RASHID JOHNSON’S SPACE OF SOVEREIGNTY AND OF CONTEMPLATION

The TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art 2022 Artist Honoree speaks of cultivating a body of work.

INTERVIEW BY ANNA KATHERINE BRODBECK

This page: Rashid Johnson, Seascape “Jitter Bug,” 2022, oil on linen, 72 in x 96.12 in x 1.68 in. Photograph by Stephanie Powell; Opposite, above: Rashid Johnson, Black and Blue [Film still], 2021, 35 mm film transferred to video, 7:50 minutes. Photograph by Rashid Johnson. ©Rashid Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Below: Performance view of Rashid Johnson: The Hikers at the Aspen Art Museum, 2019. Photograph by Tony Prikryl. ©Rashid Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

In advance of In Focus: Rashid Johnson, opening October 22 at the Dallas Museum of Art, Hoffman Family Senior Curator Anna Katherine Brodbeck connected virtually with TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art 2022 Artist Honoree Rashid Johnson. Here they discuss his practice, both making art and facilitating the projects of others, and how the past few tumultuous years have shaped how he conceives of his work and the field as a whole.

Anna Katherine Brodbeck (AKB): We are so excited to have your work presented at the DMA on the occasion of your role as honored artist for this year’s TWO x TWO benefit auction. And we’re really lucky to have a representative selection of works made in the last decade on view. I’ve been thinking of them a lot lately in the context of the pandemic, which has colored so much of our recent perspective. And even with these early works in particular, I’ve been interested in how you recreate scenes of intimate domesticity, and how the objects around us say so much about our identity, since we’ve been spending so much time at home with such objects. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about your decision to incorporate objects of symbolic resonance into your work. Rashid Johnson (RJ): I came by using domestic materials and signifiers that represent kind of domestic space quite honestly. Those were oftentimes things that were in my studio, so I was exploring other themes, concepts, and ways of establishing marks on surfaces, etcetera, and I would often come back to the things that were in the studio. And at one point, I started building shelves to house the things that were there.

I was looking at that kind of ramshackle group of shelves that I’d organized, and looking at how I filled them, and I realized that that assemblage, that kind of collection, that index of materials, was actually the thing I was most interested in. And so giving them an opportunity to best capture what it is they meant to me in my thinking and how they were informing the other things that I was doing, it really started to be this process of marrying the signifiers and the tools that informed my thinking, and then also the marks and gestures and ways that I was approaching surface.

And so the dichotomy that is born of those things coming together became the best way for me to capture my thinking at a certain time.

Clockwise from above left: Rashid Johnson, Cosmic Dojo, 2009. Photograph by Martin Parsekian. ©Rashid Johnson. Courtesy of the artist; Rashid Johnson, Our People, Kind of, 2010. Photograph by Martin Parsekian. ©Rashid Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and MoMA; Installation view of Rashid Johnson: Fly Away at Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2016. Photograph by Martin Parsekian. ©Rashid Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Rashid Johnson, Anxious Red Painting August 17th, 2020. Photograph by Martin Parsekian. ©Rashid Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

AKB: Another very obvious resonance the pandemic has with your work is with the Anxious Man series. I love how these works seem to project a sense of existential dread, which of course we’re feeling even more in our psyches as of late. But the fact that when you repeat these forms, both in individual works, but also when you show a series of them in the room, it challenges the idea of an individual experience of subjectivity in the work. And recently you’ve incorporated new colors in the series, including red, and then black and blue. I wondered if you could speak about the role of both seriality and color in your work. RJ: Series and seriality are enormously important to how I approach art making, in that it gives me space to grow a body of work or to grow a theme through the process of meditation, or through facing it over and over again, allowing a construction of a theme or a concept to be the armature for how I work, and produce, and learn through it.

And the ideas that exist in the project—whether around sovereignty, or autonomy, or independence—are the collective, right? They really all share equal footing in my project. And to be able to unpack them is really assisted by them being conjured over and over again by me in my studio space. And that space of sovereignty and of contemplation that is my studio, being able to conjure and face and be distracted by and employ it as a meditative tactic, the opportunity for repetition and then, you know, the natural evolution that’s born of that, in a micro sense as well as macro.

Color and the mobility of color and symbolism and the potential iconography that’s born of color are also really central to how the work evolves and grows, whether it’s suggested in the red that I consider to be so urgent—in the Anxious Red Paintings of 2020, or the blue that’s kind of the sister work to those red paintings, which I call Bruise Paintings, which carries with it all of our understanding of the color, and thinking about bruising, and thinking about symbols and signifiers and all the things that can be conjured in the way that we consider color, whether from a collective discourse or from an individual one. AKB: You’ve spoken a lot about your process and the meditation that occurs within the studio, but your work is also so generous for including spectators, be it through your use of mirrors, which allows the viewer to literally enter your work, or through your creation of stages for performers and other collaborators to share their own work. I wonder if you could speak a bit more about how you balance those two things, about your role as artist and author, but also what you see as the role of spectators and collaborators in

your practice. RJ: I love the dichotomy. I love the opportunity to effectively address both my autonomy and individual space as an artist, and then the space where artists feel a real agency too, and I’m not an exception to that rule. I love that I get to be the author. I love that my ideas and concerns get to be amplified through my project.

Simultaneously, I love the potential that art gives to collaboration, and the opportunity that an artwork can become a stage or a generous platform for not only my critical concerns, but those of others—some of whom I have a tremendous amount of respect and appreciation for, and others with whom I’m just familiarizing myself, as well as folks with whom maybe I don’t necessarily share a lot of the same thinking.

So the opportunity that an artwork can create space is simultaneously important to me with the fact that I’m creating space for myself. And so stages and spaces where musicians can perform, and/or people can just speak out loud, or find their voices, you know, share equal footing with the spaces that I provide for myself to be amplified. AKB: This is a really amazing opportunity to speak with an artist who, as a board member of the Guggenheim, is so involved in institutional practice at this moment, because the pandemic has also brought about a delayed reckoning for our field in thinking about our role in including voices from the community. As you’ve had opportunities to reflect deeply about the role of the institution in this way, I wondered if there are any lessons that you might share about how we can deal with greater urgency with the kind of responsibility that we have towards the public. RJ: We’re living in incredibly complicated times, in particular when we think about inclusion and a reference I just made to making space. And I think the thing that I’m learning most about is that what institutions need to continue to evolve their relationships to communities that have traditionally felt less included in what cultural institutions make available to their patrons—and to folks who step into the spaces—is changing criteria, right? And thinking a little bit differently about how our gatekeeping functions, who those gatekeepers are, who and how we make decisions, and thinking about what and how we imagine people to be qualified in that kind of decision-making.

And once we start challenging the roots of those criteria, then I think we’re going to find ourselves in an advantageous position to be more inclusive in ways that we hadn’t previously. So it’s not so much about pandering or assuming what certain communities need to be active in a space, but it’s actually giving them space to tell you and to be involved and invested in the educational programs, the curatorial programs—giving them

Installation view, Rashid Johnson: Black and Blue at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. 2021. Photograph by Martin Parsekian ©Rashid Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.

Rashid Johnson, Falling Man, 2015. Photograph by Martin Parsekian. ©Rashid Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

space and agency and allowing them to be functioning partners in the gatekeeping, to some degree, more so than just imagining what it is that those communities need. AKB: I also want to take the opportunity to of course thank you for participating in this event. It’s such an honor for us to have you as our honored artist this year because it brings such an important voice, someone really prominently engaged in the most pressing issues of our time, to Dallas, to share not just your work but your thoughts with us. I wondered if there was anything that you wanted to share about what these experiences mean for you, when you travel to new cities and talk with new communities and participate in this way. RJ: You know, it’s really rewarding to feel the urgency of cities engaged in the cultural discourse and its prescience. So for me, it’s an opportunity to learn as much as it is to bring my own sense of what’s happening and my value system. Places like Dallas have done an incredible job, especially the institutions, of building a group of patrons who have a significant investment in cultural institutions, and I’m a huge believer in what cultural institutions are capable of.

I grew up in Chicago, and my early experiences were at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it changed my life, seeing the work of Clyfford Still and the laundry list of artists that I was exposed to—it’s too long to share. But those spaces taught me that there was a place for me in this broader conversation around art and the way that we canonize and make available opportunities for historical significance. And so I’m just happy to be included and to be recognized amongst a cadre of artists who’ve successfully navigated some of these spaces before me. AKB: Thank you so much, Rashid, for sharing with us. My final question is: What are you working on now that you’re really excited about? RJ: I’m just excited to be working. I’m always excited to have the space to work. I’m working on a couple of small exhibitions that I’m excited about, and I have a little relationship to film—short art films as well as feature-length storytelling—so I’m working towards some things in those spaces. I’m just excited to have the space to be in my studio every day and to continue to evolve my concerns into things that are illustrated. P

Rashid Johnson, Red Stage. Installation view at Astor Place, New York, June 2021. Photograph by Filip Wolak. ©Rashid Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and Creative Time.

Rashid Johnson, Stage, 2020. Installation view at MoMA PS1 COURTYARD, 2021.