Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim, Review: A Revelatory Museum Survey

Targets recur via Rashid Johnson’s rotunda-filling Guggenheim Museum retrospective, an insightful present that actually hits the mark. The primary might be seen exterior the museum: a big metal sculpture referred to as Black Metal within the Hour of Chaos (2008), its title a reference to a Public Enemy tune of the identical title. Inside, there are work through which crosshairs are singed into oak floorboards, and there’s a movie through which a goal seems on a seashore, crudely drawn into the sand as dancers enact yoga positions throughout it.

There are such a lot of targets that, at a sure level, it may possibly really feel as if one had been seeing the complete present via a sniper’s scope. However who’s the shooter, and who’s being shot at? Johnson leaves these questions unanswered within the work, sculptures, images, and movies marshaled right here, lots of which discover intelligent methods of resisting the inquisitive gaze of their viewers.

That is an artist who, for the previous three many years, has contemplated what it means to look and what it means to be checked out. He did so early on in images of homeless Chicagoans, who’re proven closing their eyes, refusing to let their viewers stare again at them. And he has continued to take action in more moderen mosaic-like work whose glass has been scuffed, marked, and shattered, their tiles now performing as cracked mirrors for his or her viewers.

The purpose of a museum retrospective like this one is often to make clear its topic, permitting a full view of an ideal artist to emerge. But even with the Guggenheim now full of artwork by Johnson, the artist stays an elusive determine. I’d argue that that is truly a great factor. It means the exhibition, titled “Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” has achieved justice to an artist who has aspired towards fluidity, movingly freely between mediums and barely making one-liners within the course of.

Johnson has spoken about himself in phrases that recommend as a lot. In a latest New Yorker profile, he labeled himself “post-medium,” and chatting with the New York Instances in 2020, he rebutted the notion that his artwork is about anyone factor. “Most of my work has challenged the concept blackness is monolithic,” he mentioned.

Satirically, nonetheless, Johnson’s oeuvre has usually been positioned as a monolith. It’s steadily—and unfairly—lowered to his “Anxious Males” works, work he started making in 2015 that function scribbly faces with gnashing tooth and trembling eyes. That collection and associated ones play effectively with collectors, displaying up recurrently in business galleries and at artwork gala’s, and periodically promoting at public sale within the low thousands and thousands—hardly something to sneeze at for an artist who is barely 47.

Naturally, the Guggenheim present, curated by Naomi Beckwith and Andrea Karnes, with Religion Hunter, contains fairly a couple of of those works. But it surely additionally showcases many who look completely in contrast to them. The exhibition reclaims Johnson as one thing greater than a market darling, and thank goodness it does.

Not so surprisingly, the large revelations of this present are Johnson’s movies, which can simply be his least commodifiable works. Threeness (2005), one of many nice early movies on this present, is primarily composed of photographs that includes Johnson staring right into a three-part mirror, shifting his gaze among the many panels between cuts. It’s not at all times apparent whether or not he’s himself or his digicam, and it turns into even much less clear as soon as he dons a pair of sun shades that defend his eyes. Then, at numerous moments, the picture drops away fully, forsaking a black display screen that displays again its viewer, who’s left to proceed watching with a mixture of befuddlement and bemusement as she waits Johnson’s return.

Johnson has been undermining viewers’ gazes ever since his begin in Chicago, the place he was born in 1977. His images of males on the streets of the town’s South Facet neighborhood, made whereas he was nonetheless a scholar at Columbia School, acted as an early mission assertion. Jonathan’s Palms (1998), one of many oldest works within the Guggenheim exhibition, exhibits a person who places his fingers to his brows, successfully masking his face. Johnson’s digicam can’t totally see him, and he can’t see the digicam, both.

Already, Johnson was flirting with confusion, tempting viewers into making simple errors with their eyes. Whether or not due to racism or pure human error, some apparently mistook the middle-class artist for his fashions, main Johnson to be taught that there was a “disconnect how I see myself and folks see me,” as he tells Karnes within the Guggenheim catalogue.

The slipperiness of Johnson’s artwork made him a main contender for a present like “Freestyle,” a now-legendary 2001 exhibition on the Studio Museum in Harlem that featured Johnson’s early images. The present was about “artists who had been adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists,’” whilst they had been additionally “redefining advanced notions of blackness,” as its curator, Thelma Golden, wrote. Johnson emerged from it a star.

The brilliance of works like Jonathan’s Palms might have dimmed because the time of “Freestyle,” however the images Johnson created after that present stay each bit as thrilling as they as soon as did. A type of photos, a 2003 self-portrait through which Johnson poses along with his hair styled à la Frederick Douglass, rhymes properly with a protracted custom of artists enjoying dress-up for his or her cameras. Like Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman, Johnson was displaying that identification might be worn like a fancy dress. His image, printed so giant which you can see each pore, feigns the flexibility to painting the reality. Then, as you look into his darkish brown eyes, you begin to marvel simply how a lot of the true Johnson you’re seeing right here.

Simply as he was gaining discover as a photographer, working within the medium he studied within the Artwork Institute of Chicago’s graduate program, he was additionally shaping a follow in sculpture—one thing he continued to hone as soon as he moved to New York in 2005. Many of those works pile excessive the references to artwork historical past, essential concept, music, and extra, usually in ways in which make his artwork deliberately tough to absorb—nowhere extra so than in Modern Black Male Literature Starter Package (2003– ), that includes a bunch of books stacked on a pallet. All this studying is wrapped so thickly in plastic that it’s not possible to get a glimpse of any of the tomes’ titles.

Thus ensued a interval of productiveness and an explosion of bizarre, cutting-edge artwork: his “Cosmic Slop” work of the late 2000s, made by melting down black cleaning soap after which letting it dry on wooden panels to kind darkish ripples; his items resembling shelving items of the early 2010s, to which Johnson added books, file sleeves, mirrors, and rough-hewn blocks of shea butter. You possibly can see your self in practically all of those works, and you’ll see your self, too, of their successors.

Falling Man (2015), a play on Georg Baselitz’s work of inverted folks, options an upside-down determine surrounded by glass tiles, a few of which have been bashed in. Throughout, there are splashes of black cleaning soap, creating crimson splatters harking back to against the law scene. Footage of police killings of Black males—together with that of Walter Scott that very yr—had been broadly seen within the media on the time. Johnson’s portray saliently captures the sense of Black dying gone hyper-visible whereas additionally heading off simple readings on the cross: the titular falling man is white, and there’s additionally an previous image of Johnson’s father that seems completely disconnected from the whole lot else right here.

The identical yr, Johnson stopped consuming and bought sober, an expertise that he has mentioned “amplified my anxiousness.” The “Anxious Males” work resulted, and so did many different artworks that evince a way of paranoia. Their monumental dimension is typically what makes them efficient. Untitled Anxious Viewers (2019) measures 15 toes broad, permitting its rows of scrawled peepers to overwhelm and unnerve. Its grand scale and its black-and-white coloration recall Jackson Pollock’s huge splatter work.

However greater is just not at all times higher for Johnson, who has produced so many giant works prior to now decade that his artwork has dulled over time. Sanguine (2025), an set up that occupies a lot of the Guggenheim’s uppermost ramp, strikes Johnson’s artwork into the realm of spectacle, with a grid-like construction stuffed with books, crops, and movies, together with philodendrons and extra which might be suspended from the museum’s roof. Primarily, all of it simply appears to be like costly.

His extra profitable latest works are achieved in a extra somber register. Black and Blue (2021), his expressionistic movie about his household’s lockdown-era solitude, is likely one of the only a few nice works about Covid, and Quiet Portray (2025), with a skinny, tangled black line in opposition to a white background, exists on the limits of imaginative and prescient. Each works are serene and reserved.

It’s notable that Johnson has continued to color his “Anxious Males” successors in tandem with these calmer works, which seem associated to his bigger curiosity in wellness rituals—what we would name self-care in our current, overly therapized vernacular. Older works on the Guggenheim discover Johnson rubbing shea butter on his physique and spray-painting messages to himself (“RUN,” “FLY AWAY,” and so forth). These rituals appear designed to assist Johnson stay stoic within the face of a lot essential consideration.

Possibly that’s why I saved returning to a lesser-known self-portrait on this present, The Reader (2008), through which Johnson reclines on a deck chair whereas consuming a whiskey on the rocks. Sporting a gown tied on the waist, he holds a hardcover guide as much as his face, obscuring it from his digicam’s lens. He stays blurry—actually, due to how the image is shot, but additionally metaphorically, as a result of Johnson by no means fairly comes into focus. That this exhibition permits him to stay that approach is a feat.