Back to Work: Bec Tudor speaks with artist Anthony Johnson about an eventful 2007 and the year that lies ahead.

Anthony Johnson is flicking through documentation of six year’s worth of work and exhibitions. He’s methodically mapping-out the trajectory of his practice, by way of introduction into our conversation about the recent developments in his accelerating artistic career. For someone whose submission to CAST’s recent annual member’s show was a pink fitball inflated within the confines of a pair of bad boardshorts (Kelly, 2007), Johnson speaks about what he does with surprising solemnity. His tendency to manifest absurd situations between objects and himself comes across with the absolute force of vocational conviction.

Anthony Johnson in his home in Hobart. Photograph by Bec Tudor

Like most artists, Johnson has his regular day job. But what seems to drive Johnson’s determination to make is an attitude towards art practice as inseparable from life and work. Earlier in his practice this manifested itself in seemingly paradoxical ideas of sculpture as action. Inevitably, it’s also come to engage his own body as both agent and object. He is interested in evidencing actions having taken place, without necessarily resorting to performative modes of aesthetic delivery.

Since Johnson constantly draws creative inspiration from his everyday experiences and environments, it is to be expected that autobiography play a large part in his work. Yet, when he flicks to an image of his as yet un-exhibited 2007 sculpture Dude I’m initially too shocked to recognise the mass of cream-coloured foam (adorned with black sneakers and a baseball cap announcing FREEDOM with the image of a caribou) for the horrible doppelgänger of the artist that it is.

Dude 2007. Photograph courtesy and copyright of the artist

Tudor: Whoa, I’ve never seen that work before!

Johnson: Yeah, this is a crazy studio experiment mucking around with expanding foam…and it just goes too far! It can almost be seen as a self portrait because the shoes and the hat are things I purchased for myself at certain points in my life where I guess I was aspiring to be something else. We all end up buying things we look back on and go: Why did I buy that? Now I don’t even know how to relate to it! Those sorts of things often end up in my studio and they get used in works occasionally – it’s the only way I can do justice to them without feeling so bad as to throw them away. So in some ways it’s kind of like an exploded self-portrait. I’m looking forward to showing it. On all angles it really grosses you out.

T: This dude is on his side with a leg in the air, floundering. It’s like he wants to get up but he can’t.

J: Yeah, but he’s still trying to look cool. Like: Maybe I’m break dancing, but I’m kind of fucked-up and losing it! It’s all wrong isn’t it? But it really makes me think of – and I hate to say this – it really makes me think of kids down at the mall, trying to be bigger and better than they are. And this whole ‘bling’ fascination of people just really wanting to overdo themselves through fashion and stuff.

T: Do you laugh while you’re making works like this?

J: There are moments. When I started to muck around with the expanding foam I wasn’t thinking of doing a work like this. What I was doing involved a freestanding fan, it was a play on the term ‘shit hit (the) fan’ and so this fan had a big growth on it that spun. I got too ambitious about how big I wanted it to get and eventually it snapped off. I was like: You idiot! Of course it was going to do that. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s so dumb! I was so disappointed at the time. The title is probably even what I said when the fan thing broke: DUDE! What are you doing? You idiot! So then it related to these bits of clothing that were kicking around my studio. It’s this embarrassing look at yourself – wearing it on your sleave – how embarrassing things can be sometimes.

The self-deprecating Dude seems a healthy outcome from a remarkable year, which in fact, left very little for Johnson to be embarrassed about. In 2007 his work was featured in three significant exhibitions beginning in May with the solo exhibition Better Solutions for Bad Ideas. Conducted under the logo of AMJ Utilities, this exhibition took over the entrance, project space and storeroom of Inflight artist run initiative in North Hobart. Johnson transformed this site into the simulacra of a stereotypical workplace via indoor plants, packing crates, framed certificates, commercial signage etc. His intervention conducted a brilliant and subtle deconstruction of the inner-workings of Inflight past and present, as both an organization of individuals and a physical location.

Then in August he appeared in the group show Your call is important to us curated by Craig Judd at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s heritage Bond Store. The irony of TMAG choosing such an idiosyncratic historic venue for an occasional exhibition of contemporary art was not lost on Johnson, who responded by dumping two large, seemingly unrelated objects into that space; the rusted carcass of a burnt-out car (Living Dead, 2007), and a museum vitrine filled with the contents of his own studio, turned on its head so the legs stuck into the air like bloated roadkill (Untitled (museum practice), 2007). That this show fell during the event, Living Artist’s Week, was not unrelated to Johnson’s decision to present these two dead beasts. While it was difficult to read the sculptures in dialogue with one another, each performed a critique of the values surrounding history, preservation and display within the museum context. Evident, also, was the artist’s questioning of the relationship of the contemporary artist to the authoritative status of our cultural institutions.

Within just a few weeks however, Johnson found himself negotiating a much heftier institution when he was selected for Primavera, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual showcase of ‘hot’ Australian artists under 35 years of age (24 August – 4 November 2008). Despite the prestige of his achievement, Johnson is cynical about the idea that Primavera represents a major turning point in his career:

J: You know, going into this show I didn’t really feel like a young artist - I felt like a young artist ten years ago. I’ve been chipping away at my practice for a really long time and I really found it hard to believe this show alone was going to bounce me off into opportunities I could never imagine.

That said, when he began discussions with the curator Christine Morrow he couldn’t have foreseen he’d end-up reconstructing from scratch a loathed item of furniture from his past. Primavera features existing (as opposed to new) works, but it just so happened Morrow chose two of Johnson’s works that, for different reasons, were no longer existent in their original state. The original Upgrade (of the artist’s fridge-unit), first exhibited at Firstdraft ARI in Sydney in 2005, was a superfluous fridge-unit that had come with Johnson’s Bondi flat. Relocating this object to the administration area of the ARI and hoisting it up on car jacks until its top was flush with the ceiling, Johnson temporarily transferred his daily ‘spatial problem’ onto the gallery and its volunteers. Since living in Tasmania he’s been free of that irksome fridge-unit…until now.

J: Christine wanted me to do a version of Upgrade…, she was quite cut-and-dry about her ideas as to what she wanted - as you would be when you are curating a big show. I had very amusing, endless email discussions with her about how this work could exist and some of her ideas were really wacky, which lead me to the conclusion of making a beefed-up fridge-unit on steroids. I wanted the fridge-unit to reflect a sort of aspired-to economic growth, an inflation that boasted (embarrassingly) the egotistical rise of my ‘artistic status’ from ARI to MCA via a spatially intimidating fridge-unit. I sent the MCA all the specs about how to construct my old fridge-unit and they fabricated it for me. So when I turned up, there was my fridge-unit, re-fabricated and ready to be assembled. I hadn’t seen in three years…and it had grown! Upgrade (of the artist's former fridge-unit) 2005-7. Photograph courtesy and copyright Jenni Carter, MCA.

Allowing others into the planning process and the creative act itself, would be a difficult ask for an artist accustomed to being their own chief cook and bottle wash. For Johnson, navigating the shift from ‘doer’ to ‘instructor’ to realise the works for Primavera was a communicative and conceptual challenge. This was especially true for the temporal work Downgrade (2005-07), a garden mulcher with which the artist gradually processed a pile of new wooden Ikea furniture into a beanbag slip.

J: I spent a lot of time resolving how Downgrade could exist when the show lasts for three months and I’m not there. I didn’t let these things become resolved on practical levels by the museum. I made sure that they all stayed on board as conceptual elements in the work. The MCA is such a large institution, it’s a machine in it’s own right. It’s the sort of situation that if you’re not really adamant about the way you want to resolve your work in the context of this show, things can really be taken out of your hands. So there were points where I needed to say: We’re not going that way with this work, it’s got to be this way, unfortunately. And when I did, they were completely respectful of those decisions. So it was one of those things where I had to keep myself in check and think: Is this what I want – is this the integrity I want this work to have?

T: Was it hard to trust gallery staff to mulch the furniture in Downgrade for you?

J: I was conscious of creating a huge burden for them as museum staff. There were around ten sessions of mulching that they did. I got them to decrease the whole contents of all the furniture by a tenth, not in any systematic way. It was really about training them not to be precious about it. There is no hard and fast rule, it’s really rudimentary, it’s really chaotic and I want it that way. Everything had to be hacked down with a small axe in order to be fed into the mulcher. It was a really labour-intensive job and I was concerned as to whether or not they would be able to pursue it because I knew it was a really full-on thing to take place in the gallery. But they did it amazingly well, so I was stoked. There was just a lot of respect for the artist, and I notice that with the MCA in general, they seem very dedicated to what they are presenting. And for good reason too, they’re a museum for god’s sake! There’s not an ulterior motive there, and sometimes I’d anticipate that there would be in a museum. It was good to walk away from there very positive about what certain art institutions are doing for artists.

Downgrade 2005-7. Photograph courtesy of Jenni Carter, MCA.

Primavera tours to Adelaide’s Samstag Museum in April, where yet again, Johnson will re-resolve these works for a new space. He has a few small projects lined-up for later in the year including a self-initiated group show with fellow artists Kel Glaister and Sebastian Moody at Linden Gallery in Melbourne, but he’s clear about the fact that while 2007 had an emphasis on exhibitions, 2008 is a year for concentrating on new work. So this is perfect timing for Johnson to receive his first residency. From November he’ll be based at The Australia Council for the Art’s Los Angeles studio for three months. It’s easy to see how California, no doubt, will be fertile ground for an artist whose practice is concerned with material consumption, waste, productivity and futility.

J: It’s going to be fantastic. I think LA and that whole Californian-dream culture will be really interesting in terms of the way I think about my work, and think about our relationship to objects. It really epitomises western culture at this point. Growing-up through my teenage years, all the best stuff came out of America. It was this hub that pulsed all the greatest of popular culture. It seems to be a place that was too optimistic and too positive for it’s own good. It’s beyond anything we have here.

So it seems the year ahead is shaping up to be just as eventful as the one that’s just been for this Hobart-based artist. If Dude (2007) is any indication however, wherever Johnson’s career might lead him, he’ll bring along a keenness to acknowledge, with good humour, the ridiculousness of being a contemporary artist, and for that matter, a contemporary human being.

Bec Tudor is a Hobart-based writer and current PhD candidate at the Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania. She is also a member of the stock editorial team.