Published Articles
Browse in-depth essays, interviews, and reviews on the work of visionary artist Martin B. Johnson. This archive includes writings by leading art critics and curators, such as Donald Kuspit, as well as conversations and reviews published in major journals and exhibition catalogs.
Donald Kuspit – Artforum (May 1985)
By Donald Kuspit · on the work of Martin Johnson
This 1985 Artforum review of Martin Johnson’s exhibition at Phyllis Kind Gallery examines his playful yet caustic use of language, kitsch, and chance. Kuspit highlights Johnson’s dadaistic humor, his obsession with fragments, and the Joker-like tone that mocks both art institutions and cultural conventions, revealing the blurred boundary between profundity and banality.
Phyllis Kind Gallery
Martin Johnson
Artforum — May 1985, Vol. XXIII, No. 9, p. 108
By Donald Kuspit
Martin Johnson saturates us in language to the point of vertigo. Every currently “in” style and type of image, every kind of surface and rhythm of paint, a seemingly inexhaustible mixing of high art and kitsch modes of representation, are all brilliantly manipulated in fast-paced, punning works. Many of them have interchangeable parts, and seem like only gratuitously different hands in a game of solitaire. These paintings are polysemous manipulations obsessed with the plasticity of language and meaning — in Johnson's words, a “visual jazz +++ stretching and testing the limits of meaningfulness.”
Accident is seriously involved in this text, as is temporality: Johnson “embosses” some of the dropcloths he paints on with white dots on a black bar, symbols for the mechanical conception of time, and contrasting with the unpredictable duration of the chance event. Chance plays a major role here — it's almost a formula; it has been ordained that everything be left to chance. This effect shows up perhaps most obviously in the bits and pieces of lettering, which do and do not add up to familiar words, memorable phrases, aphoristic statements. The language has the faded quality of a half-recalled insight, resembling the flotsam and jetsam of words of wisdom on ancient monuments. Meaning has seeped out of this language, yet it remains peculiarly moving, touches some blind reflex of an obscure feeling. Like the works as a whole, it is terribly familiar, but it has the force of a blurred concrete poetry. Thus the works have an aura of both profundity and banality. They are a cynical invitation to invent one’s own image, make up one’s own story — a kind of linguistic and visual doublespeak.
Everything here is trivialized into a fragment, a trace, and these traces are organized in a semiotic joke — free-floating signifiers in search of a signified — and then let loose like balloons to see how high in the stratosphere of meaning they can rise. Each image is like a half-dumb gesture that just might make sense, a sort of visual Delphic oracle which rings peculiarly flat but calls forth our best interpretive powers. Johnson’s works await the seer who will make sense of them, yet they’re not quite senseless in themselves, but resemble oddly shaped parts of a puzzle that when finally put together is discovered to constitute a familiar picture of the world. Seeing these works, I thought of a police lineup in which none of the faces were quite recognizable but all were sort of familiar, or of baseball cards, which were exciting to collect only so long as the set was incomplete.
Johnson deals with the instant passé; in our artistic and social worlds that means everything, yet just because it is everything it remains peculiarly mysterious. Each work is a tease, like a penny arcade game, and the exhibition as a whole was a carnival scenario, the stage set for some gala punk masque of fortune. The figure of the Joker from the Batman comic strip seemed to me a major clue to the show, and the general aura of macabre clowning was of its essence. The near garishness of the works, the obvious desire to dazzle, and the peculiarly fetishistic focusing on individual objects or configurations are powerfully witty in effect, all the more so because the wit is felt but not always analyzable.
The words “Sears and Bikinis” make a certain sense together, their juxtaposition with the vaguely monstrous striped face of the sun perhaps still makes some sense, but the whole thing next to a schematized image of what can be understood (no doubt ala Rorschach) as a symbol of a fiery female genital and a penis, beneath which the words “Xerox Open Wide" are stenciled, makes little direct sense. As one goes from image to image within the same work, one is not always sure to what point they are being accumulated, yet the tension mounts, even if the final reading is unclear.
To call these works “dadaistic” has some appropriateness for their institutionalization of the anti-institutional. But unlike traditional Dadaism, which had a certain aura of know-nothingism to it, these works have a know-it-all aura which makes them even more vicious in their insight into the institution of art. Dadaism wanted to dismiss and shatter that institution, and ended in nihilism. But Johnson knows that nihilism is a lame-duck position today. Whatever one does ends up in the institution of art, so why not continue to labor within it, the canker in the rose that adds to its rosiness, or, better, Jonah trying to gnaw through the side of the whale while knowing he never can? Johnson gives us a rich manure of images which, spread on the field of art, helps raise a single flower of scorn, and that’s the prizewinner these days.
—Donald Kuspit
Julia W. Boyd — Martin Johnson (1990)
This essay by Julia W. Boyd on Martin Johnson was originally published in the exhibition catalog UN/COMMON GROUND, Virginia Artists 1990, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. The text examines Johnson’s installations, fascination with found objects, the talismanic word FOR, and the sculptural category UNIS, situating his practice in a broader dialogue of humor, fragmentation, and archetypal meaning.
By Julia W. Boyd · Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Originally published in UN/COMMON GROUND, Virginia Artists 1990, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.
A vast and cumulative inventory of component forms, Martin Johnson’s installations buffet the viewer between perplexing hilarity and profound revelation. His richly allusive compounding of forms, text, and imagery “produces hallucinatory visions of the known which show just how unknown it really is, because it is so encrusted with our half-known intentions” (Kuspit 1983).
Kitsch and chance run rampant in Johnson’s carnival of found objects (“life is a found object,” he quips). Commonplace junkyard debris is reconfigured into a carnival-like proliferation of webbed structures set before walls filled top to bottom with found paintings. Each painting is stenciled at the bottom edge with fragments of found text, both letters and words, that are occasionally obtuse or unintelligible. Painted across the top of each painting is a dotted black border resembling the sprocket edges of film. Densely massed together, the paintings produce the media-blitz effect of banked television monitors, their thousands of images at complete odds with the closed captions underneath them. Johnson’s words often do not correlate with images; neither word nor image provides the complete message or meaning, but only a glimpse of an idea. These fragmented image/text pairings are built into a visual whirlpool that engulfs the viewer with snippets of ideas alternately disconnected and reconnected, rejuvenated by new associations or unexpected visual alignments. Johnson’s use of words or phrases is akin to his use of component objects in his installations, all part of a larger and ever-growing body of work. None of the objects is seen alone, nor are the words free-standing.
A huge red mouth, detached and absurdly mocking, is a surrogate for the artist, in a sense imposing himself on this otherwise appropriated realm. The mouth’s grinning toothiness dominates by frequent repetition and scale; floating free-form from the ceiling or on the floor, applied to various sculptures, or frequently painted over the mouth of a figure or animal in the found paintings. In combination with all the repeated components and densely decorated surfaces, the mouth adds to both the fetishistic and carnival-like effects of Johnson’s work.
Diverse and iconoclastic artistic and literary sources feed Johnson’s imagery and methods. They include, but are not limited to, Constructivism, Dadaism (Duchamp), Surrealist automatism, folk art, ’50s trash/funk art, Chicago Imagists (Jim Nutt and Karl Wirsum), installation art (Jonathan Borofsky and Judy Pfaff), and early East Village graffiti art (see McGreevey 1988). Johnson also acknowledges the influence of Lucas Samaras, whose unbridled experimentation with nontraditional materials to uncanny effect has been incorporated into Johnson’s working method.
Looking for new and unexpected meaning, Johnson has revived and reformulated the challenge posed by Duchamp’s ready-mades earlier in this century. His irrational or unexpected combinations of found objects with nontraditional materials, as well as his free-spirited attitude toward their use, counters his disaffected attitudes about making, experiencing, and exhibiting art.
Words and talismans have their own life in Johnson’s work and their own self-propelling relationship to the history of his career. Gamesmanship is operative in decoding text, image, pun, and poetry. The word FOR is a critical talisman for Johnson that he uses physically and conceptually in all his paintings. A union of OF and OR, FOR is a catalytic word that he feels abstractly encapsulates broad archetypal concepts. Word play resulting from the chance or purposeful combination of FOR with other words or images transmits an intricate symbolism for him that appears disarmingly simple, yet it bears the weight of complex meaning.
Johnson has assigned colors, shapes, and formal attributes to each letter of the talisman: F = red square (“feel frame”); O = blue circle (“order”); R = yellow triangle (“rhythm”). Using a shorthand of symbols of a given letter, Johnson can transmit the concept of FOR without actually writing the whole word (Schwartzman). With this talisman he can share abstract thoughts and feelings with the viewer (FOR-US = FORCE; METAFOR). Clustered like concrete poetry, the individual letters suggest sounds and summon images both related to and independent of the image in which they appear.
He occasionally objectifies FOR, forming the three letters into hundreds of colored wire sculptures piled in a large heap of possibility on the floor, like sand. There is an unspoken invitation to the viewer to “take one,” and an almost uncontrollable urge on the part of the viewer to do so, thus to begin to participate with Johnson in his poetic search, his recycling of the familiar, the commonplace, the rejected, with most uncommon results.
While all of his paintings involve the FOR talisman, his sculptures are grouped under the all-encompassing category entitled UNIS (UN-IS, or not is, a process of becoming — with associations with the words unit, unite, unified). Combining visual and textual tools repetitively in both media, he explores the gap between seeing and thinking. By way of explanation, Johnson says, “I am attempting to BE FOR — a psychological state that transcends art, that takes place in space and time.” He continues, “Epiphanies of the language of a moment catch an idea like a scent, a vague recollection that you grasp and then it’s gone” (Johnson). After having been delighted by playing the game, deciphering the codes, the viewer leaves with a sense of having glimpsed aspects of many truths.
— J.W.B.
Dry Criticism These Sober Hours
By Donald Kuspit · On the Work of Martin Johnson
This essay examines Martin Johnson’s maximalist installations, exploring how his manic, fragmentary, and overwhelming methods both critique and mirror American culture. Kuspit argues that Johnson’s work transforms trivial objects into allegories of human destiny, blurring boundaries between fine art and popular culture, and exposing the grotesque underside of the American dream.
Dry Criticism These Sober Hours
By Donald Kuspit · On the Work of Martin Johnson
Originally published in a City Gallery of Contemporary Art catalogue, c. 1994.
Martin Johnson’s oeuvre is massive. There are literally hundreds, probably thousands, of pieces in his installation “cross-picture” puzzles, and when I asked him for an account of his development, he sent me several hundred annotated slides. It seems evident that he “growed like Topsy,” with no clear beginning, and no end in sight. He started with the intention of becoming a Bauhaus-type architect, and ended up extending the “emograph”—the term a professor gave to his doodles—ad infinitum. With his typical flair for contradiction, he ended up being the opposite of what he wanted to be; instead of a minimalist, he became a maximalist.
So writing about Johnson poses a problem: To be descriptive is to miss the point. What I’ve decided to do is to try to explain the interdependence of the method—manic, accumulative, ruminative—and meaning of his installations. Johnson has an incredibly strong artistic stomach; he’s able to digest all kinds of junk in the cud of his consciousness. He’s a compulsive collector of trivia; indeed he wallows in it. He converts whatever he collects into art, or rather uses it in an artful way, which brings out the “art” in it—that nobody saw before.
It is standard Dadaist-surrealist operating procedure to regard ordinary objects as extraordinary art (and vice versa), but for Johnson that is not the end of the ironic process. For him, it is the instrument of a larger, indeed, cosmic statement: Each installation is a human and divine comedy in one—an allegory of human destiny. His installations are macrocosms, and within them are numerous microcosms. Again and again, on a grand scale but also more intimately, he attempts to embrace the human whole, as exemplified by everyday America. Indeed, strange as it may seem to say so, Johnson is a kind of folk artist, if more conspicuously and self-consciously avant-garde.
Johnson, then, is a true American original, a pioneering consciousness full of wonder at the fairy-tale novelty of the world. His personal, wild-eyed vision presumably sees the world as it really is. Thus, the Cheshire Cat smile that haunts Johnson’s installations has a bemused, all-knowing Mephistophelean expression, as in For Devil Face (1980). It is the look of a confident prankster.
In a way, Johnson’s guiding spirit is the Joker, the sardonic nemesis to Batman’s self-righteousness. Like the Joker, avant-garde art is regarded as less than funny, almost criminal, by the ordinary law-abiding citizens of the respectable world. Lawless and disruptive, provocative and mocking, disturbing and questioning, avant-garde art turns the conventions that make for ordinariness upside down in a carnivalesque spirit, showing their absurd underside. Avant-garde art demonstrates that every scene is secretly ob-scene, everything normal is unconsciously abnormal.
It would be like Johnson, in both the folk and the avant-garde tradition, to “find” the Cheshire cat smile in a popular place, just as Gatsby accidentally “finds” the menacing eyes of God on a billboard advertisement in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Indeed, Johnson’s installations stretch the fine art/popular culture continuum, as Lawrence Alloway calls it, to the limit. Everyday signs become fraught with more sophisticated, complex meaning by their “refinement,” and fine art becomes more broadly communicative by its popularization. The boundary between fine art and popular culture (avant-garde and kitsch) finally dissolves, as does the boundary between making and finding (conceiving and appropriating). In what has been regarded as the archetypal postmodern process, there is a convergence of higher and lower, precious and commonplace, exquisite and gross, elite and vulgar, central and marginal, until they can no longer be distinguished hierarchically. They seem to cross-fertilize into a new construct that can be called fine art, or, for that matter, popular culture only nominally.
Yet, “artistic” reconceptualization adds, as Duchamp suggested, an aura of mystery to real-life things, while they, used as art, give the idea of art an irksome, disturbing reality. Johnson is thoroughly Duchampian, to the detail of Duchamp’s conception of the art-life object as a medium of unconscious, uncanny, even telepathic communication between artist and audience. The question, then, is what Johnson’s art-life installations communicate. What, through their manipulation of all-American objects, do they reveal about the American unconscious and Johnson’s own unconscious? If America is one big grab bag of things for Johnson, what things does he grab, and why?
Johnson’s installations are inordinately complicated, multidimensional constructions of seemingly free but in fact overdetermined associations. Each image-object is in itself a sum of contradictory associations that add up to an emotionally incoherent message. Ambiguity and ambivalence are Johnson’s stock-in-trade. His installations seem capricious, infantile, and mischievous, each a kind of Pandora’s box of toys, but they are in fact apocalyptic visions of the madness and absurdity of the America that lies underneath the banal surface.
To my mind there are four basic strategies to every Johnson installation. First, Johnson arranges his works in abstract, anonymous grids, which fixes them firmly in place. Many of the works are conspicuously framed, and the frame has an identity of its own, as his high profile, relief-like character indicates. This intensifies the effect of manic seriality.
Second, virtually every Johnson installation involves “making a face” at the audience—a provocative representation of a face. Wildly different facial physiognomies abound in Johnson’s works (as in a 1993 UNC installation), or hallucinatory configurations that “accidentally” suggest faces (as in a 1984 Virginia installation). Johnson’s figurative constructions confront us in a “face off,” forcing us to take them on “face value.” They have a physiognomic import. The self that the face or figure-face expresses tends to be one-dimensional, however elusive and bizarre. It is in effect a signature self—an all-American poster face. There is really very little to it, however “suggestive” or “expressive” it or any of its features may be.
Third, Johnson’s installations are composed of fragments. It is as though each of them is an effort to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Fragments seem compressed together rather than conjoined, and many works are made from literally cut-up as well as cut-out parts. The parts seem like debris from an explosion, collected and rearranged to suit Johnson’s paradoxical vision. A Johnson installation seems like a sum of fragments that do not synthesize into a whole. His method is an endless additive process that never issues in a final product. The result is chaos.
Finally, Johnson’s installations are claustrophobic and catastrophic. His installations surround the viewer on all sides by a patchwork architecture that for all its grid-rigid structure seems about to collapse. Going through a Johnson installation is like being swallowed into the maw of a monster: We fear we might end up digested and distilled on the wall, our skin and psychic bones on display. Johnson’s installations are less playful than they are purposefully menacing and overwhelming. Their excess and exaggeration make them all the more engulfing. There is something dangerous in their apparently gratuitous abundance.
Johnson’s strategies serve a satiric purpose: Behind the Joker mask is an astute observer of the American scene. A morbid critic of American culture, Johnson’s clown is full of wisecracks about American society. His installations exaggerate the basic qualities of the American scene until its inherent nightmarishness stares us directly in the face. He shows us the manic, fragmented, flashy activity and totalitarian, claustrophobic anonymity of the American circus, full of lives that are catastrophes in all but name, of “characters” doing their tricks and playing their games to survive.
Johnson’s message is that the American dream of freedom and plenty is in psychic fact an insane nightmare. His art replicates this nightmare with the same manic vigor that keeps it going. His grotesque, absurd, peculiarly self-caricaturing faces and figure-faces reflect the grotesque, absurd, peculiarly self-caricaturing character of American life. Johnson holds up a mirror to America’s interior life, showing the devastating and distorting effect of superficiality on it.
Essay by Donald Kuspit. About the work of Martin Johnson. Source: exhibition catalogue context (City Gallery of Contemporary Art, c. 1994).
Ray Kass Interview — The Folk Art Messenger (2011)
By Ray Kass · Interview with Martin Johnson
Interview conducted at FORinstance Gallery, Richmond, Virginia (which would later become MUSEUMoFOR). Published in The Folk Art Messenger, Vol. 22, No. 3, Spring/Summer 2011.
Describing his personal initiation as an artist, Martin Johnson said:
On December 10, 1974, I gave birth to a painting onto which I scratched the word ‘FOR’ on the bottom because I felt that everything was connected and that I was experiencing an expanded sense of infinity in which everything in the universe was FOR everything else — and freely given from the heart.
FOR seemed to mean FOR US. Then I saw the words FOR IS FORCE FOR US.
The word FOR, when broken down, is a symbol for composition: FEEL-FRAME, ORDER and RHYTHM. When they join together, I make my art. FOR leads to poetry and is the power behind every poem.
UNIS is also an important word that connotes the object and the process combined. An abbreviation for UNISON, it also stands for UN-IS — both becoming something and changing at the same time.
My drawings have always been very layered. One of my teachers called them my “emographs” — meaning “emotional graphics.”
My sculptural constructions all come from my EMOGRAPHS. They are the connection of points in space with lines.
The Smile that recurs in my work is an expression of my feeling when I begin to sense the unknown. At those moments I feel like laughing.
[* Martin Johnson in conversation with Ray Kass, ForInstance Gallery, Richmond, Va., May 15, 2011.]
Martin Johnson’s visual art works represent dynamic glimpses of his stream of consciousness. His multi-layered works, often in shallow relief, become grottoes for his furtively inspirational and ironic words and images. Maze-like webs in which verbal and visual images, ambiguous grinning lips floating amidst scripted broken puns, are his personal metaphysics — an abiding questioning voice tinged with alchemical magic that either hits the bull’s eye or forgets the target. In fact, Johnson says that “mysticism” means “missed his ism.”
Born in New Jersey and raised in Richmond, Va., Johnson graduated from Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture and Urban Studies in 1974 with no intention to become an architect. He went on to pursue an M.F.A. in Studio Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where they offered him a scholarship and an ample studio. His artwork at that time touched on many of the significant issues that would soon emerge in the Neo-Expressionist art world of the early 1980s, particularly the emerging stylistic characteristics of self-taught and Outsider art.
Johnson wove words and patterns together in a manner that expresses a genuine kinship with outsider artists. Like many self-taught artists, the basic strategy and style of his ongoing work has remained consistent with that of his earliest pieces. He graduated from Chapel Hill in 1977 and moved to New York City. Over the next decade, he became a well-known figure in the New York art scene. But in 1987, following a string of sell-out exhibitions at the Phyllis Kind Gallery and major reviews in important art magazines, Johnson abruptly packed up his family and left New York to take over his family’s business in Virginia Beach — a sales and marketing company for plumbing supplies. Although he had dropped out of the New York art world, he never ceased his prodigious art production.
ForInstance Gallery, Johnson’s Richmond studio and personal museum, contains an ample cross-section of the more than 40 years of work of a compulsively prolific artist. His work, in both 2-D and 3-D formats, is based on combining recycled found objects or shapes, densely woven patterns, text images and language games that improvise assonant puns or pure free association.
Several key images appear in all mediums. The preposition “FOR” is present throughout his work and is a favor Johnson extends to the viewer to enter his world. Another more ominous iconic image is the giant red-lipped grinning mouth — the kind of thing that would chase you in your dreams. “The Smile that recurs in my work is an expression of my feeling when I begin to sense the unknown. At those moments I feel like laughing.”
Everything that Johnson brings together in his densely embellished pieces is literally tied together with wire or twine. Knots are both a methodology and a universal imagery in his artwork. They are the basis of his constructions and are central to the sensibility of the words and images that he weaves into them.
Johnson’s “found objects” are mostly discarded frameworks of various kinds. Once tied together, the discarded armatures — electric fans, shopping carts, display racks, plastic frames, sundry chairs and car parts — become skeletons that Johnson fleshes out with skins of cheesecloth stretched over wire webs, hardened with acrylic or Roplex and painted with colorful diagram-like patterns. His elaborately embellished sculptures assume the proportions of the body — the classical dimensions of the human form. “My sculptural constructions all come from my EMOGRAPHS. They are the connection of points in space with lines.”
Johnson has associated his use of found objects with Marcel Duchamp’s appropriation of such materials for the representation of fine art, a kinship that has been strengthened perhaps by Johnson’s playful use of pun-like aphoristic words in his constructions. However, there are few strategic parallels between Duchamp’s deconstructive objectives and posture of aesthetic disinterestedness and Johnson’s galaxy-building ambitions. Early on he called his sculptures “UNIS,” a joining of the prefix “un” and the verb “is,” to signify that his works were in a constant state of transformation and change. “UNIS is also an important word that connotes the object and the process combined. An abbreviation for UNISON, it also stands for UN-IS — both becoming something and changing at the same time.”
Johnson’s visual forms embrace a broad lexicon of cultural and historical references. His frequent use of interwoven words and images — providing the string leading through a labyrinth — creates an obscure narrative that nevertheless serves the artist’s purpose in making personal sense of a world filled with tenuous banality, social dysfunction and meaninglessness. The all-inclusive scope of his highly detailed works bring to mind art forms that are intended as aids to meditation and transcendence such as Navajo and Tibetan sand painting or tantric art illustrating the transfer of vital cosmic energy. “FOR seemed to mean FOR US — and then I saw the words FOR IS FORCE FOR US.”
The spirit that emanates from Johnson’s work is a Mediterranean sensuality that borders on opulent fecundity.
Ray Kass is a nationally recognized artist and a professor emeritus of studio art at Virginia Tech. The founder and director of the Mountain Lake Workshop at Virginia Tech, he produced workshops for Howard Finster (1985), John Cage, Jiro Okura, Stephen Addiss, James De La Vega and Merce Cunningham, among others. He is the author of many publications, including John Cage: Zen Ox-Herding Pictures (2009), The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors (2011) and Morris Graves: Vision of the Inner Eye (1983). His future plans include a retrospective exhibition of the work of the Virginia artist Georgia Blizzard, with Lee Kogan as co-curator. He is a founding board member of the Folk Art Society of America.
Interview: Martin Johnson on Collectors, Artists, Language, and Art (2013)
Originally published in myVMFA magazine (2013).
In this conversation, artist Martin Johnson reflects on his encounters with famed collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, his career in New York and Virginia, and the enduring themes in his work. He discusses repeating motifs, his exploration of language as raw material, and his fascination with bright color as both stimulus and structure.
Sarah Eckhardt: When and how did you first meet the Vogels?
Martin Johnson: I first met the Vogels in the late 1970s when I had my initial New York studio at PS1 in Long Island City. I saw them often around the city at openings and in SoHo. After I began to exhibit with Phyllis Kind, we became even closer. They came to my studio one or two times a year; and I visited them in their Upper East Side apartment, which was absolutely full of art.
Sarah Eckhardt: Were you already aware of their reputation in the art world? What did it mean to you to have your work in their collection?
Martin Johnson: They were not really well known to me early on, but they seemed to be smart, perceptive, and warm people who loved art and felt that I was doing something unusual and unique. Their enthusiasm for my work was greatly encouraging. It is a great honor to be in their collection and the 50×50 project.
Sarah Eckhardt: You had quite a successful career in New York. When did you move back to Virginia and what motivated that decision?
Martin Johnson: I moved back to Virginia in the mid-1980s. I had an opportunity to take over a family business and to continue my art while providing a better environment for my young daughter. I worked in the business world for 30 years, never ceasing to make my objects. Now I am working full-time in my Richmond studio. Having sold the family business in November 2012, I am making some of the best work of my life.
Sarah Eckhardt: You often return to certain formats or visual devices in your work. Especially in a piece like Timely, it makes an interesting reference to photography via painting. When did you start using this element in your work, and what has it meant as your work has evolved over time?
Martin Johnson: The format I have returned to since the ’80s is two-dimensional works, with a black bar with white dots at top (signifying “Time,” above all) and a white strip on the bottom with an inscription (language being an integral part of all art as it’s perceived by the mind, and the mind’s need to name). That which happens between is the Grey Matter—color, shape, and thought.
Sarah Eckhardt: Would you expand on what you mean by Grey/Grey Matter?
Martin Johnson: The endless possibilities of that which happens between darkness and light in both space and time is the stuff of artists. Thought and substance merge through the human experience; the format I use gives me the structure to express that idea while never running out of “possibility.”
Sarah Eckhardt: Would you talk about the role of language in your work?
Martin Johnson: The role of language is very important to my work. I have used the word “FOR” since 1974, as my motto, my form, and the name I have ascribed to my art makings and life. At that moment in 1974, I Meta-a-FOR, and for almost 40 years since I have been working on A-FOR-ism. I had the notion that the smallest and seemingly most insignificant thing can take on great meaning and hold mystery, desire, imagination, and the urge to penetrate realms unknown. For me, language is raw material to be manipulated and explored and trans-FOR-med.
Sarah Eckhardt: The paintings you’ve made in the past decade are extraordinarily bright. Would you talk about your attraction to this kind of color?
Martin Johnson: Bright color is both a stimulant and a structure for me. It both energizes the work and sets up a tension with the format. The colors vibrate, pushing and pulling the eye, making the experience of the work as much about perception as about content.
Sarah Eckhardt: Do you see your work as more connected to painting, sculpture, or language? Or is it equally all three?
Martin Johnson: It is equally all three. I have always thought of the work as object-paintings, with language as an inherent part of the structure. Painting is the surface, sculpture is the object, and language is the thought. Together they make a wholeness, which is what I strive for.
Sarah Eckhardt: What are you working on now?
Martin Johnson: I am working on a series that continues my exploration of the FOR motif, expanding on the play of language and color. I’m interested in how the work resonates differently now, in the present time, compared to when I first began. It feels new again, and that excites me.