Rindon Johnson’s Virtual Sublime
Last chance to see Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves at Chisenhale Gallery
Rindon Johnson, Coeval Proposition #2: Last Year’s Atlantic, or You look really good, you look like you pretended like nothing ever happened, or a Weakening (2021). Installation view Chisenhale Gallery, 2021. Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London and SculptureCenter, New York, 2021. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.
Rindon Johnson is a Berlin-based artist who creates his work with both physical materials and virtual spaces. In his integration of virtual and actual realities, he questions the ways in which the virtual and physical, as well as the imagined and the remembered, are connected. His work Coeval Proposition #2: Last Year’s Atlantic, or You look really good, you look like you pretended like nothing ever happened, or a Weakening (2021) is an exploration of weather, data, and the terrifying beauty of human existence. Currently showing at Chisenhale Gallery in East London, this work is a must-see for anyone interested in contemporary art.
As you walk through the door into the exhibition space, you’ll find a large screen on the floor. It’s dizzying, like those chalk drawings of big holes on the ground that can feel daunting to walk over. The work is a single-channel video projected onto a screen in the middle of the room, slightly raised off the floor so that it almost appears to be floating. Throughout 2020, Johnson collected the weather data from a specific area of the North Atlantic ocean, then used this data to create a second-for-second visualisation of the entire year in this specific spot. This CGI figuration of data is what is projected onto the screen, and it looks like a livestream of the ocean. Over the course of the exhibition, anyone who visits will see a digital re-rendering of the weather data gathered for that exact day and time the previous year. In this way, Johnson has essentially created a seascape that evolves through time and perspective: at times it shows the ocean, the horizon, and the surrounding sky; at other times it shows the ocean surface itself, making it feel as though you could fall in. Johnson’s body of water is contained by its borders, in the form of the rectangular screen, but it’s also constantly flowing, moving, and shifting alongside recorded changes in the weather. The result is a thread through recent history, constantly tying us back to this moment last year, providing an alternate, parallel timeline.
Rindon Johnson, Coeval Proposition #2: Last Year’s Atlantic, or You look really good, you look like you pretended like nothing ever happened, or a Weakening (2021). Installation view Chisenhale Gallery, 2021. Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London and SculptureCenter, New York, 2021. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.
The geographic location of this spot in the Atlantic Ocean is pertinent in a few ways: first, the Atlantic has immense historical and cultural relevance to Johnson’s perspective as a Black American, described best in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. Second, this spot is the approximate midpoint between the two galleries that have hosted Johnson’s Coeval Proposition #2: Chisenhale here in London, and SculptureCentre in New York. Finally, this specific area of water is also in the middle of the North Atlantic ‘cold blob’: an area of the ocean where the temperature is continuously dropping, while the water surrounding it is getting warmer — an impact of our ecological crisis. This ‘cold blob’ is slowing down the Gulf Stream, the consequences of which are just another facet of the unceasing results of climate change.
Rindon Johnson, Coeval Proposition #2: Last Year’s Atlantic, or You look really good, you look like you pretended like nothing ever happened, or a Weakening (2021). Installation view Chisenhale Gallery, 2021. Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London and SculptureCenter, New York, 2021. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.
The work is long — 366 days long (2020 was a leap year) — and as such it cannot be consumed by the human body: we physically cannot view the whole piece at once. The vastness of the project becomes too big to imagine, and the result is a kind of antithesis to quick content, the easy, bite-sized videos that we’re so accustomed to today. The size of the work comments on the limitations of human existence — nature always has been and always will be bigger than us — yet this is juxtaposed with the reality that human existence in its current capitalist form is damaging the natural world beyond repair.
The sheer vastness of the work, in length and in concept, is also reminiscent of the sublime, a theory developed by Edmund Burke in the mid-eighteenth century. Burke defined sublime art as art which refers to a greatness that cannot be calculated, measured, or imitated. The sublime is portrayed through vast landscapes, where nature is both beautiful and terrifying in its expansiveness far beyond human experience and understanding. A popular artwork utilising the sublime is Caspar Friedrich’s 1818 painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Considered to be one of the masterpieces of Romanticism, this traditional representation of the sublime presents the white male gaze over nature, and as the male figure in the painting observes the landscape before him, he dominates the scene, prominently positioned in the centre of the work. The painting is fixed, it shows one perspective: the male character’s view, not ours. In contrast, Johnson’s work presents a new, decentred gaze: it is in transit and in trans-ness, alluding simultaneously to massive global structures but also to Johnson’s personal trans identity. Unlike Friedrich’s painting, Coeval Proposition #2 is not didactic: it remains open to interpretation, yet it doesn’t lose the beauty or the terror of the sublime. Like the climate crisis, it feels massive and infinite.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, c.1818 [oil on canvas].
In this way, Johnson is both questioning and consolidating traditional ideas, shifting through both time and perspective. His work orbits these ideas, but it is not limited by them. As an algorithmic process, the work seems to be as live and unpredictable as nature itself, but the data is set in stone; it has been predetermined. This duality contributes to the ways in which the work resists categorisation — even the title of the work holds multiple options within itself. In an interview with ArtReview, Johnson says ‘I would hate to make a work that is static’. This much is clear: waves continue to flow, the sun rises and sets, and the world goes on. Johnson’s explorations of capitalism, climate change, and technology continue to raise questions on the future of the planet and the future of humanity, and a focus on the unknown continues to highlight the ways in which we will continue to question our own selves and our ever-changing bodies — we will never be exactly the same as we were at this moment last year.
Coeval Proposition #2: Last Year’s Atlantic, or You look really good, you look like you pretended like nothing ever happened, or a Weakening (2021) is available to see at Chisenhale Gallery until February 6th. You can also watch a video tour of the show with commentary by Johnson here.
