Larry Johnson

Larry Johnson

Hammer Museum

Through September 6

Much is made of Larry Johnson as cynic, and I have lambasted cynicism over and over on this blog from Anne Collier to Walead Beshty. I have documented my contempt for that type of thinking. My basic issue is that cynicism, although often clever in its analysis and presentation of often disheartening effects of culture, is often just a self-defeating enterprise that doesn’t allow much room for error, much belief in humanity as something to live for or up to, and does not allow much “feeling our way into the world.” Cynicism instead finds its kicks in simply being clever and takes being clever as virtue when it should be more ambitious, when it should believe in something. It’s pronouncements are total but never affirming or life giving. Cynics are fantastic at taking things apart but are not able to put things together with much conviction. I often butt my head against this way of thinking, and its philosophical roots have always been troubling to me.

Johnson is labeled a cynic by many, and it would be easy to agree. Cynicism runs through his work. One needs only to look at works like Untitled (The Study), 1998 and Untitled (Nathan Lane), 1998. In these works, modernist sculpture as a cultural form is not distinguished from commercial signage -- all have raw visual equivalency and therefore the value of the forms is flattened. Nothing has anymore meaning than anything else. That said, the introduction of Johnson’s signature at the bottom of the Nathan Lane piece receives this same fate – there is nothing sacred about creation, about the artist, all of these things are bound up by the engine of culture, the same culture that created vapid celebrities and Hallmark Cards, empty vessels for unfulfilled desires. Untitled (Landscape), 1998 brings this thinking to its most chilling conclusion in showing David Smiths, Donald Judds, and again commercial signs littered in a bleak grey landscape. All forms are removed from the systems of meaning that contained them -- they are all defeated by meaninglessness.

I initially wanted to write Johnson off for such a bleak outlook, but in his retrospective at the Hammer Museum, I found all sorts of human things coming forth in formally dynamic and fascinating ways. I was surprised by Johnson. I was surprised by how uneasy his work is with its own means, how each piece almost willfully struggles against itself. In the end, Johnson’s use of irony, satire, photographic processes, commercial signage (all of the processes typically seen as complicit in separating us from our lives, placing us at a distance from ourselves, and forcing us into a constant state of inert critical detachment) slowly unravels, fills full of clumsy holes, and comes out the other side, downright heartening and human (not in a greeting card sort of way, but in a hard earned sort of way).

I fixated on one extraordinarily powerful work, flatly but tellingly called Untitled (Winter Me), 1990. The work is classic Johnson, offering a text settled but plangent in serene scene of stark graphic winter trees, snow, and mountains. The text is loud and overbearing, screaming the confession of a celebrity on the phone with his agents – everybody wants him, everybody flatters him, they beg to create anything and everything around him. The celebrity conveys his story in punchy, obnoxious call and response narration, punctuated over and over by the word “Me” – “Life with Me, This is Me, Me She Wrote, Me fashion creation” and ending with “Hour after hour, offer after offer it goes I have no time to stop and smell the rose named for Me.”

The assertion of the Me over and over in the cult of celebrity paradoxically destroys the self or individual. “What do we know of celebrities really,” Johnson seems to be saying here, “The more I see them, the less I know of them.” His use of language in the piece demonstrates the emptying of the Me masterfully. Johnson’s irony and satire changes the calm surface of the winter landscape (typically an engine for self-affirmation or greeting card solace) into a vehicle for celebrity critique, but the remarkable thing is that the work throbs with human sympathy and heat. Johnson has managed to both critique the celebrity and at the same time construct an elegy to the celebrity’s lost self. I can’t help but almost believe that Johnson may be mourning that we are unable to believe in, stop for, or smell “the rose named for Me.” The Winter Me is us, all of us in our worlds of empty images and hollow virtues – we are all in the winter of self.

Johnson’s retrospective is full of such devastating moments and at times, Johnson is outright cunning in his ability to offer works that hide under a blanket of detachment then lure you in and demand that you be human. Though satire, irony, and collage are Johnson’s tools, he is ultimately uneasy with the fact that things can never be straightforward anymore. He uses the world of irony to critique irony itself. Johnson knows deeply that irony or displacement of any kind comes with a loss, that the lack of whole or the lack of center for the self shifts its nature into a thin collaged entity that is great danger of being lost entirely. As in Untitled (Jesus + I), 1990 the self can be reduced to simply the things by which the self surrounds itself, commodities pitched for old fashioned purposes now past purpose – Honey and Almond Scrub and Super Aloe Lemon cleanser to wash something that is becoming increasingly hard to know or even see.

Ultimately, the ability of Johnson to mourn and offer effective elegies may not necessarily be a victory over cynicism but definitely suggests a depth in the work that the simple label of “cynical” might miss. For instance, a true cynic probably wouldn’t care whether gay icon and tragic figure Sal Mineo came first, last, or at all in a roll call of celebrities from the cast of The Misfits or Rebel without a Cause in Untitled (Movie Stars on Clouds), 1982/84. However, Johnson insists that Mineo be present in every display and always come last. Johnson puts forth his affections for Mineo and is not ashamed to do so. Johnson’s work is full of such simple human gestures, and I would have to say that his work is less in the line with artists that simply critique design or celebrity culture and more in line with those that secretly love design and celebrity culture but wish it didn’t come with such horrible losses -- more early human Warhol, for instance, than late cynical empty Warhol.

Johnson can even exist without irony at all and can employ straightforward representation to heartbreaking effect. Christopher Knight, in his review of Johnson, is right in focusing on Johnson’s most recent work Untitled (Achievement: SW Corner, Glendale + Silverlake Blvds), 2009 as particularly telling. Johnson’s first completed work in a number of years, he renders an L.A. apartment ding-bat window and an askew Emmy award with a few slashes then photographed and framed the work. Knight’s attention to the poetry of the picture is wonderful:

“Wings held high, her body straining forward with an atom held aloft, Emmy recalls Tinker Bell, the jealous pixie who glowed brightest for Peter Pan. Johnson's trophy is precariously balanced, as if poised between a neighborhood display of self-satisfied pride and an imminent swan dive off a suicide ledge.”

However, I am more interested in the fact that this is a straightforward representation of something that Johnson saw, that the picture believes in representation enough to give the viewer credit. Johnson knows we know about celebrity and what it does -- we no longer need to be shocked out of our complacence or jarred into condemning it. No design tricks, no irony, no satire – just connected, good old fashioned human hopes and dreams, realities and fictions, placed where we can see it.