Rashid Johnson, Stacked Heads

0:00:05.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re at the Storm King Art Center, and we’ve walked round a bend. In the distance, coming into view, we see a large bronze sculpture that looks at first glance like two rough cubes, one stacked upon the other. But when you come closer, you realize that the surface is quite complex, and there are plants that are growing out of it. This is called Stacked Heads, by the artist Rashid Johnson.

0:00:28.0 Dr. Beth Harris: I’m so struck by the porousness, the various sized apertures that we see, that don’t feel intentional, but feel like scars and places where the sculpture has been even attacked. But we think about bronze sculptures and monuments as having a kind of impenetrability, of standing outside of nature somehow. And this one is almost a home for the natural, the plants that grow on top of it and around it, and seek the light through its openings.

0:01:00.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: It does feel as if we’re looking at some kind of casing or skeleton, at the result of some kind of death. And yet, there’s also the sense of regeneration. That from this hollow, scarred form, nature is bursting forth. And that’s not necessarily apparent until you get fairly close to the sculpture, because it’s surrounded by bushes and trees.

0:01:22.0 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s impossible not to see this as a human figure, especially because separating these two cubes, the smaller one on top of the slightly larger one, almost like a neck. And so, if I begin to see this as a figure, it’s one that is deeply scarred and open to the elements.

0:01:39.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: This sculpture can be seen as a three dimensional representation of a large series of drawings titled Anxious Man, in which an abstracted human head is roughly drawn. But then the surface of the skin is scarred, and scratched, and etched.

0:01:55.7 Dr. Beth Harris: And the artist has made no secret that he has long suffered from anxiety. And so this is, in many ways, a very personal work.

0:02:03.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: The artist has said that his anxiety became even more acute when he became the father to a young boy. And he’s recounted the emotional calluses that he’s grown through his life in order to ward off the evils of the world. But how as a father to a young boy, he has a responsibility to, either, help his child also grow those calluses, or to more directly confront the wrongs of the world. So while the artist has stated on the one hand, that these heads are a self-portrait, they are simultaneously an expression of his response to the world around him. And at least for me, when I see these plants growing from the metal surface, I do have a sense of a kind of healing, the way that nature will inhabit every nook, every crevice. And from it, grows life.

0:02:48.7 Dr. Beth Harris: For me, it’s the very opposite. The plants that grow from these bronze geometric forms, feel to me like a figure that is pierced, and open, and vulnerable, and can’t manage the forces of the world, the chaos of nature, in a way. And I think also about these geometric forms, these two rectangular, squarish shapes, the cylinder in between them. The perfect geometry that those shapes evoke, that is completely undermined by the way the surface feels malleable and manipulated by human hands, and scratched and scarred. And so there’s a sense of the imperfect, of something out of control, to me.

0:03:35.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: Regardless of how we read it, though, this is a sculpture that is about suffering. But it’s also teeming with life.

This work at Storm King Art Center

Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men from the Drawing Center

Monica Davis, editor, Rashid Johnson: The Hikers (Zurich/Aspen: Hauser & Wirth Publishers/Aspen Art Press, 2021).