Margaret Rose Vendryes
The Ecstasy of Resistance: M. Scott Johnson, April 2015
Shadow Matter: The Rhythm of Structure/ Afro-Futurism to Afro-Surrealism brings over fifteen years of work by the gifted sculptor M. Scott Johnson to his birth city: Detroit. This is a stunning exhibition that shares Johnson’s inspired and inspirational excursion to becoming a visual artist. Ideas and theories around how the 20th-century movements of Futurism and Surrealism can apply to art of the African Diaspora are still forming, but the main thrust of Johnson’s work is established and on display. Considerations of future realms that test what we understand as ‘real’ can only enhance our engagement with these objects.
The exhibition title addresses tenets that guide the sculptor as well as enigmas that remain under consideration as Johnson continues to build his oeuvre. Structure can be appropriately described as having rhythm that can be coherent or off-kilter, soothing or agitating, stable or not. Everything that is tangible has structure but rhythm is connected most immediately to music. There is a cadence; a regular beat to the structure of Johnson’s art that is exciting. It is sturdy. Its structure is solid. Yet, many pieces float in the room appearing to hover over pedestals and pulsate within niches. This is because sound is elemental to this work.
Shadow matter is another story. It is a complicated superstring theory concerned with human parapsychological twinning that has been bandied about since 1985. The connection to stone sculpture in general and M. Scott Johnson in particular is difficult to discern until we consider the out-of-body experiences common to shadow matter activity. If nothing else is understood about Scott’s relationship to his art, it is that the stone owns him and not the other way around. He communes with his raw material and intuitively understands that, as it is with the shadow matter body, even after death there is an “indefinite survival of the human personality.”[1] Scott will live on through his art as it has been for artists since mark making on prehistoric stone walls. Not even the most insensitive among us could deny the emotional impact of handprints made over 25,000 years ago. In reality, a shadow is NOT matter since it has no mass and takes up no space.
Even so, shadows are of consequence here because, for Johnson, “shadows matter.”[2] He prefers to work out in the open where he can “watch the shadows walk” over the day to reveal “the parallel dimension, the other space where the stone is becoming … when you hit a stone you are exploding an atom.”[3] Johnson studied geology and geography bringing a sensitivity and knowledge of natural forces to his chosen profession. He is a new-millennia Afrocentric artist who Jeff Donaldson (1932-2004), artist, teacher, and founding member of Africobra would have identified as a kindred brother working a “TransAfrican style” a category of black art he invented to describe work by artists of African descent that reflect their innate duality, an art that speaks to where and when they live and work while retaining cultural bonds with Africa.[4] In the academy, this is referred to as cultural retention. What Johnson calls ‘atavistic’ memory reveals his humility before the skills he acquired and has honed into a mature signature art. Surely the knowledge of his ancestors lives within his hands. Surely credit for the work can not he his alone. I discovered a similar modesty in the late African American sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901-1989). A deep-seated humility mixed with self-effacement born out of being raised Christian as much as out of the never-good-enough scars of racist discrimination that refuse to heal. Johnson rubs pigment into the rough, scarred surfaces of many of his sculptures. A inclusion of color which is a bow to Indian conceptual sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor as much as direct contact with the stone that needed to happen because his tools do not allow it. The necessary touch that sooths after the hammer and chisel had done their part.
Johnson strives to redefine the relationship between traditional African aesthetics and contemporary African Diaspora culture beyond the simplistic ‘looks like/ is like’ analyses that dominate surface art historical treatments of African American art to consider the corporal aspect of making and viewing sculpture. From 1996 through 1999, Johnson trained with venerated Shona sculptor Nicholas Mukomberanwa (1940- 2002) in what was at the time a Zimbabwe in transition with the recent end to Apartheid reverberating throughout the region. The impact of his exposure to this labor-intensive art through hard-won apprenticeship at a moment of great tension and exhilaration can be felt in his work. An example like Shadow Matter Entity (marble, 2000) shows how Johnson learned to listen to the stone tell the way, to get swept aloft on the music made by over a dozen sculptors working individual stones with hammer and chisel that unfold like an orchestra led by a celestial conductor. But there is something else happening in Johnson’s work that is not present in the carvings by the Africans. Describing that difference is the task at hand.
In Zimbabwe, stone carving is a man’s art and the environment in which it is made is a man’s world. Visual art and culture among the Shona and their neighbors has a limited known history and little documentation exists for the objects that have survived. Even so, it is clear that stone carving was an essential skill with which the people of this region were particularly adept. The majestic stone walls of the Great Zimbabwe complex (c.1200-1450) made of split and hewn local granite were punctuated by impressive monoliths with stone birds of prey perched at their apex – sentinels protecting what and whom laid within those walls.[5] Carving, wood being the most common material, is the principle art form in Sub-Saharan Africa. Stone, a much more difficult material to carve, is favored in Zimbabwe where granite is plentiful in the highlands north of the Limpopo River. Although the softer soapstone is also prevalent in the area, Shona sculptors favor alluvial holocrystalline stone (locally referred to as springstone) that can be unyielding and unforgiving should its natural form be misunderstood.
Shona stone sculpture has been produced since its inception in the early 1960s for trade and not local consumption. It was conceived in Africa in line with the philosophy of art for art’s sake. Although the Zimbabwean sculptor Joram Mariga (1927- 2000) is noted for his experimental carvings in soapstone in the years closely following WWII, it is the British artist Frank McEwen who is credited with promoting and advancing an intermingling of European and African aesthetics during his tenure at the National Gallery in Harare. Along with showing the work of avant garde European artists like Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore in Zimbabwe, McEwen exhibited native artists encouraging them to tap into their cultural capital and create art that could compete with the Africa-inspired art made by European artists. Nicholas Mukomberanwa (1940- 2002) was one of McEwen’s star artists and his sculpture is said to exemplify the “conservative modernist approach” that is the hallmark of stone sculpture coming out of Zimbabwe.[6] An example of his work, such as Desperate Man (1988), show a machine-like angularity and high polish that, in its abstraction of human form, speaks to the ill effects of industrialization on the body and the mind. All the stonework is entirely worked by hand without the aid of power tools. It was this wielding of power – this pushing the material until it yields – the “ecstasy” of overpowering the “resistance” of the hard stone is what seduced M. Scott Johnson to leave the security of home to learn how to understand and shape stone. His trust in Mukomberanwa’s words “The truth of a sculpture is located in the shadows” reverberates in Johnson’s practice. However, simply paralleling Johnson’s work alongside that of Shona sculptors is much too simplistic and does not do his work justice.
Although he is a ‘direct’ carver who charts the stone under his hands with an instinct honed over time and with diligent practice, there are sketches and drawings and paintings and collages that reveal that charting is also undertaken on alternate surfaces in thought out preparation for the stone. There is merit in these works that foretell what is to come in the round, but they are in the end adjuncts to Johnson’s ultimate goal: the sculpture inside the stone. The connection to the Shona tradition is evident, but Johnson is not a Shona sculptor. Shona sculpture, with great ingenuity and skill, began as a consumer product geared towards a marketplace that embraced and supported its growth as a decorative art. Johnson saw had higher goals for this work.
Johnson took what he learned in Zimbabwe home to begin a career as a trained sculptor with Africa under his skin. Here and there, the influence of his Shona mentors appears on the surface in early pieces like Chiminuka (springstone, 1999) where the mask-like faces hover within the form, but the true virtuosity of his personal style emerges in the serpentine undulations of St. Leroy and the Dragon (marble, 2006) or HR-40 is the Key (marble, 2000). These works, where the hard stone appears like flexible sinews, intestines, or arteries that pull back and push forward, deny the solidity of their material. These are not easy, decorative pieces, as so much Shona sculpture truly is, they demand much more of us as viewers. Signs, symbols, punctuation marks are newly invented and in need of deciphering. Scott cites Elizabeth Catlett and Afrofuturism as inspirations. “Afrofuturism is a home for the divine feminine principle, a Mother Earth ideal that values nature, creativity, receptivity, mysticism, intuition, and healing as partners to technology, science, and achievement.”[7] It is no coincidence that artists like Catlett are celebrated as Afrofuturist progenitors for using their imagination as “a space of resistance.”[8] Johnson, too, revels in the resistance of his material anticipating the thrill experienced when it yields to his tools – what he refers to as the “ecstasy of resistance.” A passing glance will not suffice upon encountering the marble memorial The Target: Remixing Elizabeth Catlett (2003).[9] We need not know Elizabeth Catlett’s (1915-2012) 1970 bronze titled Target that inspired this piece to recognize how that work spoke to Johnson. The fracturing of coherence, the loss of control, and the implied violence of that seminal work from the African American art historical canon is expertly transcribed for the 21st Century. Afrofuturism is an uncanny effort to reconnect with nature without forgoing the advantages of the machine. The charcoal sketch for this piece is a map scored by suture marks within forms that echo engraved metal ceremonial axes of the Thonga and Venda peoples of Zimbabwe and Mozambique, but also the Mangbetu of Central Africa. Johnson has created a non-specific Africa; his is a global African aesthetic.
Norman Lewis (1909-1979) is held in high esteem by Johnson as an early master of Abstract Expressionist painting inflected with African American experience. Lewis’s jewel-like renderings of color and light in oil on canvas are today legendary in American art history. In his time, he was a second citizen of that seminal movement. We can see the influence of Lewis most clearly in Johnson’s small sculptures in scarce Calcite orange and other translucent rocks, which are difficult to work into his signature style because fine details get lost. However, he admits to enjoying variety in stones especially those that give off a “delicious inner glow.”[10] Like jewels, both raw and polished, encase forces of nature revealed only in part when strategically placed under light, there are many ways to engage with Johnson’s sculpture. It is something particular to the viewer, every angle that tells a story – reveals a narrative. Johnson falls into an introspective place when attempting to describe how he hopes his narrative will be written. He believes that “every artist has a narrative or a perceived narrative about what it means to be an artist.”[11] Once he was introduced to Shona carving, Johnson recognized the importance being in Zimbabwe “to build [his] narrative.”[12] Johnson knew immediately that Shona tradition would be a part of his narrative, but not all of it.
Unlike the smooth jazz that was an integral part of Norman Lewis’ studio life, Techo and House tracks inspire Johnson’s unexpected turn towards hyper-popular music. “The stone is about me trying to create a harmony like songs…creating a track in Techno/House music… layers, ambient sounds.”[13] This engineered electronic music was born in Detroit out of 1970s funk and disco music with an ear towards building a new sound for the future. Disco turned into “house” music, which is more laidback than Techno’s complicated rhythmic, and usually fast, beats that are simultaneously compressed and pulled out.[14] An example of this audio influence on Johnson’s carving can not only be seen but felt in Tao of Physics (marble, 2003) where the variety in the surfaces are expertly balanced in a rapturous, sweeping dance.
Portraits, such as Anderson Mukomberanwa (marble, 2002) carved of pristine white marble is as much a reflection of the man it memorializes as what that man represents – a brother in art who understood the importance of pure sensory engagement to any artist who strives to know the world fully. The unmarred whiteness of the stone is an apt representation of the pure blackness of this African man. Such are the inferences that can also be made for the delicate Sabrina (marble, 2006) vertical and sturdy, rough and smooth, hued pink like flesh that has never seen the sun. Again, this portrait is for a person of African decent. And then there is Gill Scott-Heron (marble, 1999) a spoken word artist and prophet-like figure who, during the Vietnam War era, moved a generation to speak out against that unwanted conflict. There are the voids, negative spaces as important to the structure of the piece as much as the stone itself. Those spaces, and the shadows they enable, activate the work to represent life in all its facets and mysteries.
A portrait made via abstraction can reveal much more than one realized through naturalistic representation. The story of Picasso’s, and his compatriots and followers, early 20th Century adaptation of African art forms to invigorate his art is thoroughly documented.[15] A generation later, beginning with the writings of philosopher Alain Locke in 1925, earnest attempts to claim ownership of an aesthetic legacy in
traditional African arts were made by African American artists.[16] The spiritual underpinnings of classical African sculpture are not fully understood today. Yet, those objects that survived the devastation of colonization are revered for their manifest visual power. Conserving and preserving the cultural hybridity that is African America’s legacy is important to M. Scott Johnson’s professional agenda. It is an honor that we have an opportunity to encounter the work and the artist while he walks among us and is able to tell his narrative and inspire the next generation of artists.
[1] Douglas M. Stokes’s review of Shadow Matter and Psychic Phenomena by Gerhard D. Wasserman offers an accessible overview of shadow matter theories. Journal of Parapsychology (September 1993)
[2] Interview with M. Scott Johnson at home in Queens, New York, 16 February 2015.
[3] Interview
[4] Michael D. Harris, “Double Consciousness to Double Vision: The Africentric Artist” in African Arts, Vol. 27, No. 2 (April, 1994), 45.
[5] For an excellent overview of Great Zimbabwe in context with art of the African continent see Monica Blackmun Visona et al., A History of Art in Africa (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2008), 471-491.
[6] Visona, 491.
[7] Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013),101.
[8] Womack, 103.
[9] AKA Life vs Inspiration (the Target) tribute to Elizabeth Catlett (marble, 2003) is in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Collection, New York.
[10] Interview
[11] Interview
[12] Interview
[13] Interview
[14] New Yorker staff writer Nick Paumgarten interviewed Detroit photographer/videographer Will Calcutt who gives a smart “Brief History of Techno” which includes examples of the sound. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/audio-a-brief-history-of-techno accessed 3/23/15.
[15] An in-depth treatment of this subject can he found in Peter Stepan, Picasso’s Collection of African and Oceanic Art (New York: Prestel, 2007).
[16] See Charles Molesworth, ed., The Works of Alain Locke (the Collected Black Writings) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).