In the poetry contest in China by which the Sixth
Patriarch of Zen Buddhism was chosen, there were
two poems. One said: “The mind is like a mirror. It
collects dust. The problem is to remove the dust.”
The other and winning poem was actually a reply to
the first. It said, “Where is the mirror and where is
the dust.”

John Cage 1 

  The body of new work constituting this exhibition by Will Johnson develops from his earlier work in painting and monoprints. The grisaille works are ostensibly closest to the earlier work, though his paint handling in the works in this exhibition is perhaps less calligraphic and more painterly than in his earlier monoprints. Certain motifs perdure from Johnson’s earlier work, such as the fishy figure to the right of the canoe in One Arm Duck Press, comparable to the figure at the right in Pig Latin, 1993. 2  Similarly, the pig’s head motif of Pig Latin recurs here in The Leviathan. These recurrences are not merely superficial, but what is salient is the continuity of sensibility informing a way of world-making.
 

This continuity of sensibility likewise bridges what superficially may seem a discontinuity in the works in this exhibition: those in grisaille or nearly so, narrative, with a space filled sometimes to produce the effect of a clutter, and those in color, depending on color, ostensibly not narrative, treating of space as void. Paintings of things and paintings of not-things.
 

The grisaille painting This Day One Inch Foot Gem has a recumbent figure surmounted by a heap of things topped, like a building topped out during construction, with a tree. The mass of stuff is the more a mass of stuff for being delineated from the ground. Within the heap, the objects are indicated, but for the most part indistinctly delineated by paint which remains as much signifier as signified. A ladder rests against the side of the heap; useless for ascent or descent it rests on the one who would ascend or descend. The mass of stuff presses with the weight of the world on this Gulliver overwhelmed by a conglomeration of Lilliputian conspicuous consumption. All this, and yet all this is rendered ironic by the title, read as a koan: “This Day One Inch Foot Gem.” 3  Parse the phrase. 4  “This day,” not any other but this day in its individuality. “One,” singular, unique. “Inch,” small unit. “Foot,” large unit. “Gem,” precious stone. Surely the gem in question is not merely another object of conspicuous consumption depicted in the painting; rather, it is the lapis philosophorum, the ‘philosopher’s stone,’ metonymy of the self. 5  It is said that it may be found in a dunghill. 6 
 

Matehuala 7  appears as a significant break from the other works in this exhibition: Matehuala is intensely colored rather than largely or entirely achromatic, seemingly largely nonrepresentational rather than figurative, and with relatively unfilled and flat space rather than complexly congested space. The plywood support of Matehuala is integrated into the work: the grain of the plywood verneer is evident, knotholes are not only left unfilled and visible but are incorporated as compositional elements, and the top, left and bottom edges are emphasized by the visible residue of gluing from the previous attachment of other pieces of wood. A field of lemon yellow fills the panel, punctuated in the upper register by a white four-legged table represented in isometric projection, and in the lower register by a passage of translucent phthalo blue and grisaille overpainted by the yellow field. The lemon yellow overpainting serves to define a shape resembling a bottle, or an abstracted standing figure. A horizontal row of five conspicuous knotholes, punctuated by a vertical split in the top layer of verneer between the two knotholes at the right, runs across the panel approximately one third up from the bottom. The vertical split is subtly balanced at the left by the more dense ring of yellow around the second knothole from the left. Two unfilled knotholes induce an implied horizontal line approximately one third of the way below the top of the panel.
 

The knotholes and splits in the plywood give emphasis to the physicality of the support, while the painted field gives emphasis to the non-materiality of the representation of a table as a ghostly luminosity, a whiteness becoming suffused with magenta, not-yellow, the absence of yellow. The lemon yellow field is intense but has a value nearly that of the white table. The yellow field induces the perception of a magenta afterimage onto the white table shape while inducing a perception of a denser yellow around the table shape, while shifting the gaze to the white wall results in a yellow afterimage of a table. The interaction between the phenomenon of painted surface and viewer, between representation and perceptual response, constantly shifting and altering during the duration of the regard elicits the other of the represented: the noumenon of a Platonic Form of a table.
 

The Myth of Emptiness, an altered found object, is a small bottomless suitcase, installed handle uppermost, lid hanging downward and forward. The lid of the suitcase is painted with a translucent, almost transparent white, 8  through which the vicissitudes of time on the suitcase are legible in the torn lining. Without bottom, the suitcase is open to reveal the opaque white wall, the transparent shadows cast by the side and top implying a volume extending through the plane of the wall. 9  “Diaphane, adiaphane.” 10  As Brian O’Doherty notes:

Space now is not just where things happen; things make space happen.
Space was clarified not only in the picture, but in the place where the picture
hangs—the gallery, which, with postmodernism, joins the picture plane as a unit of discourse. 11 

In engaging Matehuala and The Myth of Emptiness we are situated not with things but, through things, with the condition for the appearing of things, with the “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.” 12  So also with This Day One Inch Foot Gem, Leviathan, One Arm Duck Press, and the other largely grisaille ‘narrative’ works in the exhibition.
 

Narrative paintings of things; not-narrative paintings of not-things which treat of the condition for the appearing of things. Nacheinander, nebeneinander. 13  ‘One after another,’ ‘side by side.’ Thus Gotthold Lessing employs the terms:
 

in the one case the action is visible and progressive, its different parts occurring one after
the other [nacheinander] in a sequence of time, and in the other the action is visible and
stationary, its different parts developing in co-existence [nebeneinander] in space. 14 

to instantiate the distinction of the respective domains of poetry and painting by employing Kant’s forms of sensible intuition 15  as fundamentum divisionis. The essentialist, reductivist, purist, move of modernism in the arts thus begins, the sister arts 16  sundered.
 

The hegemony of the modernist paradigm ended. This end is not simply a matter of the reconstitution of the sisterhood of the arts, a recursion to a status quo ante, but rather entails the recognition that, in J. W. T. Mitchell’s formulation:
 

the tendency of artists to breach the supposed boundaries between temporal and spatial
arts is not a marginal or exceptional practice, but a fundamental impulse in both the theory
and practice of the arts, one that is not confined to any particular genre or period. 17 

Will Johnson’s recent work reminds us that however the enterprise may be continued, whether in treating of things in space and time or by treating of space and time of themselves, our agency is situated in bodies within space and time, which in creating the “thought-things that we call works of art,” 19  as well as in the other enterprises of thought, we perdure in transcending.

Homeric	acrylic on wood	45 x 32 inches
Ty and Susie	acrylic on wood	36 x 48 inches
This Day Inch Foot Gem	acrylic on wood	37 x 43 inches
The Forms of Emptiness	acrylic on canvas on wood	50 x 48 inches
One Arm Duck Press	acrylic on wood	34 x 51 inches
Matehula	acrylic on wood	65 x 48 inches
The Myth of Emptiness	altered found object	10 x 15 x 4 inches
The Leviathan	acrylic on canvas	37 x 43 inches

 

After attending Washington and Lee University, and San Francisco Art Institute, Will Johnson attended Brookhaven College, completing the Bachelor of Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University. He is Exhibition Designer and Preparator, Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, and converting a former industrial facility in Kaufman, Texas to a studio and residence.
 
 

1. John Cage, Silence (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1966), p. 272. Return
2. William Johnson, Pig Latin, 1993 oil on canvas , 22.25 x 26 inches, in the Brookhaven College Permanent Art Collection. Return
3. Koan #32, from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday , 1969). Return
4. Cf. the parsing of the proposition “This is a pen.” in Robert E. Wood, A Path into Metaphysics: Phenomenological, Hermeneutical, and Dialogical Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp.44ff. Return
5. See C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 181ff et passim. See also Jung, Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), q.v. ‘lapis.’ Return
6. Michael Maier, Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum (Frankfurt am Main, 1617). p. 336; cited in C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 313. Return
7. A city in Mexico, approximately midway between Monterrey and San Luis Postosi. Return
8. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, 1978), III.140., p. 35e: “And white may indeed occur in the visual impression of a transparent body, . . . .” Granted that white is generally used and perceived pictorially as opaque, both the impression in perception and in physical actuality of a transparent white are not precluded, as empirical experience with zinc white will disclose. Return
9. Again cf. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, 1978), I.19., p. 5e: “Transparency and reflections exist only in the dimension of depth of a visual image.” Return
10. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934, 1961), p. 37. “Diaphane,” translucent; “adiaphane,” opaque. Return
11. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1986), p. 39. Return
12. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934, 1961), p. 37. Return
13. Continuing to advert to Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934, 1961), p. 37:

A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and
that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles
o’er his base, fell through the nebeinander ineluctably. Return
14. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry [1766], trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 77. Return
15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1787 2nd ed.], trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965); see the exposition of the transcendental aesthetic, §1 A19 - § 81 B73, pp. 65-91. Return
16. Reference is to the notion that painting and poetry are sister arts; see Horace, Ars Poetica, line 361: Ut pictura poesis. Return
17. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 98. Return
18. ‘Post-historical’ is Arthur C. Danto’s term. Though I regard his position not to be entirely without internal contradiction, I nevertheless find much of his case of very considerable merit. Indeed, I regard his argument for art tohave moved into a reflexively philosophical enterprise to be the best exposition of the current situation, though as such it seems to me to entail a master narrative. See Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Return
19. “Thought-things that we call works of art” is Hannah Arendt’s phrase in The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 62:
    
    

By drawing a distinction between truth and meaning, between knowing and thinking, and by insisting on
its importance, I do not wish to deny that thinking’s quest for meaning, and knowledge’s quest for truth
are connected. By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning men establish themselves are question-
asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswer-
able ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is much more likely that
men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable
questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things we call works of art but also the
capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded. Return