Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas
‘In this period of man, after philosophy and religion, art may possibly be one endeavor that fulfills what another age might have called “man’s spiritual needs.”’ Joseph Kosuth, 19691
The exhibition, ‘Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas’, begins in the early 1970s with Johnson’s droll fixation on miniskirts blowin’ in the wind, and ends with the sugary spiritualism of his contemporary paintings. The New Wave gives way to the New Age. It is a familiar story but this passage from ironic voyeurism to sweet Enlightenment is as perplexing as ever.
At the time it seemed that Johnson had merely been blown off course rather than taken a concerted leap of the imagination. He was un-prepared for the heavy weather that periodically ran him down. There was a whirlwind whipped up by charges of pornography, and then a more grueling front of bad karma, payback for his appropriation of Aboriginal designs. No wonder Johnson’s journey appears to lack grace. For all the poetry in his art, it is difficult to detect any rhyme in his frequent stylistic shifts, as if we don’t have a bearing on the wind and currents that he had to steer between. Thus the curators, Julie Ewington and Wayne Tunnicliffe, undertake a type of meteorology: they are primarily concerned to investigate the climatic shifts in the larger habitus that propelled Johnson from voyeurism to Enlightenment, from conceptual to contemporary art.
Leaving aside the twists and turns, the most perplexing aspect of Johnson’s journey is the way in which the shameless facticity of his Conceptualism inexplicably dissolved and then drifted off into the radiant floating universe of Buddhist allegory. Thence touched by God, all that was profane became hallowed... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline