"My work has always had concerns around race, struggle, grief and grievance, but also joy and excitement around the tradition and opportunities of Blackness."
—Rashid Johnson

 

Rashid Johnson’s enigmatic portraits unmask the face of anxiety, astutely laying bare the fragility and turbulence of the human condition. Executed in 2020, Standing Broken Men is the culmination of more than two decades spent mining the intersections of subjectivity, abstraction, and sociopolitical precarity. An intricate mosaic of mirrored and vibrant ceramic tiles, it features Johnson’s distinctive boxy, abstracted bust motif rendered in a various assortment of media—including black soap, wax, oil sticks, and red oak flooring. The work illustrates the graphic and tactile breakthroughs of his recent Broken Men series, which he began in 2018 as the continuation of two acclaimed bodies of work that featured gridded portraits on tiles: the Anxious Men and the Anxious Audiences (2015-2018). Visualizing the fragmentation of postmodern identity, Standing Broken Men is emblematic of a singular chapter in Johnson’s career, other examples of which are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

 

The notion of the face as the image behind which selfhood and interiority hide can be traced back to the very beginning of the artist’s career as a young photographer in his native Chicago. Captured in the late 1990s, his straight-on portraits of homeless men of color were printed with analogue techniques that framed their subjects in brushy, agitated rectangles. As Johnson’s focus shifted from reproducing individual subjects’ likenesses to more abstracted visages, the internalized disquiet he had been seeking to represent came to the fore. The grids of tiles and faces in the Anxious Men became an ordering principle, a foil to psychological anarchy; Standing Broken Men disrupted this uniformity to unleash the internal turmoil that lies within. Signaling a departure from Johnson’s earlier monochromatic palette, the present work evokes the full emotional range of anxiety through a kaleidoscopic array of askew shapes and shattered rectangles.

 

 

The shards that comprise Standing Broken Men can thus be read as a metaphor for the complexity of identity—the fabrication of selfhood symbolized by the careful balance of composite elements. At first envisioning this body of work as self-portraits, Johnson soon realized the universality of his interrogation of subjectivity in the face of heightened discussion surrounding issues of race and social justice in the United States. The fractured components of Standing Broken Men imply a violent collision between individually- and collectively-constructed identities: the shattered mirror tile in the figure’s chest brings both physical and psychological bloodshed to mind. In light of changing political conditions and attitudes, the work’s multivalent depiction of the body as a site of tension is rife with individual and cultural symbolism.

"The beginning of [the Broken Men] parallels the beginning of my thinking about how an art object is made."
—Rashid Johnson

Johnson’s choice of media almost always carries personal or public significance, and his frequent use of black soap, which appears in Standing Broken Men, is similarly dense with social connotations. Produced by combining shea nut fact and the ash of foliage, the substance is commonly used by members of the Black diaspora thanks to the widespread popularity of its homeopathic benefits in West Africa. The artist’s decision to adorn the figure with stroke of such a symbolically-rich material denotes the inextricability of his sense of self from his African heritage and acts as a tangible link to his ancestry. Despite these associations, Johnson’s meditation on the nature of identity is intended to resonate beyond specific cultures and customs. “When I call these works Broken Men, I didn’t intend to gender or race them,” he elucidated. “It was meant as a stand in for the human condition.”ⁱ

 

In presenting a universal account of the experience of anxiety, Johnson might have pushed the subject of Standing Broken Men to the point of no return. The figure has an ambiguous countenance: it is possible to interpret him as a fragile and frail inheritor of the worries of the world, or as the apprehensive bystander of contemporary society’s injustices. But it is also possible to view Johnson’s shattered figures in more promising terms—that the union of disparate parts into a vibrant, dynamic whole might allude to the potential for restoration, solidarity, and renewal. Evocative of the improvisational idiom of Joan Miró, the expressive gestures of vivid oil stick suggest that these figures are not just existential portraits of our times. “They also could be more magical,” Ian Alteveer, the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, articulated of the Broken Men: “strange new beings on the brink of a brand-new world.”ⁱⁱ

 

ⁱ Rashid Johnson, quoted in Nadia Sayei, “Rashid Johnson on broken men, the black body and why Trump is bad for art,” The Guardian, November 25, 2019, online.
ⁱⁱ Ian Alteveer, quoted in Hilarie M. Sheets, “In Rashid Johnson’s Mosaics, Broken Lives Pieced Together,” The New York Times, September 23, 2021, online.