A Medium That Speaks

The moment my eyes fell onto High John the Conqueror, they were transfixed by the challenge presented. As I walked around the tall marble sculpture by M. Scott Johnson in the Unruly Navigations exhibition, my viewpoints changed with every step, causing the piece to contort and mutate right in front of me. From some angles and distances, I recognized a human eye and the contour of a brow. But then, from others, there was the outline of a bird’s wing as well as its downturned beak. My brain could only attempt and fail to piece together something that it had never before conceived.

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High John the Conqueror was inspired by an artist file from Zora Neale Hurston that Johnson read while doing his residency at the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture in Harlem. In this file, the renowned author tells a story about the African-American folklore hero High John the Conqueror, a trickster figure that has the power to shapeshift—thus providing background to the piece’s transmutable nature and its ability to "trick" your eyes. According to African-American mythology, this "Afrofuturist deity," as Johnson refers to him as, originated in Africa and then manifested into the New World during the Transatlantic slave trade. At times, he himself was enslaved whilst being in the Americas, though his spirit was never broken. In fact, he would often use his powers to deceive slaveholders as well as to unify enslaved peoples. In the traditional tale that Hurston wrote about, he shapeshifts into a crow, visits other slave plantations, and grabs enslaved peoples’ spirits out of their bodies. In gathering these spirits, he provides a space for enslaved people to rest and be together all whilst their physical bodies remain on the plantations. This story and others contribute to his standing as a symbol of Black liberation and autonomy at a time where it seemed impossible to exist. Johnson encompasses this energy in the piece, as well as in the process of creating it.

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Johnson’s relationship to his medium is a center point in his artistic practice. With his sculpture, he employs an approach known as direct carving where one does not envision or anticipate a final form, but rather the form emerges from the process. He never aims for a specific shape, instead choosing to trust the spirit of the medium by letting it guide him through the work. "Chase the mistake" is a phrase that he uses to encompass this approach, and it is an attitude which instructs the relationship that he builds with the medium. He recognizes the materials he uses as sentient beings, and rather than ordering or demanding them, he treats them as his equals. Considering this, his artistic practice is not so much sculpting as it is having a conversation with the material. He relinquishes control, thus opening their relationship up to unpredictable possibilities—or, in his words, "chasing the mistake."

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When I heard Johnson explain his relationship to his medium, I was fascinated by his emancipatory approach and began to conceptualize it within a broader cultural context. Domination and ownership are acclaimed principles forged by colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. These values are embedded in our culture, contributing to obsessions that are less popular in other cultures such as home ownership, professional positions of superiority, or wealth and power in general. By treating his artistic medium as if it is a living, breathing entity, Johnson challenges traditional American constructs of power and introduces new principles of freedom and self-determination that are derived from a framework of African-American mythology.

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High John the Conqueror allows us as viewers to look beyond the superficial, hedonistic surface of what we consider to be American culture and to appreciate African-American cultural values that have been historically neglected. In his work, Johnson aims to create something that has never been seen, and this piece perfectly encapsulates that as he brings to life this representation of Black spirituality, a piece of the intricate web that the African diaspora consists of. High John the Conqueror is not just a glance into the glossed-over depth of Black spiritual culture, but it is also an interruption to the American values that we are conditioned by today. Johnson’s art and his artistic practice are not newly imagined approaches; they are a way for him to materialize an existing past, and they are a protest to the idea of what American culture is, allowing us to envision what it can be.