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    • XVII

      • Colleen Asper Labor with Rectangle
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom
      • Triple Candie Exhibition Preparations
      • Sean Raspet 2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD…
      • Owen Kydd Handheld
      • Dan Levenson Notes From Jessica
      • Julia Rommel Easy Tacker
      • Jordan Kantor MAN(ET/DE)GAS
      • Sreshta Rit Premnath The Last Image
      • OJO The Adventures of Nuclear Wad & How He Learned To Stop Dreaming
    • XVI

      • Julia Sherman Re-Claiming Susan B. Anthony
      • Robert Hult Hasidic Street Posters in Brooklyn
      • Runo Lagomarsino Pedro’s Story: An Unsuccessful Transatlantic Traveller
      • John Houck Pine Ridge: An interview with Jim Houck
      • Brian Zegeer Dragoman of Little Syria
      • Sidney Russell Kuna Yala Swag
      • Desirée Holman Outer Spaces: Part I
      • Faith47 The Unexpected Present
      • Carmen Winant Personal Best
      • Philip-Lorca diCorcia Red Bull Snake
    • XV

      • Jessica Green & Tom Griffiths Terra Incognita (A Video Game Folly)
      • Prem Krishnamurthy The People’s Representation: On Staged Graphics in Klaus Wittkugel’s Work
      • Cian O'Day N/A, or On the Dark Stores of Brian Ulrich
      • Yasmeen M. Siddiqui Avatar Gone Analog: Musings on The Bridge Project by Do Ho Suh
      • Emily Larned ARTS 02–2011: The Artist-Created Institution as Art Practice
      • Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier Interview with Metahaven
      • Aaron Kunin Space and Place in Two Video Installations by Amie Siegel
      • Tom Griffiths Interview with Barbara Griffiths
    • XIV

      • Colleen Asper & Justin Lieberman In Conversation
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report To The Committee On Periodical Group Exhibitions
      • Ryan Mrozowski & Mike Womack Before-Biennial-After
      • Kay Rosen Waiting for Michael Asher
      • Kate Gilmore Drag
    • XIII

      • Talia Chetrit Van Hanos’s Harlem Studio
      • Mieke Marple The Lives of Objects at The Suburban
      • Laurel Nakadate Island Light
      • C.D. Parker Draw Me a Pie Chart Powerfully
      • Alan Reid Despondent Babysitter
      • Lucy Kim & Leeza Meksin Art Crimes
    • XII

      • Anonymous On Looking at Nature: An Untitled Petition on Crapomimicry
      • Paul Huf Musical Box with a Dancing Ballerina
      • Lance Wakeling Voluntary Sculptures: Photographing the Unmonumental
      • David Kennedy-Cutler Possession Obsession
      • Nine Budde Stopping by at a Friends’ Place
      • Cody Trepte Untitled (Something Clever Here)
      • Jeff Wall noted in 1982 that “the gray volumes of conceptualism are filled with somber ciphers which express primarily the inexpressibility of socially-critical thought in the form of art.”(Jeff Wall, “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” originally published in Gary Dufour, Dan Graham, exh. cat. Perth: The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1985. The article can also be found in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Alexander Alberro, Blake Stimson, p. 511. MIT Press, 2000) For Conceptual art, language served as the vehicle for discourse—coding and decoding information. There were layers of language: text-in-art as well as essays published in magazines by artists to supplement and unlock their works. The primary function of language was to dematerialize the art object, but it quickly became a hermetic code whose ability to engage social issues had failed.

        Early Conceptual art’s reliance on language often fueled criticism that it was inaccessible and insider. A new generation of artists taking form in the early 1980s sought to tackle this problem head on—morphing the use of text-in-art from the rigid applications of the late ’60s and early ’70s to a more humorous and pathos-filled practice. Larry Johnson is one of these artists. With a casual commitment to systems, a heavy injection of reclaimed subjectivity, and a return to image making, Johnson’s work fits cleanly in the lineage of West-coast Conceptualism.

        Larry Johnson’s use of photography links his work to Bruce Nauman’s staged photographs of visual puns, while his reliance on language places his work in company with Lawrence Weiner’s stenciled wall texts and Ed Ruscha’s text-heavy paintings of industrial landscapes. While Johnson’s work borrows from artists of the previous generation, his approach to art making is unquestionably unique. Unlike the tautologies generated from the early Conceptualist’s use of language where the image only reinforced the meaning of the word, Johnson’s unexpected conflation of text and image suggests new readings to the viewer.

        His use of language can be seen as a parsing of Conceptualism, leaving behind the failed strategies while adding new elements to revive the discourse. The esoteric humor, queer content, and endless pop-culture references in Johnson’s work mark an irreversible shift in the evolution of Conceptualism. It should be noted here that this approach to Postconceptual art was unique to Los Angeles. New York had the Pictures Generation, happening concurrently, which employed similar strategies of appropriation and humor through quoting the images of pop culture rather than the language that Johnson focused on. Both approaches, however, shared the aim of creating work that was more socially engaged than that of the rigid Conceptualists from the previous generation.

        200811_CodyTrepte_image_1

        Larry Johnson, Untitled (Jesus + I), 1990, Color photograph, 46 5/8 x 61 inches (118.4 x 154.9 cm), Edition of 3. Courtesy of the Artist and Patrick Painter Inc., Santa Monica, CA



        Untitled (Jesus + I) (1990) is one in a series of pieces set in an anonymous snowy landscape. As with all of Johnson’s work, Untitled (Jesus + I) is a color photograph that could be confused for a drawing or painting. It is large, somewhere between a flat-screen television and small movie screen projection, and it is rendered to look like an animation cell. The backdrop of hills and trees is colored in cool tones, while a large orange sign—present in all of the works from this series—is firmly planted in the snow-covered ground. The cartoony Garamond typeface of the sign verbosely tells the story of “looking inward rather than at externals,” and proceeds to list the many “Dorian Grey, Ltd.” skin care products that had been sampled before attending a dinner party. The story is circuitous; starting with “Jesus and I” and ending with “my glistening tan,” the lack of logic is hysterical.

        When asked about the subject of the texts, Johnson said, “the fragments are chosen for the universal or non-specific qualities of their confessions and complaints. I am the author of first-person fictions.”(Interview by David Rimanelli, “Larry Johnson: Highlights of Concentrated Camp,” Flash Art, Nov.–Dec. 1990. p. 121–23) The stories that the artist uses allow for more humor to enter the work, while the ever present “I” is firmly planted in pop culture, giving him access to something close to a collective subjectivity. While Johnson is the author of these stories, he is not the subject. The “I” is pulled directly from the pages of TV Guide, advertisements and circulars, movies and television shows, and is in essence the voice of a shared experience.

        Johnson’s use of animation techniques gives visual weight to the language presented in the work and allows it to function purely as an image. Upon closer reading, the text takes on deeper meanings, separated from its placement in the landscape. Johnson’s series of winter scenes from 1990 imply an infinite backdrop where one might constantly come across these first person accounts, anonymously displayed for any passerby. Each winter scene references an un-recallable animated film from our childhood, or perhaps the nether regions of our memory that store these severed bits of pop-culture knowledge. The incongruity and solitude of the snowy landscape only adds to the punch line.


        200811_CodyTrepte_image_2

        Cody Trepte, What are you doing? (Twitter Drawing), 2009, Java Applet. Please note: You will be prompted to click ‘Allow’ to launch the java applet.


        Larry Johnson’s work has one foot in Conceptualism and one foot in pop culture. It is the humor and the recognizable imagery that make his photographs accessible, while the smug wit and heavy use of language display a direct link to cryptic Conceptual art. His art operates on two levels: the image and the code. This, Jan Verwoert explains, “is the promise that the embrace of the secretive holds for critical Conceptual art practice: the promise of transgressing the limits of its own discursive codes by speaking two languages at once, the didactic and the hermetic.”(Jan Verwoert, “Secret Society,” Frieze, Issue 124, Jun.-Aug. 2009. p. 137) Johnson’s work does exactly this and proves that with enough flexibility, Conceptualism can continue to evolve. Its success won’t come from quoting previous generations, but rather from extracting what we like and discarding what we don’t.

        Cody Trepte is a LA based artist. He is currently working on his MFA at California Institute of the Arts.

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    • XI

      • Adam Helms Hirschhorn at Gladstone Gallery
      • David Scanavino Fact or Fiction
      • Jason Tomme The Voodoo of Robert Irwin
      • Kristin Posehn The Rocks of Rocklin
      • Joanne Greenbaum Decorating the Void: On Clay and Dirt on Delight
    • X

      • Jennifer Dudley Interview with Daniel Bozhkov
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report to the Committee on Decentered Practices
      • Shana Lutker Artists Are Not
      • Steve Cairns & Isla Leaver-Yap Blind Carbon Copy
      • Katarina Burin Rooms No One Lives In
      • Jonathan Bogarin What’s Your Context?
      • Sara Greenberger Rafferty Master of None
    • IX

      • Andrea Hill Fact, Factoid, Factotum
      • Nicholas Weist We’re Interested in Your White Horse
      • Tyler Coburn Ronnie Bass at I-20
      • Allison Kave Doa Aly and Juan William Chavez
      • Gillian Sneed Interview with Adam Pendleton
    • VIII

      • Jacob Hashimoto Interview with Luis Gispert
      • Lilly McElroy Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg
      • Kevin Zucker Thematic Apperception Test
      • Ian Cooper That’s What He Said
      • Colleen Asper Interview with Matt Borruso
    • VII

      • Mieke Marple Interview with Michelle Grabner
      • Farrah Karapetian Reframing Mirrors and Windows
      • Ruby Sky Stiler That’s What She Said
      • Spencer Finch New Zealand Light
      • Dana Frankfort John Walker: Text in/and Painting
      • The Editors Whitney Biennial 2008
    • VI

      • Katie Herzog Bay Area Figurative Language
      • Matt Connors Teignmouth Electron by Tacita Dean
      • Connelly LaMar New Photography 2007 at MOMA
      • Ethan Greenbaum Inside Lights
      • Matthew Lancit Cleaning Magritte’s Pipe
    • V

      • Roger White Jay Heikes at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Interview with Michael DeLucia
      • Erin Shirreff Michel Auder: The Feature
      • Jessica Lansdon Interview with Brian Bress
      • Lisha Bai Suzanne Song at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
    • IV

      • Mariah Robertson Conditions in Time
      • Jacob Feige Psychopathia Pastoralis
      • Eric Golo Stone Interview with George Kontos
      • Skyler Brickley Keith Tyson at PaceWildenstein
      • Lumi Tan Curatorial Project with Jo-ey Tang
    • III

      • George Rush Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper
      • Jacqueline Cooper Margaret Wall-Romana at Bucheon Gallery
      • Ana Wolovick Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein
      • Skyler Brickley Nicholas Krushenick at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Peter Young at PS1
      • Ethan Greenbaum Daniel Gordon Interview
    • II

      • Christine Frerichs Rebecca Morris at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery
      • Skyler Brickley Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine
      • Ethan Greenbaum Kristen Baker at Deitch Projects
    • I

      • Mark Barrow On Abstraction
      • Tova Carlin Superstudio
      • Julia Weist Johannes Vanderbeek at Zach Feuer
      • Skyler Brickley Wilhelm Sasnal at Anton Kern
      • Ethan Greenbaum Cement Garden at Marvelli Gallery