Sculpture Magazine
Review of Andrew Ellis Johnson installation, "Spring: Let them keep their
children 3-4; tethered." Harlan Gallery, Seton Hill College, Greensburg, PA
Andrew Ellis Johnson has gained a reputation for patching together traditionally
irreconcilable languages of contemporary sculpture. He selectively juggles
materiality, theatricality and topicality to immerse the viewer in
paradox. With an eye for the irrational and tragic in politics, a
passion for objects and a droll sense of allegory he manipulates
narrative from street corner anecdote to autocratic proclamation, with
critical intent, but sometimes just for his own amusement. Amusement is
one of the dilemmas at the center of Johnson's newest installation titled
"Spring: Let them keep their children tethered". To be sure, its
amusement deferred as the victimization of children in over 60 war-torn
nations has inspired the artist to address the issue of abandoned land
mines.
Johnson has produced 10 4x8 ft, concrete slabs which are distributed
uniformly across the gallery floor. On each piece he inscribed ten
different hopscotch diagrams gathered from across the globe. A few contain
numbered squares, some are assigned alphabetically, while others are
completely blank, all variations of the ubiquitous grid that children
gleefully navigate. Most are designed with simple rectangles and triangles
but a couple are more complicated with circular or elliptical spaces laid
out at the crown. Each gray 2 inch slab, etched with what could be a plan
of a pre-teen's first lesson in border skirmishes, are as stark and heavy
as minimalist dogma would have it, detailed only by an occasional
rivulet of stress fractures. Scattered among these sarcophagi-like
casts lay a collection of animal traps, partially embedded in the frozen
aggregate.
Each expectant trap has been painted with a benign pastel pigment, thereby
providing its conceptual camouflage. If not closely inspected they pass
as toys or oversized bracelet charms. A background audio tape of
exuberant children depicts absent prey. Viewers can easily imagine
themselves or their children as participants in this drama of loss of innocence
and shunned responsibility. But before one becomes too
wistful, the sound of play is interrupted by the echoing of sprung steel traps.
Johnson appears to have two ambitions with this work. One is to remind us
that minefields remain a catastrophic reality for over 100,000 children a
year and as a result, many remain literally tethered to their homes. The
second is to suggest that the art gallery which modernism submits as a
free and neutral zone is also not secure. The aesthetics of anonymity
and autonomy feted in late modernism, the logic of post-colonial
oppression and the indifference concerning proliferation of arms and
legacies of years of so-called limited aggression in developing nations
is conflated in these indifferent objects in this nice white gallery.
The sculptor prods the history of reductivism with specific reference to
Carl Andre and Donald Judd without rehashing conventional critiques of
minimalism's descent into stylistic absolutism or for that matter
specifically equating modernist form as dehumanizing. He is more
interested here in lamenting how easily history and meaning can be
disassociated. Johnson's work is in fact about disclosure rather than
closure. He asserts that radical formal and conceptual gestures need not
be bereft of conscience.
The viewer has to rely on ordinary experience to assess what's left after
the transgressing of familiar art conventions and tropes. These
dramatizations of real politics with which he bathes the art object are
remarkable and psychologically agonizing. And given the weightlessness of
much popular installation art, that is, their seeming indifference to the
conceptual framework of the monument from which sculpture emerged, they
are profoundly allegorical. Notwithstanding Rosalyn Krause's pivotal
essay articulating modern sculpture's antagonism to the pedestal and the
monument, a residue of commemoration has remained at the core of
sculpture, now paying homage to actual experiences, ordinary speech and
underrepresented communities. Andrew Ellis Johnson resuscitates codes gleaned
from the history of an acadamized avant-gardism by grounding them in real
politics and subsequently exposes some of the traps inherent in the
ideology of the artworld/real world divide.