five | rindon johnson

This editorial accompanies Rindon Johnson's first solo exhibition at the Berlin gallery. Based on the science fiction novel Clattering by Johnson and Rainer Diana Hamilton, five presents an expansive installation, parts of which were created on the occasion of Johnson's nomination for the Future Generation Art Prize 2021. For the exhibition five, the multimedia installation will be embedded in an expanded exhibition concept with new works by the artist.

Further detailed photos and information on the individual works as well as the complete titles of the works, which resemble poems, can be opened by clicking on the respective images.

Follow Rindon Johnson through the exhibition with the audio walk.

The novel Clattering is created in collaboration with writer Rainer Diana Hamilton and challenges our accustomed view of relationships, hierarchical structures and systems of reproduction. In Clattering, there is no gender, hunger, war, or physical violence, and yet certain feelings and emotion remain familiar and intensely palpable.

On the occasion of the exhibition, five, the first 40 pages of the novel were published, providing a glimpse into the literary underpinnings of Johnson’s works. 

Johnson's artistic practice expands his writing into spatial installations that incorporate various elements or media. In the novel, Sima, one of the five main protagonists, masters the craft of glass and dreams of expanding on its capabilities. The three-panel glass window Clattering is a manifestation of Sima's window that bridges the gap between fiction and reality by blurring the boundaries between narrative and physical image.

Clattering unfolds an auratic effect through incoming sunlight, which the artist places in the context of abstract expressionist painting from the 1940s to the 1960s, in which emotion and spontaneity took the place of formal compositions. Like Mark Rothko's color-field paintings, Clattering demands to be viewed over an extended period of time. In doing so, Johnson incorporates external influences such as the cycle of the sun that alter the work's effects and bring out various auratic qualities within the exhibition space. In his examination of glass, the artist cites – as in many of his works – parts of American cultural history, such as the production of faceted glass. In Clattering, Johnson returns to his interest in Tiffany Glass and its contemporary reproduction. Using Tiffany Glass for his window Johnson plays through multiple narratives simultaneously: that of the story of Clattering and the historical use of Tiffany Glass and its status symbol for a certain American high-end consumer at the beginning of the 20th century, doubling down by replicating (or appropriating) the Jugendstil motifs of nature that were transferred onto the shaped glass.

Installation view Law of Large Numbers: Our Bodies, SculptureCenter, New York (2021) | Photo: Kyle Knodell

The sculpture Fruit of the poisonous tree, Higher and more free! [...] (2023) is made of ash wood and acts as a handrail leading into the exhibition. As infrastructure, it serves as a support while blocking direct access into the space. Johnson's recurring architectural interventions reflect social systems and their physical manifestations in space, referencing inequalities and exclusionary qualities. He addresses the consequences of these conventions and the underrepresentation of particular social groups in social structures. By guiding viewers through the exhibition in a performative act, he allows them to specifically experience the manipulation of architecture – such as the influence of a wall in the room or the opening Examples: laughter in the morning and tears in the afternoon [...] to the outside. Johnson creates a procession through the exhibition in which he breaks down convention. The asymmetrical geometric structure of the sculpture is based on the number five, which Johnson and Hamilton use as the basis of the novel Clattering to describe the multiplicity of possibilities and a collectivity beyond our familiar binary. In the science fiction novel, five characters are necessary to create offspring.

Beyond the pines, pines, pines, pines [...] (2023) is a wall stacked from used bricks that extends through the space like a wave. Johnson is referring both to Sol Lewitt's walls in the "Hoffman Garden" in Dallas and to the vernacular of crinkle crankle walls in the UK. While Lewitt pursued this form to follow the roots of the oak trees in the garden, the walls were originally used because they required less bricks due to their serpentine structure. Dissolving architecture as a purely screening element that defines an inside and an outside, Johnson was interested in these parallel forms and the possibility that he might take them to continue his questioning of belonging and demarcation. These walls sometimes evoke associations with themes such as migration and surveillance but they also might simply mark, over here and over there. Johnson reflects on the effects of spatial design on how we feel and behave, questioning how we fit into and find ourselves within these larger structures. Johnson pulls this form indoors as both a tool and a taunt; boundaries to the artist are both artificial and inherently fragile. 

Now you tell me. Like always, so much depends on a single white chicken in the orchard. [...] (2023) consists of five screens that transmit live streams of varying airport runways from around the world. International air traffic can be followed 24 hours a day, placing the viewer in a voyeuristic position of witnessing the constant movement and interconnectedness of our globalized world. Again, the artist chooses to cut into another reality where events can be observed, but the visitors stand outside these events. Akin to the consideration of the open window and the brick wall, these aggregated live streams examine the implicit fictions that influence our view of socioeconomic systems. Now you tell me. [...] symbolizes the contemporary capitalist narrative that time is too scarce to pay attention to the consequences of saving it: the permanent interconnection of places through air travel takes precedence over the well-being of the planet and a sustainable approach to it.

Johnson's detailed work titles poetically raise additional questions regarding autonomy and power that embed the artist's linguistic dexterity as a textual extension. Johnson's reflections always start from the possibilities and quality of language, and find their influence in the form of the titles that accompany the works like poems. They are an essential part of the work and, drawn by the artist's subjective impressions, they elude unambiguous readability through deliberate ambivalences.

→ artist page Rindon Johnson