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

Zhang Dali

Zhang Dali: "A Second History"
Curated by Wu Hung
Walsh Gallery
June 9 - July 14, 2006

Currently, propaganda and the editing of public information is an important and pervasive topic. It is in the galleries, notably the recent Cheim& Read Jenny Holzer show in New York. Television constantly bombards us with the exposure of lies and half-truths through parody, opinion, or insight on the Colbert Report, Meet the Press, or CNN. Sometimes the manipulation of information does not have to do with governments at all, think of the Dove “Real Woman” campaign to show the difference between the “real woman” and the airbrushed, commercially adjusted woman. In times such as these, it’s important to regain the history of how information was twisted and remade. The “Goebbels Experiment” of last year, a documentary by Michael Kroft, sought to do this by reopening the case of Nazi, Germany, and now Beijing based Zang Dali seeks to do this through letting us see, for the first time, some of the moves of Mao’s Chinese propaganda.

Consider one set of images from Zhang Dali’s exhibition at Walsh Gallery in Chicago last summer – a group of Chinese soldiers march across the upper right hand diagonal of a photograph, guns shouldered, confident straight ahead glares. Purposeful and austere, they are the embodiment of security, the acme of government patronage. A group of children observe this march, and most pay attention to their troops, looking literally up to them from the lower left of the frame. But this picture was not good enough. It was not to be presented to the public of China and changes were made. One alteration was the addition of painted color, but the more fascinating touch up are of those distracted boys, those that weren’t quite paying attention, being brushed out or redrawn. The final printed photograph shows every boy, every student of the Chinese army, at full attention.

Altered histories are all around us, embedded in our lives to such an extent that it becomes difficult to imagine, for we indeed have to “imagine,” what reality is, what the truth or the real “news” of human action actually looks like. This is most apparent in the world of words, where the writer takes life in and presents it the best they can but always through the filter of their own humanity. But as so many theorists have been quick to point out over and over again, it is the domain of the modified image that contains the most power to alter history and compel a certain beliefs about its factual evidence.

There are so many reasons for altering a photograph, and the reasons themselves, if they are known, are revelations in how we see the world, how we expect an image to be presented. Zhang Dali expects to reveal this to us through his juxtapositions. Placing archived original photographs next to their altered counterparts found in popular media, he shows us the shadowy world of decision making that constructs the world of images, a world so powerful to compel. It is remarkable to note that Dali matches the original photographs to their counterparts by memory and intuition. He remembers where the altered images appeared in public. His extraordinary memory is a testament to the power of the image to ingrain itself in a human psyche.

Some alterations show the influence of painting over the composition of photograph, some cropping and brushing serves simply to create pleasing compositions, but most of the revisions seem to come from extra-aesthetic reasons either political or personal. In one publicity photo, Mao walks next to a gentleman and waves to the public. Mao is taller than the man and dominates the scene with his inherent charisma and personality. This man, however, is eliminated from the photograph anyway. Who was that man? Why was he removed? Can we safely assume that he fell out of favor with the Chairman or is this just our bias in viewing the working of a so called “communist” mentality? Another photograph shows a group of aviators posing in front of combat jet. The altered photograph shows that three of the men have simply vanished. This is the shadowy world of images, the working of those behind closed doors that can never be known.

But though occupying such a strange and mysterious existence, the image retains the power of truth even when we have proof to the contrary. An image can dupe and seduce a person into belief very easily. For example, we know that Victoria Secret model photographs are trimmed, brushed, edged, twisted, or bent to present the best view of what the “model” should look like. However, the image seems to compel us past the point of knowledge and into an instinctual world of desire. In this world of desire, no amount of persuasion is enough to make us able to give up the perfect body, the perfect car. We envy it. We want it. It is irrational because it is not there to begin with, it does not exist in physical reality. The image, that supposed truth right in front of us, has been altered before we even see it. Gisele is only Gisele once Gisele has been brushed.

With political and social photographs, as are most of the images of Zhang Dali’s exhibition, the results of alterations can been even more powerful, powerful to the point of allowing a government the support of its people because belief in images outweigh any suspicions that bring doubt. Not only do people want and desire the presented image, the nature of the image itself props this belief up. As Susan Sontag deftly pointed out in her last book Regarding the Pain of Others, the pervasive social truth of the civil war, how the battles actually “looked,” come from Andrew Gardener’s famous photographs of mangled bodies piled high and gruesome scenes of concentrated horror. However, Gardener arranged these scenes according to the conventions of not only photography, but the rules of painting composition. We get a scene, but a scene that looks exactly the way it is supposed to. The power of these false, constructed images will always trump our knowledge of their creation.

This is what Zhang Dali, even with his impartial and straightforward display style, is trying to remind us – that there are two histories, a history of the image and its politics and another history, a true history that becomes difficult to know, only able to be hinted at through reconstructed accounts and speculation. It is almost as though the history of the lie is easier to know that the history of the truth when it comes to images.