Exhibiton Text — Waiting Room

Kristina Johnson
I’m as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth
Exhibition Text by Jaysen Hohlen

“What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence—it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.”

-Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Hearts are wild, so place your bets. Hit, but don’t bust. Kristina Johnson does not hold her cards close to her chest in I’m as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth. The life of an artist is as cruel as it is optimistic. What to do when the rejection letters pile up, or your credit card declines, or that collector never emails you back? These works break from the fierce monotony of being an artist, echoing a leading principal in Lauren Berlant’s seminal work Cruel Optimism. This book outlines the trappings and fallacy of “the good life.” In the space between debilitating work, global capitalism, and the myth of upward mobility, the concept of Cruel Optimism takes shape. The image is optimistic. The mirage is cruel. Johnson incorporates both through a myriad of practices, materials and representations. Pleasure is the guiding force of her investigations; consumption, the gaze, and the nostalgic object. Some call it perverted curiosity, others call it being overly sentimental.

The found objects in this exhibition hinge on cruelty and optimism. Spanning across the gallery are several wooden blocks forming a horizon line. Covered in a faded blue floral design, There was, there was, and then there was not once formed the walls of the artist’s great grandfather’s home in Norway. The house, now gone, can only be remembered through its fragments. Neon red coasters, emboldened with the phrase we’re glad you’re here!, are also present throughout the gallery. Found while clearing out her late grandmother’s home, Johnson has since had hundreds remade in her memory. Their replication and excess spilling over a section of drywall. Its phrase, an optimistic sentiment imbued with both nostalgia and irony, articulates the artist’s circular relationship with object and memory; the pleasure of remembering and the pain of forgetting. After all, a coaster can only be examined in the absence of a drink on top of it.

A box of chocolates, horizontal women, and self-suspension. These watercolor paintings offer up a backdoor to stereotypical representations of feminine sexuality. Reclining women are appropriated from the heterosexual pornographic gaze. Pulled from the imagery of the highly contested works of painter Balthus, Johnson’s works on paper begin to take shape. The late painter, who is known for his erotically charged depictions of young girls, came under controversy in 2017. That year, a petition garnered over 8,000 signatures that demanded the removal of his painting Thérèse Dreaming (1938) from the walls of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.¹ Although the museum ultimately refused to remove the painting, questions of how we as viewers should engage and circulate his imagery (and others like it) remain in our collective consciousness.

In the piece Guitar Lesson, which echoes the 1934 painting by Balthus under the same moniker, the hands of a man caress the sitter’s vagina and breasts. Her face is cast in pastel pinks and browns, her body taking form through precise lines and generous negative space. Inversely, the man remains mostly unrendered; his face consisting of broad gray brushstrokes. Although the title suggests that he is the active participant, a player strumming an instrument, he is cast aside, relegated to the inconsequential, but not removed. All the while, she leans back in the chair, her arms stretch out behind her.

These images are about her; her stillness, her pleasure. Instead of opting to rehabilitate these women from their perceived lowered positions, the artist leaves their bodies as is; spread open on a chair, tits out, mindlessly ingesting sweets, their gazes unmet. In Berlant’s essay, Slow Death, they depart from neoliberal formulations of agency; the mobile subject, independent, and self-actualized through privileged access to capital. For those of us not lucky enough to meet this criteria, Berlants opts to illuminate an agency that embodies “small vacations from the will itself, which is so often spent from the pressures of coordinating one’s pacing with the working day.”² They refer to this positioning as a lateral movement, or self-suspension– devoting the power and momentary pleasures required for self-maintenance, of coming to stillness, or of buoying oneself along in a world that would like to sink us. This position is not to be confused with powerlessness, or even passivity. Entangled in these histories of objecthood and reproduction, these paintings momentarily fall prey to this conventional lens. Johnson fields these anxieties between layers of transparency and opacity, strategically rendering figures and tending to moments of gratification. They are at once restrained, and dynamic. By departing from convenient readings of patriarchal power dynamics, we’re encouraged to perform an against-the-grain analysis. These works do not restore a power lost, rather they uncover one already there.

1 Libbey, Peter, “Met Defends Suggestive Painting of Girl After Petition Calls for Its Removal,” The New
York Times, Dec 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/arts/met-museum-balthus-painting-girl.html

2 Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 116.