Rashid Johnson at The Power Plant

Issue 03

May 5

by:

William Brereton

Published in May, 2020 in the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Issue 3 of Cornelia was virtual only.

Photo of a yellow block with three holes carved into it and a plant coming out the top, With windows and shadows on the wall behind.

Rashid Johnson’s Anxious Audience (2019), installed in the Fleck Clerestory of The Power Plant, turns the audience into a complicit witness to the here-and-now, as well as to the there-and-then. One hundred and forty faces frenetically etched into a mixture of black soap and wax on two colossal white tiled panels appear static, frozen in thought. Ranging from the gestural and cathartic to the monumental and profound, they conjure from time immemorial the ghosts of history and a collective sense of unease. In the stark portraits of Anxious Audience, Johnson points toward the countless individuals subjected to the traumas of history while showcasing a sense of personal anxiety that is both singular and shared among us.

Multiple subjectivities pervade the work—each face is slightly differentiated by Johnson’s technique of “drawing through erasure” and emerges as an individual subject to confront the audience before it melts back into the throb of the masses. Bright white squares speak loudly of missing individuals, establishing a push-and-pull between absence and presence. Envisioning a chorus of multiple individuals from disparate vantage points shouting their truths, the work encourages numerous ways for the audience to read and engage alternatively as witness and subject.

Black and white image of a grid formation on a wall. The squares are textured and scribbled.

Johnson carved additional faces into ceramic vessels filled with plants and delicately balanced on crossbeams overhead. Although the audience cannot access these pots at eye level, they nevertheless symbolize a potent life force, raising the potential to inspire care and empathy among us. In contrast with his wax figures–fixed with their traumatic complexions in time and space–Johnson’s living organisms carry on and even thrive under the clerestory’s glass roof.

Anxious Audience encapsulates both personal and collective perspectives in a polarized political and social climate characterized by heightened loneliness and isolation. As we reckon with our “stranger than fiction” world, now made even more uncertain by a global pandemic, the timing of The Power Plant’s presentation could not be more pertinent.