Rashid Johnson
In Standing Broken Men (2021), a familiar face reconstitutes itself. Appearing in Rashid Johnson’s work in painted, engraved, or sculpted forms, even as a mask on a performer, here the figure is a mosaic – given its form through the assembling of broken parts. Within the square frame of the face, another two figures emerge, an arm over a shoulder, hand across heart. An expanse of body in desert hues becomes a terrain, an aerial map, the neck a pathway offering a means of escape. A small but solid companion hovers to the right, waving arms or wings, tapping against the square frame; the trappings of mind. Speaking about the maintenance of practices over time in the context of her co-curated exhibition at A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, in 2022, architect Sumayya Vally cautioned that, while seeking the affirming edge of traditions of maintenance and care, “we need also be vigilant about how some models can preserve less than ideal frameworks. An undesirable status quo can be maintained by the self-same tools.” Some things need breaking before they can be restored. Some things should not be restored and must be remade. Johnson’s Standing Broken Men world-builds from shattered matter, the figures upright and ready to move.
b.1977, Chicago
“His works do not actively invite physical touch…yet, they do invoke a non-ocular-centric mode of interpretation,” Manuela Moscoso writes of the results of Rashid Johnson’s dextrous material volubility, which encompasses the vegetal, the animal, and the mineral. Counting shea butter; soap; space rock; ballet; branded red oak flooring; film; plants; oil; tile; and a bespoke paint named ‘Anxious Red’ among the artist’s staples, Johnson works across mixed media, painting, sculpture, performance, and film. “His materials…stimulate tactile memories; both their composition and their viewing…” Their titles speak of anxiety, of escape, of anxious crowds and broken men who, through Johnson’s painstaking tending to form, are remade. Take what is perhaps the artist’s most recognisable, recurring figure: the ‘anxious’ or the ’broken man’ is a square face on a neck, bodiless, possessing two wild, oval eyes, (often scratched or etched into soap), a nose, teeth gritted or mouth slightly agape. A closer look and the face takes on the qualities of a visual trick or an optical illusion, becoming a square frame in which two heads turn talkatively or tenderly towards one another. Foreheads – even lips – may touch. Hands are clasped. Speaking to his choreographic collaborator Claudia Schreir about his film The Hikers (2019), Johnson says:
That dichotomy is very much in line with how I almost see myself functioning in the world – being able to use certain kinds of language or what has come to be understood as code-switching, to some degree, and understanding how my language, my body in space, or my interactions with people can be interpreted. I have the ability to navigate spaces in certain ways that people would consider to be acceptably sophisticated and then other ways that could become colloquial, almost textural, or physical that are more representative of other aspects of my personality.