33 Artists in 3 Acts (27 page)
Sherman is less relaxed here than she was in her studio. The judgment that accompanies museum exhibitions and the social pressures of the opening are taxing for even the most outgoing of artists. Sherman also appears unnerved by her dependence on others. She laments that the installation process has been slow due to union and earthquake regulations. She also seems frustrated that overseeing exhibitions is soaking up so much of her life. “I won’t have time to make new work for the next year and a half,” she mutters.
We enter the final room of the show, which has been painted teal blue and houses six larger-than-life-size portraits of “society ladies,” as Sherman calls them. Here, the artist depicts herself as older women whose multimillionaire husbands, one suspects, have cast them off. Socialites are usually assumed to be superficial, but these lonely female characters convey pain and other intense emotions with a verisimilitude absent from Sherman’s early work, which tackles media stereotypes rather than real people. The embattled dignity of these women reveals both the empathy and brutality of the artist’s eye. I feel like I know every woman in this room, I exclaim. Sherman laughs, as she often does in response to compliments.
From the fresh-faced characters of the “Centerfolds” to this room of mature women whose erect postures betray the effort it takes to cling to one’s youth, the retrospective presents a chronicle of aging. Standing next to the artist amid her work, it is striking how she has aged gracefully in real life but awfully in her fictions. Indeed, the “Society Portraits” evoke Oscar Wilde’s classic,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, in which the vain protagonist sells his soul to ensure that he doesn’t grow old while the figure in his portrait becomes decrepit in the attic.
Sherman’s work has proved prescient about a culture in which social media fosters obsessive and continuous self-representation. However,
in the very first sentence of the catalogue essay that accompanies the show, Eva Respini declares, “Cindy Sherman’s photographs are not self-portraits.” This appears to be a nonnegotiable directive in the Sherman universe. “If an actor is on stage with very little makeup,” says Sherman, “you wouldn’t say that is a self-portrait. They are still playing a role.” But what if the actor herself devises all the roles? And insists on total control of the costumes, makeup, art direction, lighting, and camera? Curators of the solo shows of living artists are rarely in a position to insist on these questions; they are generally obliged to fall in line with the artist’s own orthodoxies about their work and to make a case for their publicly declared aims. Indeed, curators are vital cocreators of the myths that art historians call “intentionalist fallacies.”
Just beyond this room, at the exit and entrance to the show, a professional decorator is finally at work installing the newly reprinted wallpaper. The mural, which was first shown in 2010, features giant jester-like characters that Sherman admits have “a come-worship-me look.” These figures tower against black-and-cream sketches of Romantic landscapes appropriated from traditional French toile wallpaper. From her 8 × 10-inch
Untitled Film Stills
to the present, Sherman has moved slowly and methodically toward claiming greater wall space. In the early twenty-first century, when many male artists appear to embrace the motto “If in doubt, make it bigger,” Sherman has earned every inch of her scale.
With this mural, Sherman employed digital strategies that she hadn’t before. In 2003–04, she made the psychedelic backgrounds of her clown photographs digitally. In 2007, when working on a commission for French
Vogue
featuring Balenciaga clothes, she shot with a digital camera for the first time. Then with this mural, she started manipulating her facial features in Photoshop. Bizarrely, the traits created by these digital alterations seem almost genetic. One character has an extra-long skinny nose; others have eyes that are conspicuously small or close together. They look like inbred demigods bound together in an old-school circus act. “What I like is that they seem related somehow,” declares Sherman. “They have certain traits that make it look like they are from the same family.”
Rashid Johnson
Self-Portrait as the Professor of Astronomy, Miscegenation and Critical Theory at the New Negro Escapist and Athletic Club Center for Graduate Studies
2008
I
t looks like a bizarre psychoanalytic group therapy session gone wrong. Rashid Johnson and I are standing next to
Untitled (Daybeds 1
–
4)
(2012), the focal point of the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s solo show at the South London Gallery. In the center of the grand Victorian space is a row of four chaise longues that evoke Freudian couches, each on its own Persian rug. The four daybeds are upholstered in zebra skin and their wooden frames are “tortured,” as Johnson puts it. Three of them are upended, leaving only one patient the opportunity to lie down. “It feels like a triage,” says Johnson, as he walks around an open toolbox and a large pot of something black that suggests a witch’s cauldron, both remnants of the installation process. “Something terrible has happened and people need help.”
When Johnson scoped out the South London Gallery in the wake of the 2011 riots (the most heated of which took place near here), he also visited the Freud Museum in leafy North London. The artist spent a lot of time soaking in the intense atmosphere of Freud’s treatment room, which is preserved as it was in 1939. He marveled at its cluttered display of icons and fetishes. “Freud saw African sculptures as therapeutic tools,” exclaims Johnson as he tucks a couple of dreadlocks behind his ear. “I grew up in a home with similar figurines but they were employed
in a different way. In our home, they were about identity formation rather than exploring the exotic or the unconscious.”
Johnson often jokes about being “abandoned” in Afrocentricism. In the 1980s, his mother, who taught African and American history at Northwestern University, was immersed in the intellectual scene and dashiki-clad lifestyle of the second-wave Afrocentrism spearheaded by activists like Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan in Chicago. The movement had a significant effect on national identity, not least of which was the shift in consciousness from “Black” to “African American.” But Johnson’s mother and stepfather dropped the Afrocentric lifestyle when the artist was about thirteen. He grins then says, “It was almost as if I had had my bar mitzvah so they no longer had to do all that Jewish stuff.”
Johnson leans over and gently rubs his thumb on the underside of one of the tipped-up daybeds that perches on its hind legs. The red oak has been burned to a black crisp by a roofing torch, splattered with black soap (which is made from the ashes of burnt plantain skins and is revered for its healing qualities), then scrawled upon with sticks. Johnson often uses African materials such as black soap and shea butter. “I am really interested in the idea that, through cleansing and conditioning, you can acquire a kind of ritualized Africanness,” he explains. Johnson has long been fascinated with the problem of how to be black. “It’s not dissimilar to what other people are negotiating. How to be a woman? It’s like, ‘Okay, how do I make this up?’” he explains, pulling his nerdy beige cardigan down over his white T-shirt. His Margiela sneakers signal his success to people who know their fashion brands.
Amongst the gestural marks on the bottom of the chaise longue, we can see the word “RUN.” “A lot of my mark-making represents my neurosis,” says Johnson, who has seen a therapist on and off for ten years. “I went into therapy to deal with anxiety. I find it cathartic,” he says with a relaxed smile. “Neurosis is associated with intelligence. It’s been the privilege of white people, but the black character has all the reason in the world to be neurotic,” he adds.
At the far end of the gallery is a black-and-white photograph titled
The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Kiss)
(2011), which
is a double exposure of a black man in glasses, wearing a suit and tie. Where the tips of his two noses overlap, his skin has turned white. Johnson has long been interested in the sitter as “a regal person who has the opportunity to be considered” rather than “witnessed or studied or caught on the run.” This photograph is one of several images that involve doubling and are, in part, inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 sociological text
The Souls of Black Folk
. On his second trip to Africa, when he was twenty-three, Johnson went to the home of Du Bois, who had expatriated himself to Ghana late in life. “Du Bois talks about the idea of double consciousness,” explains Johnson. “When you are American and black, you traffic through those two identities.”
Johnson has made about twenty photographs of the fictional members of the Negro Escapist Club, many of which depict the sitter in a thick haze of smoke. “I rarely smoke pot now because it makes me paranoid,” says Johnson with an embarrassed laugh. “But I smoked every day from the age of fourteen to twenty-five. My teachers would look at me with tilted heads and say ‘Mr J-o-h-n-s-o-n’ because they knew I was stoned out of my mind.” Vast chunks of his schooling no doubt plummeted down a rabbit hole due to his excessive habit, but weed taught him one thing: “to sit down and pay attention.” Despite his erudition, Johnson has never been a great student in the strict sense, having started but never finished an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But the incomplete degree hasn’t stopped the thirty-five-year-old from being a star artist. He has a survey show initiated by MCA Chicago which is touring museums in three more American cities, and was given a large room at last year’s Venice Biennale.
Education looms large on one side of Johnson’s family. “My mother comes from the black bourgeoisie, whereas my father is a Johnson from Tennessee,” he explains. “Jimmy Johnson—not James. His birth certificate just says ‘Jimmy.’ It’s very plantation.” His mother’s family, however, has been going to university for generations. Johnson’s great-great-great-grandfather was the first black man to graduate from Harvard Medical School. His mother has a PhD and his brother studied law at Harvard. Johnson’s parents divorced and remarried when he was young (his mother to a Nigerian, his father to a white Jewish woman). “We
are all very close,” says Johnson. “We have barbecues and celebrate the holidays together, but no longer observe the absurd ones like Kwanzaa.”
Johnson feels conflicted about the concept of a black brotherhood in part because of his parents’ class differences. “Common, the Chicago rapper—we went to college together—has a great line. He says, ‘Don’t say bitch, that’s not something I would call my mother, nor do I call every nigger my brother.’” Johnson pauses and glances over to a mirrored wall sculpture titled
The End of Anger
(2012). “Brotherhood suggests a monolithic black experience,” he says. “Intellectually I don’t embrace it, but emotionally, I strangely do. The perception of kinship can be exhilarating.”
The End of Anger
is one of Johnson’s many “shelves.” These critically acclaimed altarlike pieces present carefully chosen instances of African American intellectual and creative achievement. This work is named after a recently published book by Ellis Cose, which tracks the changing attitudes of black people since the 1960s. Six copies of the hardback are stacked on one of the five ledges that stick out of the backboard, which is covered in an Art Deco–ish pattern of mirrored tiles. On another ledge sits Art Blakey’s 1962 jazz album
3 Blind Mice
. Three smaller ledges host pieces of shea butter. The tight geometry of the sculpture is interrupted by splattered outbursts of black soap, making the piece feel like a shrine used for ancestor worship. Johnson admits that his shelves present “a black utopia” that emphasizes victories. “I am more interested in producing a world in which the black character has agency,” he explains. “I like to think that we have been formed by history, not handicapped by it.”
Johnson complains of the negativity, disguised as “criticality,” that is endemic in a lot of art schools. “Students often want to hate everything and just dismiss things,” explains Johnson. “When I give college talks, I tell them: you have to fall in love with art or learn to love it.” The respect and affection for others’ work should run deep. “My interest in jazz or the history of black culture,” he says, “it’s not something I’m doing to be interesting. It is my story.” For Johnson, jazz is “more American than apple pie.” It fills him with patriotism. He loves the music when it shuns lyrics, concentrates on pure sound, and grooves its way to invention.
Johnson relishes “that movement, that freedom, that feeling of not being trapped in a classic rhythmic pattern.”
Two white guys walk into the room. Johnson’s studio manager, an artist called Robert Davis, has a drill in his hand, while Johnson’s fabricator, Brian Lewis, is holding a level. The two men are installing a small show of abstract paintings in the upstairs gallery, which was curated by Johnson and includes work by Davis as well as Sam Gilliam, an older Color Field painter, and Angel Otero, a young Puerto Rican artist with a studio around the corner from Johnson’s in Bushwick. (Johnson’s large studio is a three-minute drive from Roberta’s pizza place.) Although Johnson works with a small crew and often populates his art with important cultural figures, the artist still thinks of his artwork as lonely. “When my friends were getting real jobs, I would be in my studio by myself for days on end,” he explains. “I couldn’t have survived without NPR. I needed to hear human voices. I don’t think my work has left that lonely space.”