Rashid Johnson, Good Love

0:00:05.4 Beth Harris: We’re standing in the Peoria Riverfront Museum before a work of art by Rashid Johnson called Good Love. And I have to say, the title doesn’t really match what I’m seeing.

0:00:19.7 Bill Conger: Upon first inspection, what I recognize are these geometric shapes, the circles, there’s diamond forms, concentric circles that don’t quite rhyme with other ones. And when you get closer, you start to see that this is the surface that has received some brutality, in some ways, from the artist. It changes the piece entirely.

0:00:40.3 Beth Harris: He’s taken this domestic flooring and put it up on the wall. We can see areas where the wood floor has been scratched. Maybe it was scratched before, maybe it was scratched by the artist. We don’t know. We have geometric shapes which have been burned into the wood in a kind of uneven way. So we feel the pressure of the artist with this hot branding, these heated shapes pressed into the wood. I feel the physical action of the artist onto this wooden floor that has now been raised.

0:01:13.9 Bill Conger: And to me, the smell becomes so apparent that there was this burning, and melting, and scarring, and scratching. This somewhat benign geometric abstract painting becomes so bodily. And the geometric shapes, upon second inspection, begin to look like crosshairs from a rifle. These images open up, and you begin interpreting this cacophony of images and physical interruptions to the surface as being something very visceral.

0:01:48.1 Beth Harris: And I’m looking at the diamond shape in the center. He’s pressed something hot, it seems, into the wood. It’s left this diamond shape, black wax, black soap has been applied, but those edges are so raw. There’s a way in which it looks painful.

0:02:05.8 Bill Conger: He must have had some metal shape of what appears to be a palm tree, which takes us to this exotic mindset. The dark and light of the grain of the wood hides some of these. And then, of course, the salve, which is the soap, and the wax, which is applied over top of this almost in an attempt to heal.

0:02:25.8 Beth Harris: The artist uses black soap, which is used as a healing product from Africa. So we have this association by this African American artist using these materials that signify Africa. And then the palm trees seem disassociated from that. There is an element of pleasure when I see the palm trees that gets lost or feels incongruent with the other kinds of mark making that I see here that feel painful or that feel like the result of violence. For example, that splash of black almost feels like blood that’s been spattered.

0:03:02.3 Bill Conger: The drips of the wax or the soap does become wound like. And I cannot help but start thinking that this is not just a floor, it’s a wall, it is a room, it is the hull of a ship. You start to put all of this together.

0:03:19.7 Beth Harris: And so if we follow these associations, the wood of a ship, we think about the middle passage. The sense of looking through the scope of a rifle reminds me of the kind of violence that’s perpetrated on Black people in our country.

0:03:36.3 Bill Conger: And then there is the title, which further creates such an enigmatic read to the piece, “Good Love.” The crosshairs create L’s and E’s, and the diamonds create V’s. All of a sudden, it’s almost as if there is some message in here that is lingual, that it’s almost a note written to the viewer.

0:03:58.5 Beth Harris: There’s a quote from Johnson. He said, “We’re constantly trying to get to the essence of ourselves. But there is no more essence to get to. [It’s] all of those creolized and miscegenated bits that are making you what you are. There’s no way to make it more pure. So my work is partly about the absurdity of the things that marry us to cultural identity. And yet, emotionally, these things do attach to us.” For me, that quote is about the complex way that we connect ourselves to our own cultural histories and how they make us who we are but how we are all also so much more than that.

0:04:35.9 Bill Conger: It also seems to be very aware of how you are seen from the outside in. And getting back the images where these circles, yes, they do look like targets, but they also could be portals. They could be places where you’re looking out and examining the world from somewhere else.

0:04:57.4 Beth Harris: And we know that he is interested in using these everyday materials, like the shea butter, like the wax, materials associated with healing. The title suggests healing, Good Love. And we know that he’s also very interested in the work of art carrying the mark of the artist. I feel that here.

0:05:19.1 Bill Conger: In the end, we get as complex of a scarred history as African American history is in America. And this complicated reading of time and of action.

0:05:31.1 Beth Harris: When we come to a work of art like this, having an open mind, talking, making associations, looking closely to understand the artist’s process, all of these things can help to uncover and reveal all of the meanings that we see here.