Larry Johnson

Larry Johnson's work can be maddening. Sometimes the frustration derives from personal in-jokes, while elsewhere obscure references to Hollywood marginalia derail anyone who does not pride themselves on movie-industry arcana. The artist's fondness for the hard road to aesthetic epiphany also leads to works with thrillingly elliptical internal narratives that may not promise closure, but (perhaps more provocatively) tap into the pervasive anxiety of a society highly invested in superficialities.

Johnson continues to make photographs of hand-drawn animation cells, a practice that reeks of sorry obsolescence even though the end-products are as slick and cool as any art around. His palette, an icky range of pastels that could be remnants from 60s apartment building maintenance rooms, is now retro-chic. Challenging, and ultimately revealing, contradictions are Johnson's stock-trade, and art world assumptions, as well as Hollywood histories, fuel his artistic antagonisms. In the diptych Untitled (The 2 Economies) (all works 1999-2000) Johnson presents low-brow Morandi still lives of buckets, bottles and books, rendered with the minimum of detail in treacly shades of Ovaltine, peach and strawberry. On one photo, the phrase 'I deserve a Medal March 6 1999' reads across the objects, while in another, 'I deserve an Oscar May 29 1999' graces the composition. At first, the sentences come across as the sort of whining, queeny aphorisms born of boredom and self-hatred, but on closer examination come to serve as biting indictments of art world self-satisfaction. The first mocks the heroism of the Pop imperative to elevate everyday objects to the status of art, while the second pokes fun at those artists who cleverly play tricks with the intrinsic qualities of their media. Artists like Amy Adler, who draws from photographs and then presents photographs of the subsequently destroyed drawings (a practice Johnson has essentially been doing for years), or Thomas Demand, who photographs artifice to ridicule the perceived honesty of the medium, seem to be ready targets of Johnson's scrutiny. Once such an agenda appears set, however: the very specific dates Johnson attributes to each phrase brings them back to an inaccessible personal mythology, even self-condemnation.

Hanging directly across from this two-part work is Untitled (Unfinished Fome-Cor Factory), an image which could also be seen as a jab at Demand or fellow fabricator James Casebere. In it is pictured a forlorn industrial building, that, (judging from the 'Fome-Cor' sign on its roof) produces the material with which artists make their architectural tableaux. Johnson makes an iconic, pseudo-Becher photograph of the building, but of course his source is a drawing - and a cartoonish, silly one at that - whose right side blurs into a sketchy perspectival recession. Even more obvious as subject matter is the fumbling, barely literate way in which industrial America gave itself catchy names, and his eye (or ear) for the pathetic and ironic poetry of mass communications is on a par with his ever-ready predecessor Ed Ruscha. That foam-board is also the oft-used backing material of photographers everywhere gives the image a wickedly corny self-referentiality.

Architectural signage also figures in two smaller photographs, Untitled (John Sex) and Untitled (Leo Ford). In the first, a nondescript, single-story bungalow is incongruously adorned with a hand-written autograph blown up to form a giant roof-mounted sign: 'Larry Your a real hot Dude John Sex'. The billboard pokes fun at the diction of the performance artist/object of adulation, while also suggesting a public humiliation of the homeowner for his seemingly licentious enthusiasms. It could just as easily, however, be a pathetic yet sincere display of fandom, implicating not only the artist but the broader culture of autograph seekers that are a constant if unremarked component of daily life in Los Angeles. The second picture performs the same operation, but marries the oversized sign to a building of more hospitable proportions, a multi-story faux chateau equally germane to Hollywood. Such buildings often have large signs in fanciful script that help to further spin the fantasy of living a themed life, but none betray the real lives of their occupants the way Johnson's porn star pleasantry does: 'Larry Till next time Leo Ford'.

Johnson's work treads a fine line between disdain and humanism - often the two are impossible to separate. Cultural critique and self-reflection actively check and counter-check each other in his pictures until we are presented with a complex record of an artist grappling with the maddening contradictions of the world around him. As his fascinating project continues to develop and unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that Johnson possesses immense acuity.