Matt Johnson

Matt Johnson
Blum and Poe
September 9 – October 14, 2006

After a couple of successful shows at the tiny Taxter & Spengeman gallery in New York, Matt Johnson’s current is task to fill the high ceilings of Culver City’s Blum and Poe. He uses five pieces, four sculptures and an enormous painting, and while the New York shows received light critical praise, the L.A. presentation feels a bit thin, swallowed by the large space it occupies.

The show is a minefield of symbols -- Michelangelo, Picasso, Magic Eye books, Buddha, a crab, automotive repair advertising, and what may or may not be a fish head. Each of these could compel a witty exhibition, and I genuinely believe that that is what Johnson is trying to do, be as witty as he can while at the same time taking his thought and work in deeper directions. After all, humor often surprises with the quality of its critique. You would expect nothing less from a former student of Charles Ray. Artists like Tom Friedman and Ray do this very well in their work, and Johnson seemingly drew close to their respective practices in his first show.

For this reason, I wanted to find a well of purpose under Johnson’s work. Immediately, I wanted to make connections to the topics of the time. For example, maybe the sudden strength of Creationism, the Kentucky originated movement to replace evolution with Biblical truth, might explain the Sistine’s Creation of Man image. This would go right along with the hokey and theatrical tendency of advertising’s use of religious imagery that might draw in Michelangelo’s beloved Pieta. I at least wanted to follow Blum and Poe’s press release and see Johnson’s well made and subtle boulder skulls, 4 Eva, 2006 and Ventrifact, 2006, as quotes of Picasso, full of primal destruction and verification of death. “No tenuous fragility here of human bone, no openwork hinging of jaws . . . all solid matter, obdurate substance, a fossil in its absolute prime,” as Leo Steinberg would say. The claims of artists like Picasso or Michelangelo to draw life from paint and stone, to create like gods, might be perceived with a smirk in Johnson’s stones.

Well, that’s what I wanted. What I got was different. Johnson did manage to capture the kind of dopey, silly look of Picasso skulls, but overall, his scattering of objects disappoint. The same complaint could be made of this show as was expressed negatively of his first show -- the work does not advance past irreverent one liners. The work’s wit is easily exhausted by a terse viewing.

A one liner can be fine. In fact, I enjoyed Johnson’s Bread Face in the Hammer’s “Thing” exhibition of new sculpture. Johnson can make little sculptural gems, discrete moments of wit and craftsmanship. But like a band with a couple of hit singles that suddenly comes out with a “concept” album, the overall effect of an artist’s work sometimes doesn’t deliver a overall effect comparable to its smaller moments. Installed as it was in Blum and Poe, the works in apparent dialogue with each other, Johnson’s current show felt like a concept that wasn’t entirely thought through.

One gets mixed up rather easily. Neither Ventrifact’s apparent skull image nor 4 Eva’s subtle fish head are allowed any theatrical lighting or any play of shadows across their surface. They are simply there, grinning at you without much to say. The point maybe was to see them in relation to Magic Eye, 2006, Pieta, 2006, or Buddha Crab, 2006. After all, why not have a fish head crawling to shore next to Buddha Crab – its gold filigree at attention atop a throne of sand, a small moment to conjure religion and explanation for the universe? What would be the harm of having Ventrifact, bathed in excessive light and stripped of all its potential drama, placed adjacent to Pieta, its transparent market sensibility allowed its full theatricality? However, in the context of such a large space, these effects were lost. The crab shiva didn’t speak to the fish head.

All of these juxtaposition and ideas have great potential, but the whole scene fails to generate the magic it seeks.

Magic Eye, 2006, however, did generate an interesting moment – all of the gallery-goers of L.A., with their designer clothing and dark rimmed glasses, waiting, straining and squinting to see God’s life giving touch to man in a giant Magic Eye. A parlor trick, yes. Funny, yes. The strategies of Jeff Koons replayed, jostling with the taste of all around. But now that Koons’ magic has worked on us over the years, exposing our art historical textbook taste, Johnson’s painting comes across like a harlequin in the street trying to borrow a quarter from your ear.


Image courtesy of Blum and Poe