Barry Macgregor Johnston
Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin, Germany
In literature and film, it’s curious how often street carnivals, ostensibly celebratory, reveal a violent undercurrent. Cormac McCarthy’s 1974 novel Child of God opens with a carnivalesque procession that leads the reader to the farmstead of the book’s murderous protagonist. Treme, David Simon’s new television series on HBO, elaborately reconstructs a post-Katrina New Orleans Mardi Gras parade, its Goya-esque grotesqueries brimming with concealed threat. The silence of Barry Macgregor Johnston’s installation Street Light (2011) seems to have been wrested from a clamour that might have been either festive or destructive, one can’t tell. The ambiguity challenges a submissiveness to narrative interpretation. Johnston’s background is in performance art, and he has created an environment haunted by performative process, but of a pitch that remains undefined.
In Street Light, a collection of old broomsticks hang from the gallery ceiling on lengths of coloured string, each unique and individually modified by the artist using dollar bills, beer bottle necks and the handles of baseball bats. One is tacked with metal staples that jut from its black skin like punk jewellery. In the midst of these sticks hangs a piñata – a mass of what might be papier-mâché, roughly the shape of a bear’s head, covered with red and yellow confetti. This is a traditional element in Mexican street carnivals, containing sweets that are released into the crowd when the piñata is beaten with a stick. The cluster of broomsticks is a potential assortment of weapons as well as a collection of vamped-up, turbo-charged witch transporters. On the edge of this arrangement are two columns painted white; one has a grinning mask incised in the wood at around head height, the other an oval aperture (Smoke Mask, 2011). Metal grates extend from their bases, like feet with their toes curling upwards. The columns are surrogate figures, ghosts of absent revelers, with faces mocked up by negative shapes cut into the dark hollows at the core of the cylinders. Their pale verticality, in the midst of the hanging sticks, suggests vulnerability. They might be sculptural realizations of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Pillar of white in a blackout of knives’ – a line from her late poem The Bee Meeting.
Against the back wall, a two-metre-wide disk, mounted on a massive wooden contraption, can be spun from handles attached to the rear (The Wind, 2011). Its front side is densely packed with fragments of azure-green car window glass that sparkles as it rotates. The sculpture looks like a gambling device from the set of a primitive TV game show. Like the broomsticks and the piñata, function is a fugitive quality that barely attaches to it; only enough to tinge its presence with an air of forsakenness. For all their associations with witchery and weaponry, the gallery context makes the multicoloured broomsticks into a decorative mobile. These objects have relinquished their purpose, but not sufficiently to be freed from their aura, like stage props with only a tenuous illustrative relation to what they signify. It is a defeated realism, intimating a violence (the broken glass, the makeshift sluggers) that pollutes the abstraction it might aspire to. As it does in the work of Tom Burr and Félix González-Torres, Minimalism haunts Johnston’s work as a memory of an autonomous formal language that turns out to harbour sexual eccentricities, pop-cultural debris and other impurities. The spinning disk is a pure form – a circle; the broomsticks, all approximately the same width and length, hint at Minimalism’s modulated seriality.
Four rectangular bed sheets in various extravagant materials – primary-coloured stripes, violet satin, a silver/grey melée – are stretched over the walls, each with an oval of contrasting material sewn into the top centre, another sign for a vacated head (Psychic Curfew, 2011). These hangings may suggest Modernist abstraction, but they also resemble the tableaux against which tourists have their photographs taken, head poking through a painted frame of a figure trapped in the stakes, or riding a rodeo bull. The fabrics are formalistic values as well as theatrical costumes viewers can imagine donning – pulling the sheets over their heads – in order to be spirited into the carnival. But the superimposed ovals are impenetrable voids. One is of a fabric depicting branches threading over a night sky; another oval is decorated with a filigree pattern as though fencing off the black material. These bed sheet works are obviously indebted to Mike Kelley’s cut-felt ‘Banners’ from the late 1980s and early ‘90s – an extensive series of fabric collages, of similar dimensions to Johnston’s – originally installed with their sides abutted. The striped piece is so similar to a striped Kelley work that it functions as a quote, whether intentional or not. Here, Johnston is perhaps unwittingly submissive. But whereas Kelley’s banners were a splintering (and broadening) of the artist’s persona into a spectrum of possible voices – ranting, cajoling, seducing, rejecting the viewer – the subjectivity of the artist/protagonist of Johnston’s installation is as absent as the carnival it appears to commemorate.
Mark Prince
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