Leon Golub was no tastemaker—unlike Rashid Johnson, who sort of is. Both came to New York out of Chicago, but disparate generations aside—Golub died at 82 in 2004 and Johnson is 46—it would be hard to find two artists whose sensibilities are farther apart.
Johnson, a multidisciplinary artist who made an impact right out of the gate, runs the elements of Black middle-class domesticity through the windmills of your mind. Golub, an intensely Expressionist painter who mostly flew under the radar, pushed the pain and, most disturbingly, the glory of unrestrained violence in your face.
Yet, this month, while intractable conflicts rage around the world, the two will occupy the same gallery in Et In Arcadia Ego, a timely, two-part season opener that Johnson put together for Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea with its in-house curator Kate Fowle. The Latin title is scratched into Golub’s 1997 canvas Time’s Up: “I too am in Paradise”. The speaker is Death.
Disruptive influence
The politically active Golub meant to be disruptive—a quality shared by the eight artists whom Johnson has included with himself in a thematic group show that accompanies a solo presentation of Golub’s visceral paintings. “It may be a dangerous game to create parallels between our works,” Johnson warns.“This is much more about the amplification of Golub.”
Nevertheless, parallels exist. Golub has been a touchstone for the conceptually minded Johnson since his graduate student days at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “They hung huge murals of Golub’s in the Art Institute, and when you grow up in a town with one encyclopaedic institution, you accept its presentation as canonical,” Johnson recalls. “It wasn’t ’til I moved to New York that I became aware that he was not so well known.”
Golub’s enormous paintings—he called some of them “Gigantimachies”—remained too abrasive and out of synch with prevailing tastes ever to attract even the audience of, say, Philip Guston, whose depictions of racism, fascism and outright evil excavated similar territory but were, at least superficially, more palatable.
The group show unpacks the idea of how one explores violence
A Guston is in the gallery’s group show, which includes several works by other artists that employ masks. (Johnson contributed one of them, and commissioned another from Tiona Nekkia McClodden, one of several younger artists he has championed.) “Masks appear in Golub’s practice,” Johnson points out. “The group show doesn’t intend to mirror it but unpacks his critical as well as aesthetic concerns—like the idea of how one explores violence.”
Radical pivot
Teresa Margolles does that. Her sculpture—a bloodied sofa—embodies the aftermath of murderous rampages by Mexican drug cartels. But the curator in Johnson was intent on illuminating an additional theme of transition, not just from life to death but in the “radical pivot” that Golub, and Guston, made in their work—as did the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, when he became Amiri Baraka. (The show includes texts by Baraka, Samuel Beckett and Percival Everett that address sentient pauses between thought and action.)
“Some works are just about transition,” Johnson told me. In Phat Free, the mid-1990s video by David Hammons, the artist kicks a bucket down a dark, empty city street; what sounds at first like gunfire slowly turns into rhythmic drumming. “I was thinking of these in-between spaces,” Johnson added. “This kind of waiting and pause you see in Golub’s work. Its brutality draws a certain audience, but there can and should be opportunities to bring people into that space and be challenged by tough themes. I think these works can begin that process.”
• Leon Golub: Et In Arcadia Ego. Conceived by Rashid Johnson, 5 September-19 October, Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, New York
