Larry Johnson
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA
‘Larry Johnson’ is a sizeable survey covering some two decades of this Los Angeles artist’s career (1985-2007, with a hiatus from 2001 to 2006). Avoiding the perennial difficulty of pitting chronology against theme, curator Russell Ferguson (chair of the UCLA Department of Art) instead takes a wander through, in and around Johnson’s oeuvre. This approach fits the nature of Johnson’s body of work, a mythical compendium that – in an almost Barthesian fashion – takes on the intersecting worlds of queer and mainstream celebrity culture in America, with L.A. as its heartland.
Johnson’s works are characterized less by a hysterical ‘criticality’ than by the room they leave for the wry acknowledgment of the extent and type of the our own complicity. Sidestepping a Warholian appropriation of media iconography, not a famous face in sight, Johnson’s coloured, photographed texts and single, nearly empty animation cells only reveal more acutely the role of both language and the imaginary in creating the flash and sparkle of such worlds.
Some of Johnson’s photographs are so bound up in their own web of histories that they only come into sharp focus as a result of the wall text or exhibition catalogue: this includes his break-out work Untitled (Movie Stars on Clouds) (1982/84), in which deceased celebrities (Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo) are memorialized as printed names on a row of blue, cloud-dotted grounds: all of them played gay roles, were suspected of being gay, or were gay icons – all of them also died early. With a number of longer, multi-coloured texts on coloured grounds, Johnson draws the viewer into a slowed, halting reading of appropriated narratives written in what he has called the ‘shorthand’ of celebrity.
In Untitled (Greek Tycoon) (1986), an abbreviated excerpt drawn from a morbid 1980 record of celebrity deaths called How Did They Die?, hinting at the unhappiness of Jackie Kennedy’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis, is reworked as turquoise text on a deep blue ground which echoes the format of Josef Albers’ studies in colour and optics. In Untitled (Black Box) (1987) a fragment of the black box transcript of the 1982 crash of Air Florida Flight 90 shows up in bright, confetti-coloured letters whose mixed hues forestall quick comprehension despite their superimposition on black.
One’s own compulsion to read through these sensationalist bytes in spite of their difficult, even painful, visuality (pink on orange hurts, as Albers could have told you) provides an early clue as to what Johnson is about. But it isn’t until 1990, when Johnson begins to compose his own texts instead of drawing from other sources, that our own desire for the text’s glossy materials and brighter subjects becomes the subtext, implied in the language itself as much as the supposed ‘subjects’ addressed. Here Johnson goes beyond pastiche to create a new register of language designed to catch us in our own desires, not as the commodified concept of a ‘guilty pleasure’ but as an inquiry: why so interested?
Ferguson’s agile avoidance of the curatorial pitfalls of hindsight draws out one of the most compelling aspects of Johnson’s work: his seemingly paradoxical use of countless time- and place-bound cultural references to make supremely present work. What gains increasing presence throughout this retrospective is our own desire to consume the array of stories Johnson selects for us – glitzy, morbid and tragically hilarious as they are. The texts written by Johnson himself are imbued with pictorial heft and take their place within empty winter landscapes. In the clean winter air, the narratives acquire a new lucidity: the way the words relish themselves; the way we do as well.
Sarah-Neel Smith
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