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It’s Spring, 2003, at the SECA Awards
lecture at San Francisco MOMA. Chris Johanson is the last of the four
recipients of the prestigious emerging artist award to speak. The other
artists are relatively well-groomed, conservatively dressed and polite;
one is shyly funny. They’ve shown slides and cogently talked the
audience through their process. Then Johanson takes the stage. His hair
and beard are long and wild. He’s wearing well-worn, long cut-off
work pants and a tee shirt. He steps up to, then immediately backs away
from the podium, away from the mike and out of the spotlight, saying “I
can’t see any of you and it’s tripping me out, can you turn
the house lights on please? I’m so nervous right now.” The
crowd laughs in empathy. The house lights come on and Johanson smiles,
scans the audience, and begins his presentation.
Johanson rambles, digresses, voices his opposition to the impending war
in Iraq. He swears. He uses the words “trip” and “tripping”
a lot (as in, “I try not to trip on that”). On one slide,
he pauses for a full five seconds, then says “That’s just
like, whatever,” The next slide is a painting of an interracial
couple having sex on a countertop. A full five second pause before Johanson
says “That’s just about making love, really.” Big laugh
again. But Johanson also repeatedly hits on much darker themes: people
crowded into cities, war, disappearing redwood forests and pollution,
and, amid it all, staying positive in a world full of negatives.
Chris Johanson is nonlinear, spacey, excessive — and he has the
crowd in the palm of his hand.
Most of the crowd, anyway. After the first few minutes, one of two fashionably
if conservatively dressed middle-aged women turns to her companion and
stage-whispers, “He’s an outsider artist.” A minute
later, they get up and leave. Johanson is just getting warmed up, and,
after showing a few more slides, stating that “all mediums are golden”,
he begins the video portion of his presentation. Johanson is known as
a painter, not a video artist, and he’s already over time.
After another fifteen minutes and one amateurish but amusing video of
a man roaming the California coast dressed up as a conquistador chugging
wine from a jug and pompously claiming this land in the name of his queen,
Johanson — at this point fully impassioned, offering big gestures
that sometimes send his hair flying — finishes his now boisterous
performance. As if coming out of a trance, his discomfort returns, and
he quickly thanks the audience and leaves the stage, to rousing applause.
It’s easy to see Chris Johanson and think of two other oft-bearded
American artist/iconoclasts: Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsburg. But with
his risk-taking delivery and eccentric bearing, Johanson also brings to
mind another, unexpected American figure: comedian Andy Kaufman. In his
work and his speech, Johanson, while fully engaged and engaging, simultaneously
seems to be off in his own unreachable world. Also like Kaufman, Johanson
constantly treads outside of established boundaries, colors outside the
lines. And most of all, Johanson is always straight-faced and super-earnest,
but underneath it, somewhere, there’s the hint of a wise-guy wink.
You can never quite tell when Chris Johanson is just playing.
The two women who left the SECA presentation early were wrong about Johanson.
Of course, such terms aren’t necessarily absolute, but if one is
either an outsider or not, Chris Johanson is no outsider. He has been
an integral part of a thriving and internationally recognized art scene
in San Francisco’s Mission District for the past fifteen years,
and is considered a founding member of what’s been coined the Mission
School or Urban Rustic group of artists, which includes Barry McGee, Margaret
Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, and Johanson’s best friend Chris Corales.
Johanson’s art career started in high school, when as a skate punk
in San Jose he made posters for friends’ punk rock shows. After
a stint in college, he arrived in San Francisco in 1989, bought a sharpie
marker, and began drawing crude figures — thoughts of urban angst
scrawled above their heads — in public spaces throughout the city’s
then-gritty Mission district.
In ‘95, his friend and fellow artist Scott Hewicker asked Joahnson
to split a show with him at the offbeat Jack Hanley gallery. It was the
beginning of a personal and professional relationship between Johanson
and Hanley that has thrived to this day. Hanley describes the work at
that first show as “all about this figure Negatron who was a guy
laying in the gutter.” Hanley recalls that not much sold at that
first show, but that one important collector did, surprisingly, and perhaps
presciently, buy a piece. Over the next two years, Johanson kept on working
feverishly and started showing more work in Hanley’s gallery and
other offbeat venues. His big San Francisco break came when he was selected
for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ biennial show, Bay Area Now,
in 1997. Over the last decade, Bay Area Now has become the major coming
out party for young northern California artists. Curator Renee de Guzman
recalls that graffiti-turned-celebrated-museum-artists Barry McGee and
Margaret Kilgallen recommended Johanson. As de Guzman explains, “When
someone like Barry comes out, everyone’s looking for the same thing.
Chris shared some of the same sensibilities, but brought his own genius,
language and color.”
In 1999, Hanley took Johanson to the Liste exposition in Basel, a major
showcase for alternative artists, where he was a hit. With the successes
of Bay Area Now and Liste, Johanson was suddenly in demand without ever
showing at what he calls a “hip downtown gallery”. To this
day, Johanson takes pride in making work in public spaces, and in bookstores
and warehouses as well as in established galleries and museums.
By the year 2000, Johanson was internationally known and making his living
from his art but still hadn’t really established himself in the
nexus of the establishment art world, New York City. Then Johanson was
selected for the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Curator Larry Rinder gave Johanson
the choice of a traditional gallery and the space he really hoped the
artist would choose, the museum’s four-story stairwell. Johanson
chose the stairwell and, with the help of a team of San Francisco friends
and the Whitney installation staff (even Rinder stayed up late nights
painting the walls with Chris and his troupe), turned it into an epic
“picture about the place we live in called Earth that is inside
of this place we call space” that started on floor one with two
distraught men sitting in the depths of a dark, hardscrabble plywood underworld.
The piece then steadily rose to a brightly colored, nearly utopian climax,
where figures dangled from the ceiling, floating in a galaxy of planets
with names such as “plants and animals”, and “soothing
energy”, but also a few others that still hinted at the darkness
below, “cold” and “anger” and “grey area”.
In the middle of the starry night sky sits a gigantic yellow sun emblazoned
with a big “SUN” with text below: “the main reason why
far away yet very very close to us all the time the light of the spirit
whose warmth is always with you”.
In the New York Times, Holland Carter ripped the 2002 Biennial as a whole,
but closed with a rave about Johanson: “With its almost childlike,
graffiti-based images and its huge ideas, Mr. Johanson’s work is
an inspired addition to the show, and to this city right now.”
If you ask friends and colleagues why Johanson, with his unsophisticated
style and stream-of-consciousness wordplay, has succeeded, you’ll
get a variety of answers. Chris Corales and Jack Hanley will first mention
how hard and constant a worker Johanson is, how making art is an essential
part of his day-to-day existence. Another close friend, Andrew McKinley,
the owner of what Johanson calls his “home” in San Francisco’s
Mission, Adobe Books, attributes Johanson’s success partly to his
unique ability to communicate: “He speaks simply for a lot of people
who don’t get a lot of say.”
SFMOMA curator Janet Bishop echoes McKinley, but adds: “Chris’s
work has a sense of coming straight out unfiltered. He’s able to
tackle both the little and big issues with such humor and inventiveness.”
And Yerba Buena’s de Guzman talks about Johanson’s way of
incorporating bohemians of the past like the beats and the hippies into
his punk aesthetic, while throwing in the Andy Kaufman trickster factor
that adds another level to the seemingly direct work: “We’re
never sure how much he means it and how much is tongue in cheek.”
But everyone who’s worked or hung out with Johanson talks about
his success in terms of his ability to build and work with community.
Friends eagerly fly to New York to help build an installation; curators
stay up late at night painting museum walls.
To sit with Johanson at an outdoor café in the middle of his San
Francisco home base on 16th Street is to sit with someone very reluctantly
holding court. From time to time, people approach, some exuberantly, some
hesitantly. Johanson is gracious to all of them, but you can tell he’s
not exactly comfortable with the attention. He’s not just Chris
from the ‘hood anymore, and while he certainly doesn’t complain
about his success, he’s not exactly in his element being an alt-culture
celebrity, which may be part of why he’s grown the beard and the
long hair over the last two years: his scruffiness at least somewhat separates
him from a system that he vehemently disdains. As he puts it, “White
male power structure equals evil to me. With the beard, white store owners
don’t like me in their stores anymore, security guards watch me.
But energy on the street is better than ever.”
The next moment, Johanson talks about his hate for the government and
its wars and then about corporate greed. But, conscious of his new, more
privileged position in the American food chain, he also discusses success
and ambition: “When I was a kid I was ambitiously looking for places
to skate and then I was ambitiously making fliers for friends’ bands
and then I moved up here and I ambitiously started a band and ambitiously
started making paintings. By ambitiously, I mean with full energy.”
Now, in a move that has shocked many friends and colleagues, Johanson
has moved to Portland, Oregon. In Fall 2003, Chris Johanson married fellow
artist Jo Jackson. The year before, the couple moved home and studio across
the San Francisco Bay to Oakland, both for more physical space and some
psychic distance from their Mission community. But Johanson found himself
coming into the Mission — to Hanley’s gallery and Adobe Books
— every day that he was in the Bay Area.
He and Jackson began looking to buy a house in or around San Francisco,
but grew more and more frustrated with the area’s inflated real
estate market. The following summer, while visiting friends in Portland,
the couple bought a house, and in December 2003 they moved north.
After more than a decade of frenetic activity in San Francisco, and with
more and more of his work involving people crammed together in the inner
city contrasted with the rapidly disappearing beauty of nature, it was
apparently time for Chris Johanson to leave the Mission.
On the phone recently, after his first month in Portland, Johanson discussed
what comes next. He has upcoming shows in Paris, Scotland, Israel, London,
Cincinnati, and back home in San Francisco. But what seemed to excite
him most is what he and Jackson are working on right now: “Our garden.
Building a modern earthy sculpture house in our back yard out of found
wood and filling it with indigenous plants."
In discussing this seemingly personal backyard project, Johanson is upbeat
and as ambitious as he would be about the grandest of museum installations
- and his voice doesn’t betray even the hint of a wink.
***
(To see some of Chris Johanson's work, see: http://jackhanley.com/id53.htm)
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