Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks

Rashid Johnson, Self Portrait Laying on Jack Johnson's Grave, 2006, Lambda print, 40 ½” x 49 ½”. Collection of Dr. Daniel S. Berger, Chicago. Courtesy of the artist.

By Stephen Knudsen

The first museum retrospective for artist Rashid Johnson-an exhibition originating at MCA Chicago this summer and now at the Miami Art Museum-is refreshing the concept of post-black art, a term that has been mulled over by academics for two decades.¹

Johnson lectured on his retrospective, “Message to Our Folks,” for a gathering in Aspen, Col., earlier this summer. He was introduced to the predominately white audience as a post-black artist and then with the ad-lib remark, “And since you are here I don’t think you’re post quite yet.” This jest of questionable taste brought a polite smile to Mr. Johnson as an acknowledgement of an idiosyncratic moment and even more idiosyncratic term. Post-black as a label is just one more quagmire in our souring love affair with prefixing “post” to everything under the sun. Thank God, however, for the term’s evolved and sensible definition: that no one is obligated to ghettoize the gallery and nothing is pre-ordained and nothing should be relegated self-evident by pigmentation. To quote Lawrence of Arabia, “Nothing is written.”

Post-black is both honored and satirized in Johnson’s work and in the work of some of his influences. For instance, a twisted kind of post-black unfolds in Paul Beatty’s novel, The White Boy Shuffle. Here readers find a black messiah proclaiming suicide as “the ultimate sit in.”² Beatty is the new Voltaire, asking if this is really the best of all possible worlds. Of course, for the term to have any use, “post-black” cannot function as what Lyotard called the “inhuman” in his last book The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. In the first chapter, Lyotard kindly brings to our attention that the sun will burn out: “With the disappearance of earth, thought will have stopped-leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of.”³

Death by Black Hole “The Crisis”, 2010, steel, black soap, wax, books, shea butter, plant, space rock, mirror, spray enamel, and stained wood, 96 ½” x 76 ¼” x 30”. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photo courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

Johnson’s sculpture Death by Black Hole/The Crisis is built in part with 156 copies of a book on astrophysics by Neil deGrasse Tyson. In the book, Tyson explains what it would be like for a human to be crushed in a black hole. Johnson’s 3D identity collage takes on the scope of Lyotard (human obliteration by cosmic forces) and the satire of Beatty (as solution to a human problem). At the same time, it respects ideas of black heterogeneity in Johnson’s elevation (literally) of the genius, humor and charisma of the black astrophysicist. Author Harold Cruse is also remembered, as three copies of his civil rights era book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual prop up a moon rock and the healing ointment, shea butter, near the bottom of the sculpture. In general terms, even without noticing the titles, the books and upward point of the diamond are more like a shuttle than shelving. This evokes the idea that transporting through a page can do everything from giving the troubled mind a reprieve to changing one’s course in life.⁴

The current writer with most popular appeal on the topic of post-black is Touré (one name only). He parsed out what this is all about in 2012 with his book Who‘s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now. Touré explains that his goal is “to attack and destroy the idea that there is a correct or legitimate way of doing blackness.” Post-blackness has no patience with “self-appointed identity cops” and their “cultural bullying.”⁵ Touré and Johnson illustrate each other-Johnson by being Touré’s perfect example of a post-black artist and Touré by writing an essay for Johnson’s Message to Our Folks’ catalogue. According to Touré, some of Johnson’s work says, “These people are our history, so honor them, but also, these people are history, so let’s move on.”

Endorsements for individuality in the black community were issued long before Touré’s book and long before curator Thelma Golden’s term “post-black” appeared in the early 1990s. A poetic example is found in a book used by Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903). DuBois writes: “In those somber forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself-darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.”⁶

Installation view of “Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (on view from April 14 through August 5, 2012. Photo: Nathan Keay. © Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Rashid Johnson takes the title of the book for his monolith sculpture, Souls of Black Folk. One hundred copies of the W.E.B. Du Bois book are featured in the work. They are pillars for two head-sized moon rocks in a gesture of early Afro-intellectualism supporting black-futurism. The work is also covered in a black wax/soap mixture, recalling Joseph Beuys’ conceptualism. Mr. Johnson has stated that he wanted to “make sculpture that you could wash yourself with.”⁷ The shea butter and black soap in the piece are also a poke at the idea of being brought up in Afro-centrism by his folks, only to find one day they announced, “OK, now we are done with that.” His mother cut her afro and stopped wearing dashikis, and Kwanzaa no longer became so important. “It was like getting excited for bar mitzvah only to be told, ‘We are no longer Jewish.’” Shea butter, coming from a nut in Africa, signifies the futility of putting something on the body to feel African. The shea butter is also a signifier of healing and analogous to Joseph Beuys’ fat. Johnson, like Beuys, also uses rising flora. Beuys’ 7000 Oaks entailed planted trees each in dialogue with a piece of stone (basalt). Johnson brings the idea along modestly and more humorously with moon rocks and potted plants. Johnson’s sensibility is also in the lineage of Noah Purifoy’s (1917-2004) assemblages built among Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert. Purifoy, like Johnson, sometimes used objects remembered from his childhood as direct responses to social issues.⁸

Souls of Black Folk, 2010, black soap, wax, books, vinyl, brass, shea butter, plants, space rocks, mirrors, gold paint, stained wood, 114” x 124.75” x 24.125”. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

Demonstrating admirable versatility, the retrospective is built on multiple mediums (sculpture, painting, 3D collage, photographs, installations and film). This diffraction of meaning into a spectrum of forms is also how post-black understands identity. One of the strongest links in the show is the photography.

In Self-Portrait Laying on Jack Johnson’s Grave, the artist presents the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world (no relation). Johnson shows himself exhausted after having break-danced on the stone for a good part of the day. He admitted the shots of the dancing did not work (and were not used), but still, the telling of the backstory of the resting figure contextualizes the work. Knowing Johnson was a break dancer as a kid, it does not take much extrapolation to understand that he is acting out a boyhood memory, repaying homage to the iconic athlete, and “moving on” in doing his own thing.

Sarah with Space Rock, 2009, archival pigment print, 40 7/8” x 32 5/8”. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

There is mischief in much of Johnson’s work, like Eddie Murphy goofing on Gumby or Buckwheat or a white man.⁹ But at the same time there is reverence in the content. The salon-style mix of photographs is one of the best examples in the show of this duality. The images span 10 years and fill a huge 12-by-24-foot wall space. On display are homeless men, a black astrophysicist, white female nudes, moon rocks, fictional “Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club” members, and a very proud green belt. In Brother with Knowledge of Other Planets, the astrophysicist is meant to stand in for Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium (the largest far left photograph).¹⁰ He gazes upward in the direction of Sarah with Space Rock.

The humor does leave room for seriousness. For example, one image of a homeless man, Jonathan with Eyes Closed (bottom left of photo wall), gives the gigantic grouping a dignified mind’s eye. The green belt is Rashid’s father, who taught him all things C.B. radio, as his father ran an electronics business. The C.B. radio is in the picture and also finds its way into the funky space travel sculpture, Shuttle, as another nod to his father. In the mix are two of his self-portraits: Self-Portrait Laying on Jack Johnson’s Grave and Self-Portrait With My Hair Parted Like Frederick Douglass. One can imagine these as a nod to the library in his boyhood home and as homage to his mother, who was a professor of African-American history at Northwestern University and now provost at Dominican University. As for the brother in Brother with Knowledge of Other Planets, Johnson whimsically calls Neil deGrasse Tyson his “arch nemesis,” not for lack of respect but because the physicist could not be convinced to do the portrait (thus the reason for the best-that-could-be-found look-alike).

The Shuttle, 2011, mirrored tile, black soap, wax, books, shea butter, oyster shells, plant, cb radio, 96.5” x 125” x 11.75”. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

Space travel is the ultimate benchmark of human evolution-the threshold at which one can radically change one’s place in the universe. And in that spirit of human potential, we see why Johnson asked President Obama to donate one of his suits for a show in 2004 at The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago. The request fell on deaf ears and the suit was never sent, but it does spin a good backstory to Johnsons’ work.

In creating 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke were influenced by the works and writings of Kasimir Malevich. And this is how the Johnson show feels: Malevich meets Clarke meets Kubrick. As in 2001’s finale the memories of the protagonist are re-fabricated in a laboratory for study and pleasure-and maybe art. The story goes that at the 1968 premier of 2001, Rock Hudson walked out in the middle muttering, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?” Urban legend? Maybe. So stay with it awhile because like Kubrick, Johnson does not spoon-feed a plot, though in Message To Our Folks there is one, and it is for all of us-built with detournement and humor.

Post-black will never be quite the same, and isn’t that what the term is asking for?

NOTES

1. At Alliance Conference 2012, the overwhelming agreement of attendees who were nationally recognized curators, museum administrators, historians and artists, was that “post-black” exists as a negative cultural reference. It is a new interpretation of transitional experiences as expressed by a younger generation, the children of 1960s-70s global events. (Thanks to Suzanne Jackson and Jason Hoelscher for input on this essay)

My observation on the term “post-black artist ” is that it calls as much attention to the artist’s race as the term “black artist” does. This subverts one facet of Thelma Golden’s original definition of the term where black artists preferred to be perceived simply as artists.

2. Rodrigues-Widhom, Julie, Message to Our Folks Catalog, MCA Chicago, 2012. Rodrigues- Widhom lists Paul Beatty as part of the sizable “canon of African Americans” reflected in Johnson’s work. She also quoted same phrase from the book that I use in this essay.

3. See, Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 11-19 .

4. Thanks to Roderick Holt and his discussions with me in the museum about his 12 year stay in a correctional institution and how this piece spoke to him about escape as books were his only way out while incarcerated.

5. Patterson, Orlando, “The Post-Black Condition,” September 22, 2011 NY Times Sunday Book Review, This review by a Social Science Academic is an attention-worthy introduction to Who‘s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now, by Touré.

6. Du Bois, W.E.B., Souls of Black Folk, 1903, chapter one, Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.

7. Johnson, Rashid Anderson Ranch Art Center Lecture, August 2012, <http://vimeo.com/48157784>. All Johnson direct quotes come from this lecture.

8. Lee, Christopher/Onward Films <http://vimeo.com/16468971>. This film is not to be missed in showing the elegance of Noah Purifoy’s Identity sculptures.

9. Johnson, Rashid Anderson Ranch Art Center Lecture, August 2012, <http://vimeo.com/48157784>. During the lecture Johnson showed images of these Murphy impersonations and noted that he wanted a similar quality of escapism in his work.

10. Brother with Knowledge of Other Planets is a title similar to the 1984 comedic John Sayles film about a an alien come to earth and mistaken as a homeless person, an identity he ultimately becomes.

Stephen Knudsen is a professor of painting at Savannah College of Art and Design and exhibits work internationally. He is a regular contributor to NY Arts Magazine, Chicago Art Magazine and The SECAC Review Journal. He is also a co-developer of Image Comparison Aesthetics for theartstory.org and developer of Fourth Dimension Color Theory and the Dual Color Wheel, both of which are used widely in universities.