians, et cetera. Moving to New York changed that dynamic quite a bit because there are more people occupying the same space. I was also looking for the opportunity to be around artists that I respected; it’s not that I didn’t have that chance in Chicago but there weren’t as many people to learn from-or with. And I felt New York gave me the opportunity to be around potentially the most cutting-edge, the fastest, the most interesting people and the newest projects and bodies of work that were being made. I wanted to be as challenged as I possibly could. I was a young man, and I wanted to be where the game was being played.

O.K. - And then there is 2008, which is the year of Rashid Johnson. Looking back, all the important works or decisions go back to that year.

R.J. - Two thousand and eight was a big year. I went back to work very seriously. I was a bartender, and Nicole Klagsburn offered me my first solo show in New York. For the first couple of months after she offered me a show I didn’t do anything. I was in the new studio space in Bushwick, and I just sat there thinking: ‘What the hell am I gonna make, why did I want this show?’ And it all started to come together-it was like a lightning rod of material, drawing, photography. That was the year art-making really began to make sense to me. The poetry of it, the conceptual rule of it, the antecedent histories of the things that I was interested in making, it all just kind of hit me at the same time. At this point you see me begin to reference myself, to start to take on drawing, and my own kind of materials, and to take authorship of these materials, creating something that I guess could be called my own history.

O.K. - The first shelf work is from 2008. I think the shelf works highly suggest an iconological reading. Do you think people get something like a message out of such a reading?

R.J. - I think there are messages to be taken from it, but it was definitely not intended to be a specific delivery system. I had started making shelves in the studio for all my stuff. It was as simple as looking over at them one day and thinking: ‘Oh, that’s what I’m really trying to make.’ My idea was a vehicle that would hold all of my things, whether they were kinds of signifiers, or contradictory kinds of conversations, different materials, things to be able to reach out to the world with, from the CB radios– my father ran an electronics company with CB radios-to some weird books I was reading and pictures of friends. I can take anything that I’m thinking about and place it and it enters the conversation; I can produce contradictions that I don’t feel able to accomplish in the same way on a flat surface.

Rashid Johnson, The Moment of Creation, mirrored tile, black soap, plant, album, shea butter, space rock, radio, 71” x 129.25” x 8.” Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Adam Reich.

O.K. - What about the domestic aspects of the works? What in the domestic sphere are you specifically interested in?

R.J. - There’s something important to me about the use value of these things, that they would live in a home and be employable objects. They could be brought to life, whether you are washing yourself with the Cosmic Slop soap background, whether you would talk in the CB radio, read the books or apply the shea butter to yourself, listen to the albums and so on. I thought it provided for so many interesting opportunities. And another aspect of it was wondering: Who’s the person who uses this thing? Who is supposed to use this? And when they use it how would they use it? And what is the order in which they use it?

O.K. - When you see the shelf works in a collector’s home, is that a moment for you, when you have intruded this other person’s space with one of your fictitious lives?

R.J. - I find it really interesting because it doesn’t necessarily play well with other furniture-they bully space. You’re really bringing this outside narrative agency into your own home. I love to see them in those spaces. I also love to see them in institutions because I think that is where most people will get to witness and participate with them, but I honestly love seeing them in domestic spaces.

O.K. - The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club is parallel in some ways to the shelves but looks like a completely different body of work. To me, it seems closer to your older photo works and the use of more historical references to black culture.

R.J. - This body of work again related to escape by an escapist. The idea was of an almost magician-like character, someone like Sun Ra who said, “You know what? The problematic here is so difficult for me to engage with, that I’m not even from here. I’m not even a part of this discourse. I’m from another planet. So treat me as such.” But at the same time I was thinking about the people who use the shelves; I wanted to put some characters in the room that you could at least consider to be the potential users of the work.

O.K. - I also find the club interesting. A club offers identity because there is a reason why you are together in the club. At the same time, it’s not for everyone.

R.J. - I was intrigued by a few things. I had come across a group called the Boulé that was started in 1904. It was founded at a traditional black university and parallels another group at Harvard and Yale called Skull and Bones. I thought it was an interesting moment to talk about the black upper class and how they had developed these clubs in order to help each other. And I found its existence problematic in some ways, and in others, intriguing. I wanted to frame that group in a poetic sense with these portraits, as well as leave a lot of open-ended space to interpret how they might participate with one another. We are not given any information as to how the club works, what their ceremonies or rituals are. All we see are the members.

O.K. - A social and athletic club can basically mean anything. The club is also about inclusion and exclusion. Were you intrigued by dynamics that speak to that?

R.J. - Absolutely. Groucho Marx once said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” But I was very interested in the idea of membership, the goals of belonging, and what might happen after you’ve acquired membership. It was also an opportunity to create a fiction, whereas so many things in earlier works had been about how I was seeing the world. This was an opportunity to see it from a different lens with a group of characters that might see it from a dissimilar perspective than mine.

Exhibition view “Three Rooms,” Kunsthalle Winterthur, with 2x3 (2014) (left) und Samuel in Space (with shea butter and Persian rug) (2013) (right). Courtesy of Kunsthalle Winterthur. Photo: Christian Schwager.

O.K. - I think your work has become more and more about gesture and expression. Works like the Cosmic Slops are very close to abstract expressionism.

R.J. - They have evolved dramatically over the years: The first works were just poured, there was no gesture in it at all. And when you get to the later works it’s all gesture, almost every aspect of it is touched. I began to trust the kind of poetry in my touch. In 2008, I stopped being afraid of being the artist I really wanted to be and I started to make a body of work that talked about material and poetry. Before it was like: ‘How am I gonna define myself? What am I? Do I talk black?’ All that shit. You get older and you’re a man. You’re like, ‘I am what I am.’ And I started making art that reflects that.

O.K. - And yet this can be done in a lot of different ways. When I look at your gestures, I think there is a certain moment of aggression. Some of the black blobs look like bags of paint thrown at a building’s façade. Also you smash mirrors or parts of them.

R.J. - I’m interested in that aggression. I think there’s a kind of physical catharsis in attacking a body of work. I don’t want to be delicate with it. I don’t want to explore the aspect of craft that some other artists do in a lot of interesting ways. I’m more interested in a physical relationship, the moment of confronting an artwork.

O.K. - At the same time, the materials you apply your gestures to are quite delicate: mirrors, tiles, also the wooden parquet floor that is carefully arranged into a kind of intarsia work.

R.J. - It’s a kind of graffiti. A lot of what I call the canvas or underpaint that structures my work is very laborious. So it’s this opportunity to destroy something beautiful, what I guess is almost more poetic, than I would even give myself credit for. I’ve created this constructed moment that becomes the underpainting for this aggressive gestural attack that happens soon after. I like that dichotomy, and I think it provides for an interesting narrative, a set of narratives that can be projected onto it.

O.K. - Gesture can also be seen as an autonomous part of the work. On the other hand, too many references prevent the work from becoming autonomous, because people will instantly focus on them. You use a lot of references in your work, and maybe at some point it gets too much; everything is so loaded and possibly meaningful that you can’t see the forest for the trees.

R.J. - I think it’s possible to read the work outside of the scope of references. I also think that it’s possible to really dig into the work, that there’s meat there, and that you maybe need a steak knife to participate. That’s okay for me. The heavy referential structure doesn’t necessarily exist in every work, but I think it’s a really interesting launching pad for the way even the gestural work reads, so that you know there is depth in the way everything in my project is structured. Knowing that and having it as an underlying conversation, even when you see a singularly gestured work, you are able to join it to the complexity of the more referential ones.

Rashid Johnson, Cosmic Slop “Signs of Life”, 2013, black soap, wax, 60.5” x 84.5” x 3.” Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Martin Parsekian.

O.K. - In 2009, plants appear for the first time; to me they mostly look exotic. Very often households go for exotic plants that come from a place far away.

R.J. - Most of the color that I brought into the work over the last few years has come from a natural intervention. As I brought in more color, I started to think about how plants would add a natural color and softness, that you would have to be obligated to the object in another way again, that you would be forced into participation or watch it die. The palm speaks very specifically to our access–or lack of access–to exotic space.

O.K. - In reference to the shelves, I also thought of trophies. When you think about the things that people put onto shelves, it’s often memorabilia from travels. They are showing off that they have been there.

R.J. - Absolutely, trophies from my travels. These are the things that I have, that I collected, that I brought back with me. It’s the same with all the objects: I’ve read this, I listen to this, this is who I am, how I can be identified through my souvenirs.

Rashid Johnson, The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Thurgood), 2008, Lambda print, 64” x 55.” Courtesy of the artist.

O.K. - You staged the theater play Dutchman at Performa 13 in a bathhouse in New York. It’s a very different job to direct a play than to work as an individual artist in the studio. The actors are not assistants but artists themselves. I think it’s a completely different working process.

R.J. - I learned that you can’t control everything, and you have to believe in the people that you’re working with. There was a set of skills I didn’t have and I needed to rely on other people. Honestly, for me it was quite successful. I learned quite a bit, and it’s something that I want to continue to explore. I don’t necessarily have to be the only voice in the work for it to be successful. I still consider myself to be a young artist, so I’m very open to learning and finding new challenges. I would love to do another play, and I’d really like to make a film. My work is essentially a film-you almost need to see it all to be able to negotiate its meaning. I don’t want to say that that’s frustrating, but I would like to see what would happen if I did put that into an hour and 30 minutes. I like that the artwork is taking a new direction. There are two books that I’m very interested in producing as films. One is by Paul Beatty called The White Boy Shuffle, the second is Native Son by Richard Wright. Those two are very much on my mind, and I’m really excited about them. It’s not totally unexpected, but it’s very difficult. I will have to work with a professional film crew, so that’s a whole new set of challenges that I’m ready to take on. When I get excited, that’s the thing. Enthusiasm. That bit of that spark in your brain that says, ‘I wanna do this.’

Oliver Kielmayer has been the director of the Kunsthalle Winterthur since 2006 and teaches art history at F+F School for Art and Media Design in Zurich. In 2005, he was co-curator of the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Prague. In 2004, he founded WeAreTheArtists, a network project that focuses on open discourse and authentic communication about art by means of a homepage and free newspaper. Some of his recent books include Meeting Köken Ergun (2011), The Telephone Book Special Edition (2010) and Aggression (2008), all published by Kunsthalle Winterthur.