“The healing process starts with the negotiation of blunt force trauma… It’s the story of recovery.”
Grinning or grimacing, perhaps screaming through clenched teeth, the couple in Rashid Johnson’s Two Standing Broken Men lament a fraught national history whilst radically suggesting a path toward remediation. A paragon of the Chicago-born and New York-based artist’s critically acclaimed mosaics, Two Standing Broken Men addresses the simultaneous personal and political trauma which charge Johnson’s practice, which appropriately mines his lived experience, collects ive memory, the art historical canon, and critical history. Executed in 2018, Two Standing Broken Men sees the artist approach his long-developed themes of the intersections of race and class with new vigor. Test.mes nt to the present work’s significance within the artist’s accomplished career, other Broken works are held in the collects ions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Studio Museum, Harlem, in addition to the two monumental panels he produced for his Metropolitan Opera commissions. In April the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York opened to great acclaim a mid-career survey of Johnson’s work, Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, which will subsequently travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Here, the vast, splintered surface further intensifies the anguish and anxiety which characterize his oeuvre, but his sprawling Two Standing Broken Men bespeaks an enlightened approach to trauma which centers collects ivity and community, acknowledging each cleavage in the mosaic as both a scar and a stitch.
Johnson’s output of the last few years invokes a range of recent history, from his personal sobriety journey in 2014, the effects of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, to the devastating persistence of police brutality. As if witnesses to this world of unrelenting tumult, Johnson’s crowd stares out, paralyzed and ruptured by the upheavals of the last decade, and their eyes bulge as though recognizing us, too, as collateral victims of such cruelty. Arranged with a kind of shamanistic, stylized frontality, Johnson’s heads are shattered and afflicted by the very world they confront. The frenetic, fractured surface evokes the irrepressible tactility of a Jean Dubuffet or Jean-Michel Basquiat, while the texturally variegated surface addresses the multidisciplinary practice Johnson has cultivated, one which spans painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and installation. Each medium, from black soap to shards of mirror, represent symbolically loaded choices, the former strongly tied to diasporic culture and expectations around Black beauty, and the latter perhaps alluding to the broken reflections we find in the wake of unrest. Johnson’s embrace of unconventional media aligns him with one of his greatest artistic inspirations, David Hammons, who reflected upon the Black experience using chicken grease and basketball backboards as his media, and set the precedent that addressing one’s identity means not.mes rely depicting it but weaving the truth of being into the fibers and process of the work itself.
“I say that I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post.mes dium condition, where an artist essentially employs several mediums in order to bring to life whatever specific ideas that they have. For me it's always been that way."
Johnson’s use of tile references a Russian-Turkish bathhouse he frequented during his program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “The tile became one of the signifying materials of that place,” Johnson reflected, “It became kind of a spiritual signifier and theme, representing a place where I got a lot of relief.” (Rashid Johnson quoted in: Claire Barliant, ‘Escape artist – an interview with Rashid Johnson’, Apollo, 8 November 2020, online) Cracked and scrawled upon as they may be, the now effaced tile faces of Johnson’s crowd represent fortitude and congregation, replicating those memories of peace; despite the acuities of their incisions and diversity of their composition, Two Standing Broken Men, notably, takes form not as rubble but as a medium anchored by art historical importance, its strength derived from the amalgamation of its constituent parts. Thus the crowd proposes togetherness as a cure to cruelty, human fallibility, subjugation and disenfranchisement, a great and expansive assertion that the composite whole might be more unimaginably beautiful than the fictive, undamaged alternative. Johnson’s mosaic courageously reconciles mental health and generational struggle, pieces of personal history and the collects ive fault lines of colonial projects and displacement – through art, Johnson’s resilient monoliths assure us that we can construct a new future in the present.
Rashid Johnson’s Broken Works in Select Public collects ions
Recently the curator of Seven Rooms and a Garden at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Johnson’s strength and vulnerability in his worldly – and, at t.mes s, autobiographical – body of work have earned him a place as one of Contemporary Art’s leading voices. Johnson not only has defined the scope of aesthetic and conceptual nuances in artmaking today but in his roles as a scholar and mentor for Black creatives. A paragon of his mature corpus, Two Standing Broken Men testifies to his sophisticated negotiations of pain and healing, happiness and grief, bringing to life the “tradition and opportunities of Blackness” that have long galvanized not only Johnson but a generation (Rashid Johnson quoted in: Hillarie M. Sheets, “In Rashid Johnson’s Mosaics, Broken Lives Pieced Together,” The New York t.mes s, 26 September 2021 (online))
