Rashid Johnson’s Own “Poem for Deep Thinkers”

It’s an epic display of small ideas. But what gives the exhibition its coherence is Johnson’s consistent—if tonally varied—engagement with literature. “A Poem for Deep Thinkers” is named after a piece by the poet, playwright, and jazz critic Amiri Baraka, who is a kind of guiding spirit for the show. The prosy, preachy poem contains a miniature sermon on the role of the intellectual in society:

Such intellectuals as we is baby, we need to deal in the real

world, and be be in the real world. We need to use, to use, all

the all the skills all the spills and thrills that we conjure, that we

construct, that we lay down and put together, to create life as

beautiful as we thought it could be, as we dreamed it could be,

as we desired it to be. . . .

Johnson was born in 1977, into a middle-class milieu: his mother was a poet and a college professor, his father an artist and a Vietnam vet. If you put stock in the astrology of generational difference, you might notice an ambivalent strain of Gen X betweenness in his work. Blithe irony and startling sincerity are never far from each other in “A Poem for Deep Thinkers.” Perhaps this is a result of dual parentage. Johnson is steeped in the ethos and techniques of conceptual art (he likes slapstick humor and willfully crude craftsmanship); early in his career, he made objects whose effects lingered in the brain as opposed to the heart. But he also clearly knows, in a more harrowingly intimate way, the bloody, dusty, very non-conceptual history of the Black struggle in America. By the evidence of the show, Johnson’s art practice has been a protracted struggle with the “real world,” whose textures Baraka so ardently endorses.

Photography was a major focus of Johnson’s practice early on: he tended to use it to make pointed little historical jokes. Works such as his “Self-Portrait Laying on Jack Johnson’s Grave,” from 2006, and “Self-Portrait with My Hair Parted Like Frederick Douglass,” of three years prior, are witty, faux indifferent flirtations with a tradition whose moral gravitas fights back—perhaps too fiercely—against the art-historical games of, say, Duchamp, one of Johnson’s constant references.

Johnson is a good photographic subject: he’s got big soulful eyes and a graceful presence. He was a standout athlete as a kid; I’m sure one of his buddies has told him that he’s a dead ringer for the sphinxlike basketball star Kawhi Leonard, who—not unlike Johnson—always looks like he’s got a quiet joke that he doesn’t care to share. In these pictures, Johnson seems to be saying, “Yeah, I know all about it—the awful race riots that Jack Johnson’s boxing bouts sparked; Douglass’s escape from bondage and travel ever outward, hoisting the banner of human rights—but I can take the piss out of it, too.” Not so easy in practice. The pictures are funny, but they don’t carry any symbolic weight commensurate with that of their parodied subjects. You kind of laugh and walk by. It’s easy to tell that the younger Johnson—that interesting face—wanted something more.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, Baraka narrated a passage he made out of the world of white bohemia—the Beats and the New York School poets, and the whole world of slouchy sexiness that surrounded them—and into Black-militant consciousness. That journey is, in some ways, the founding myth of the Black Arts Movement, whose establishment was often credited to Baraka and his cohorts, such as the cultural critic Larry Neal. Johnson’s got an upward story to tell, too, but it’s different from and much gentler than Baraka’s. He came of age in Baraka’s wake: maybe the only way to deal with Black Arts’s loud, strident, sometimes imprecise declamations of racial pride was to bring them down to size by yukking it up.