In April 1965, Harper’s Bazaar unveiled an edition of the magazine guest-edited by photographer Richard Avedon and dedicated to “the off-beat side of Now.” Borne of a moment of upheaval not unlike the one we’re currently living in, the issue explored the people and ideas that were shaping the era. Sixty years later, we’re marking its anniversary by talking to some of our own era’s most influential figures and faces about the idea of the Now.
The idea of “now” has always been central to my project as an artist—and it’s central because it’s complicated. There is often a sense of urgency in the way artists talk about the current moment, but also a constant sense of reflection.
This body of work I’ve been making, “Soul Paintings,” speaks to that idea. It has come out of a transition from a previous body of work I’d started making about 10 years ago called “Anxious Men,” which was a group of drawings and paintings that unpacked anxiety—and in some ways served as an attempt to navigate both my own anxiety and the collective anxiety we all experience.
The making of these “Soul Paintings” happens to coincide with a moment when I think that soul-searching is really at the heart of what a lot of us are doing as we think about this political moment, this spiritual moment, and how we imagine or conceive of our essence. Something I often try to do with my work is answer unanswerable questions or participate in the illustration of things we sometimes struggle to illustrate. What does a soul look like? And how do you bring that to life?
When we say the word soul, I think we all, in our own ways, understand what we’re talking about. But if I were to ask a bunch of people individually to describe very specifically what a soul is for them, then I’d probably get a range of different answers—in terms of both what one looks like and its philosophical and spiritual components. The soul is an idea that we all collectivize around and simultaneously have a lot of trouble defining, so these works are my way of exploring that.
In April, there is a survey of my work opening at the Guggenheim in New York [“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers”]. The survey is a dangerous game for artists. It’s a scary thing to do because it forces you to look back on everything you’ve made and done—and what you’re always afraid to find in that process is contradiction. There are very few jobs in life where we look back at what a person thought or produced in their early 20s and then platform it with the same gravity and agency as the things they made when they were older or knew more or had arrived at more advanced stages of their thinking.
I do get a lot of joy out of artists who do things or make arguments that aren’t in line with their previous work or positions they’ve taken. But it’s terrifying to be witnessed yourself in that way—to have other people witness your own naiveté.
What I’ve come to recognize through this process is that as much as I think I’ve evolved or grown or learned, there are a lot of things I understood early on that were really prescient—and significant to whatever it is that I think I know today. In some ways, I may have been even more right about some things.
There is a film I made not that long ago that’s a part of the exhibition called Sanguine, which is about me and my father and my son. You only have a certain period of time in your life—and not all of us are lucky enough to have it—where you’re a parent of a child and the child of a parent.
Sanguine is about how you live in that liminal space: how you imagine it, the complexity of it, the density of it, the weight of it. But it also serves for me as a reminder that all my work in a way has become a kind of index. There are signs and symbols I’ve been reflecting on throughout it—and I’m still adding to them. But I’m less interested in abandoning older ideas now and more invested in incorporating new ones, while still giving weight to the ones that have come before.
Some of my earliest work was photography, and photography is still very much a part of my thinking. It’s a process that is inherently subtractive. It takes from the world. It’s as simple as when we say we take a picture—meaning we steal a frame from a moment with the photographer. Henri Cartier-Bresson called it “the decisive moment.”
This idea of taking from the world our snapshot, our piece, our moment has continued to be present in my work, whether it’s the way I mark surfaces and paint or treat a canvas, or work with branding or wax that I tear away, or the use of mirrors I scratch or surfaces I remove material from. I think my work finds its most ambitious reality when it allows the taking of something to be as important as the birth of something.
I’ve always been interested in different approaches. My father was an artist. He worked in ceramics, photography, painting, sculpture. My mother was a poet and academic. There were always these intersectional identities in my home, folks doing multiple things. The idea of specializing in one thing or another didn’t seem to fit with how I thought. I liked sports. I liked theater. I liked writing. I liked painting. I liked sculpture. I liked film.
As you get older, you start to see the world differently. When I was younger, I would use the studio as an escape from everything else. It was a place I could go to reflect, to explore. I’d think about history. I’d think about other eras. I’d oftentimes try to actually push myself outside of the present moment—and it was very effective. I was also drinking at that time, so I had tools for escape.
I’ve been sober now for 10 years, and one of the things I’ve learned from that experience is the importance of being present. The filmmaker Akira Kurosawa used to say artists have one job: to never avert their eyes. I’ve taken that on to some degree. It doesn’t mean that I’m always making work that is a direct reflection on the moment we live in. But I always try to be very present and aware, so I’m not escaping. I’m living in the world with everyone else.
