Riding the Wave : ‘Waves’ by Rashid Johnson, 6 October – 23 December 2020, Hauser and Wirth, London.

Lisa Goodrum

From March 2020 we have been bombarded by copious amounts of reassurance regarding our productivity during the coronavirus pandemic. We have been absolved of the pressure to produce and encouraged to do only what we can, and as such, artistic responses to this global virus have varied dramatically. Judging by ‘Waves’ at Hauser and Wirth’s London space, the multidisciplinary artist Rashid Johnson was driven to create. This exhibition, which opened in early October, contains a series of sculptural paintings in the form of mosaics and the Anxious Red Paintings which update the Anxious Men series that Johnson began in 2015, and constitutes the artist’s own response to the worldwide lockdown.

Anxious Red Paintings August 6th, 13th, 20th and September 3rd began their creative lives as drawings, and emerged as oil paintings on linen in their final form. In Anxious Painting, September 3rd Johnson’s rough brush strokes, in the thick red pigment that he created especially, form a grid-like pattern within which arachnid-esque shapes seem to lurk menacingly. Upon closer examination, the mystery creatures look as if they have eyes that peer nervously out to survey the environment in which they have been placed. These eyes anxiously watch their surroundings, mirroring the state in which people confined to their homes across the world sat and watched the television news and scrolled Twitter while they awaited the next act in what was fast becoming a grim, and at times farcical, play. Tentacles appear to emerge from these shapes and slyly break free from the compartments in which they are supposed to be contained so that they resemble the tentacles of anxiety that have brushed against every aspect of human life this year. Previously we had been able to suppress our consternation by the predictable patterns and structures that underpinned our existence and the distraction that maladaptive coping mechanisms like food, sex and shopping could provide. Now however we are aware of our anxieties and recognise how little control we really have and the treacherous barbs of that realisation have lodged themselves in our very psyches.

The perilous state into which this virus plunged us, and in which, to a certain extent we remain, is represented by the Anxious Paintings’ unique pigment. We automatically associate the colour red with danger and catastrophe, co-opted as it has been to signify warning and emergency. Johnson’s paint has the garish coagulative quality associated with blood and in its very viscosity lies its menace. The haemic colour’s emblazonement across the white gallery wall is an intimidating and rudimentary reminder of the lives this pandemic has claimed and how it has so nonchalantly destroyed our already fragile socio-economic systems. At a scale of approximately 38 x 50 inches, the paintings commandeer the gallery walls and mimic the enormity of this crisis while acting as warning signs to the wider world. Although they are individual artistic expressions, they concurrently alert the viewer to the fact that society is existing within a disaster of epic proportions that we are woefully ill equipped to handle. Johnson’s brushwork consigns vivid and lurid lines onto the canvas where they are splayed in a semi-cognitive chaos that engenders an awareness of the painting’s interior movement in its audience. This kineticism seems to confirm then, that we are watching a wider cultural situation in flux, while in addition we are observing the artist’s mind working to process the upheaval that this event has induced.

Rashid Johnson’s Broken Men series is a number of ceramic tile mosaics that fuse symbols of the African diaspora experience like shea butter and African black soap with abstract expressionism. In doing so, the images convey the fractured sense of identity that arises from combining Western art traditions and diasporic totems. Indeed, the series as a whole plays with questions of form, identity and heritage. The works in the Broken Men series bear a striking resemblance to murals – paintings or other works of art executed directly onto a wall – whose importance stems from their use of art to bring socio-political issues to public attention. In their traditional form murals are placed directly onto a surface and subsume the surrounding area’s architectural qualities, yet Johnson’s work fails to seamlessly encompass the gallery environment, and instead maintains its distance from it. The works themselves are on concrete before being attached to the gallery wall, and the shards of mirrored tiles contained within the mosaic create the sense of being in a bathroom and peering into a looking glass while determining the persona that one decides to present to the outside world. In Standing Broken Men, 2020, the ceramics are reminiscent of the less familiar mosaic tile murals that use small, variously coloured or differently shaped tiles to create a distinct image or pattern. The ceramics here – which Johnson glazed himself – contain particles that are cardinal red, sunflower yellow and duck-egg blue and which sit alongside splashes of paint in similar hues to provide a panoply of shades that illuminate the black tiles that compose the ‘wild, agitated’ faces in his work.

The fragmentation of the figures in the series Broken Men and Broken Crowd and Johnson’s use of that descriptor reflect his observations on, and concerns about, the state of modern masculinity. In her 2019 Guardian interview with the artist, Nadja Sayez wrote that the ‘broken men’ seemed like a metaphor for the post #Metoo world, a landscape in which the reprehensible behaviour of men like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Matt Lauer has been exposed and condemned, thereby rocking the foundations upon which toxic masculinity had so comfortably stood. It is impossible then to look at pieces like Standing Broken Men, Two Standing Broken Men and The Broken Five (the latter with its inescapable echoes of the Central Park Five as portrayed recently in Ava DuVernay’s miniseries When They See Us) without thinking that they represent the deconstruction, or even dismantling of masculinity, and the characteristics that we have traditionally associated with it. Regarding The Broken Five and its potential relationship to the aforementioned case, it is also possible that the work conveys how that miscarriage of justice represented an emasculation for those men who lost their dignity, reputation and ultimately, their liberty.

The current global situation has not only unleashed a vicious assault on our collective physical health, but experts have also warned of the insidious effects on our mental well-being. Within a gallery space existing under the restrictions enforced by this virus and bearing in mind Johnson’s own history of exploring anxiety, I suspect that the works may also signify the fragility of male mental health. For this artist, ‘broken’ is an ambiguous term. His sculptural paintings are comprised of shattered ceramics, smashed mirror tiles and detritus such as oyster shells that represent both broken masculinity and broken mental health, two states that commentators have argued have reached crisis proportions and that others would claim have formed an ouroboros of sorts. Combined with the American Psychological Association’s finding that 9 per cent of men in the United States experience daily feelings of depression and anxiety, and that the suicide rate of American men is approximately 4 times higher than that of women, it is difficult not to read Johnson’s continuation of the Broken Men series here as a commentary on the precarious psychological state of modern men. Like the Anxious Red Paintings, these pieces indicate that worry and trepidation – this time men’s – is seeping out of the box-like structures in which we have stored our notions of masculinity for so long.

In Johnson’s continuing exploration of anxiety and escapism ‘Waves’ forms part of a line from his previous shows to this experiment in situating personal experience within a wider cultural narrative. In his continued use of art history, literature, philosophy, materiality and critical history as tools to navigate the terrain between the singular and the collective, Johnson interrogates his experience of the pandemic and the viewer cannot help but feel that this would have been coloured by the plethora of socio-political events and issues that swirled around him. From the US presidential campaign and election; the debate about, and protests against, systemic racism that swept across the United States and the globe; alongside the disproportionate effect that the virus has had on Black and minority ethnic people, Rashid Johnson’s show encapsulates one man’s attempt to understand unprecedented events and the complex emotions they spawned without having a standard visual language to do so. He was compelled then to use his own unique combination of an art movement and diasporic signifiers, and even his own pigment in the Anxious Red Paintings to differentiate his sentiments on 2020 from the prodigious critiques that it has already aroused. This show is a personal perspective on a year that has only intensified the main themes with which this artist engages. It highlights the anxiety with which the whole world has been confronted and from which it seems that only art has been able to provide any form of escape or clarification.