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The multifaceted, troubled, and sometimes perplexing artist Rashid Johnson, whose sprawling exhibition “Poem for Deep Thinkers” is currently on view at the Guggenheim and takes up most of the museum’s space, is forty-seven. Age is usually thought of as a career marker: a quick and imprecise way to figure out whether you’re dealing with a rising star, a towering figure making a final farewell gesture, or a patient sufferer in the long purgatory of midcareer. But Johnson’s show, unfolding chronologically, feels like one twisting, thorny, searching, implicitly memoir-like process of reflection spanning half a century—a coming-of-age chronicle.
Still from the video “Black and Blue”, 2021. Artwork © Rashid Johnson / Courtesy of the artist / Hauser & Wirth
No single aesthetic or method of making art can fully encompass the 90 or so works that make up Poem for Deep Thinkers. The show features large, colorful houseplants hanging from the ceiling on barely noticeable ropes. There are rugs on platforms and tables, providing a soft base for such arcane experiments as shea butter chopped and crumbled into tiny pieces, or, in one case, an outdated video monitor showing Johnson performing his own remixed version of yoga. There are satirical photographs and touchingly serious videos. There are clumsily carved, possibly functional, everyday objects, like fireplaces and flower pots, which Johnson calls “busts.” There are paintings—some on canvas, others on shiny white tile.
Still from Black and Blue, 2021. Artwork © Rashid Johnson / Courtesy of the artist / Hauser & Wirth
It’s a grandiose display of small ideas. But what gives the exhibition its cohesion is Johnson’s consistent, if tonally varied, engagement with literature. “Poem for Deep Thinkers” is named after a work by the poet, playwright, and jazz critic Amiri Baraka, who serves as a kind of spirit guide for the exhibition. The prose, moralizing poem contains a miniature sermon on the role of the intellectual in society:
Intellectuals like us, baby, need to deal with real things.
world, and be be in the real world. We need to use, use, all
all skills
Sourse: newyorker.com
