Rashid Johnson Antoine’s Organ, installation view, Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2016.
Photo : Martin Parsekian, courtesy of the artist & Hauser & Wirth, New York

Rashid Johnson : Plants, Presence, and Care

Giovanni Aloi

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When, in the summer of 1936, Edward Steichen’s selectively cross-bred delphiniums were displayed at MoMA in New York, the public wasn’t ready to take them seriously as art. But Steichen’s flowers bore the seeds of an important revolution to come — as they were among the very first living beings on display in an art museum, they posed an unprecedented challenge to the conventional notions of authorship, permanence, and purity. Surprisingly, these delphiniums had nothing to do with the flowers painted on canvas during the Dutch Golden Age. They were truly silent; they had nothing to say about religion. They proudly flaunted their beauty with the confidence of autonomous, living art objects.

In the late 1960s, Hélio Oiticica’s installation Tropicália reinvented plants once more. His potted palms and dracaenas played a dual political role. On the one hand, they ironically purveyed a stereotypical vision of Brazil as a wild, green paradise. Their presence alluded to cultural politics and the reduction of complex ecosystems such as the Amazon forest into exploitable commodities. On the other hand, their material presence contaminated the purity of the white cube, letting the real world spill into the safe space of representation.

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