JOHHNY HAMMOND is an artist based in Kentucky. Adam Turl interviewed Hammond in early 2020 for Locust Review.
ADAM TURL: Your work is political but also has this salvage / gothic / expressive quality that a lot of contemporary political art seems to lack. Of course, all artists have a theory of their artwork. I want to ask after yours.
Johnny Hammond: I had two epiphanies during my artistic development. One was that our current political/social system was unjust and the second was those systems had always been unjust. I, like so many, had been conditioned to be obedient and not rock the boat. Sadly, it took the upheaval of the perceived status quo to open my eyes. Seeing that the mass media had replaced our subconscious, I wanted to subvert that in my work.
AT: One of the things we’ve been discussing a lot at Locust Review is Mark Fisher’s idea of “capitalist realism”; that political and cultural ideas have been increasingly constricted over the past few decades to only those things which seem to be of use to capital. One of the things that is interesting about your work, it seems to us, is that it seems like a subconscious rebellion, a reassertion that there may be something outside of that capitalist realism. Can you describe your working process, how you come up with your ideas, and how you chose your materials, and how these fit within your conceptual framework?
JH: My work is a cathartic reaction, through the creative process, to my angst or agitation at the world around me. Anger is a driving force in my work. Hope is a cruel illusion to the problems I see in our social political landscapes. It’s like a band-aid to a gunshot wound.
How I come up with my ideas is as simple as reading the newspaper, checking twitter, or listening to someone talk. Listening is the easiest yet hardest thing for most people to do. It is not just listening though but listening with an open mind and a moral compass that is not state issued. My ideas are often related to issues that are hidden from the public and found out later, or horrid acts which we are told are for the greater good.
My material of choice, as of late, has been language, but more specifically newspapers. I have been using newspapers for a couple of reasons. One, as an artifact of the current social and political news that I am highlighting. Two, another reason for using newspaper is I want to get the audience to be drawn in and read the newspaper articles. If I can hold their curiosity with reading bits of the text on my work, perhaps I can draw them into what my work is trying to communicate. The drawback with using newspaper is that the truth is too often filtered.
Another material I mine is symbols. The symbolism of the American Flag, a door, newspapers, are all loaded with short hand anyone can understand. Now, that understanding is different to each person depending on their background, which leads to interesting discussions. My goal is to layer or subvert the symbols in such a way as to have my audience discover we do not have all the same associations. I want to break up some of that naiveté, which is a source of so much apathy to one another’s struggles.
AT: How do you see the relationship between individual expression -- artistic and political -- and the collective or universal idea of expression or social emancipation? One of the things the artist Anupam Roy talks about is “the impossibility of representation” -- of the need to find new ways to talk about the suffering subject.
Only in the last couple of years have I gone from making work based solely on my memories to work based on social/political problems. In all of this it is still my individual expression that connects to the universal idea of expression. One can research a hundred artists making work based of the concept of sorrow and they all express the concept of sorrow. Yet every artist from that research is talking about sorrow from their individual perspective. Universal expression is the heart pumping blood, and our individual expression is the blood. One informs the other and vice versa.
I agree with Anupam Roy on “the impossibility of representation,” and the finding of new ways to talk about suffering subjects. The artist must be careful to not mine the suffering of others from the safety of their studios. Examples in art history abound with artists who are tone deaf and profit from the tears of others. I cannot speak on the suffering of another person but what I can do as an artist is fight the whitewashing of truth. On my Hidden Flags series, two of the flags list dates, names of events, and facts about the issues I’m trying to illuminate.
AT: Can you talk about the dates, events, and facts you are trying to illuminate in the Hidden Flags series – and how you are dealing with a symbol like the American Flag that, while meaning one thing to most people in the United States, has become a symbol of war and oppression, for example, in much of Latin America and the Middle East?
JH: To a portion of middle and lower class white Americans, they believe in the symbol of the American Flag. They say the “Pledge of Allegiance” and believe every word of it. The tainted Kool-Aid of McCarthyism and the media driven dream of the nuclear family has installed the symbol of the flag in a false reality. It is not only Latin America and the Middle East that see the flag as a symbol of war and oppression, but here in America, for the poor, women, and minorities. What I’m doing is removing the viewer’s ability to claim innocence. If you view the work and read the text then you can see that the American flag is not clean but drenched in blood, sweat, and tears.
In Hidden Flags: Division, the flag is done in black and white with the text listed in the stripes. The information listed is events of race riots in America between African Americans and European Americans -- information not taught in schools, discussed by the government, or encouraged by the status quo. In Hidden Flags: Strange Bedfellows, the American flag is printed with swastikas on the red stripes and text in the white stripes. The flag explores the connection between the United States and the German Nazis that were given a new lease on life here in the United States despite their connections with war crimes. The text information is of clandestine operations sanctioned by the United States to further scientific and information networks.
Johnny Hammond’s Cane I Come In?
AT: You write in one of your artist statements about information and books – and remixing the content of books by “cutting up strips of sentences from book pages and looking at how the sentence fragments” interact with each other. I was hoping you could talk about that. It almost seems like a conscious – or intuitive – performance IRL of what happens in online digital spaces. It also echoes the “impossibility of representation” – the varied and chaotic jumble of social life. Some of our editors have been doing simultaneous reciting of short stories from Locust Review, creating a audible jumble of words. I also recall the nonsense poems of Zurich Dada, mirroring the failures of international communication in the lead up to World War One.
JH: It was at first more intuitive than anything conscious when I was experimenting in the studio. A physical manifestation of what was going on in my head. At that point I was studying Zurich Dada, Roland Barthes, and other artist writings. I had kind of rejected painting as a way of expressing myself and was in search of something that spoke for me but not in my voice. The atavistic joy in deconstructing books by the cutting of paper was the release I was seeking. Slowly my pile of cut strips became like a mythical magpie nest full of words. In video performances that lasted from 5 to 18 minutes, I would draw out random strips and read them out loud creating a new narrative. Later I asked other artists to take my place in the performance further removing my hand. I liked the idea that anyone could sit down and make their own narrative out of the nest, therefore making it everyone’s nest and no one’s nest. In the end I decided to reforge the freed sentences by printing my selections on a Vandercook press. The result was word-salad short stories that made sense only in an Alice in Wonderland kind of logic.
AT: What do you think the relationship is, in your work, between what you call the haptic (related to the textural and associative) vs. optic ways of seeing, on the one hand, and the social and political content of your work, on the other. I ask because this seems to echo Amiri Baraka’s description of the artwork of Emory Douglas as “expressionist agit-prop.” Crudely, the haptic being the expressionistic and the optic more closely related to the scientific. Of course it is more complicated than that. There is a poetic logic to each. In the haptic the memories of deindustrialization, of rust, of what it is to be working-class in the rust-belt. Without the optic, without the political, this texture could be seen as an echo of mere ruin-porn, but with it, it becomes something more.
JH: I think it was an intuitive desire to express myself with the material I was using, which was newspaper. American Guernica, my large scale collage re-envisioning of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and Can I Come In? my series of collage on doors, both use newsprint as the main material. Even before I started working on these, I found it curious how we (society) treat/perceive newspapers. One would think with the importance we place on newspapers that we print on better paper. There was something in the cheapness of the paper and how cheaply we think of news media that took my interest; the haptic of the newsprint and the optic of the news on paper. This can be broke down further with the other material used in the construction of both works. The doors I use in Can I Come In? are not fancy, just basic white six panel classic American doors. Most people have one in their dwelling now or lived in a dwelling that had one. Like the newspaper, we all haptically understand a door as part of a gateway or transition between areas, but there is also the politics of a door. Doors were my simple if heavy handed way of talking about the insane border issues of our country. When I was creating American Guernica I had been thinking of wheat paste posters and the newsprint is sort of applied in that way.
Johnny Hammond’s American Guernica
All of the work I made for my exhibition, Read between the Lines, seeks to enlighten the viewer. Enlighten is a soft word choice, because what I am really trying to do is distract in order for the shock to work. The haptic way people see how I have used the flag generates a distracted agitation in the viewer, which upon closer inspection of the optic, the politics of the work will shock the viewer. I am not so naïve as to believe the work I am trying to do will convert anyone to a saner outlook, but I am interested that by rattling them, good or bad, that I am making them think.
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