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Acrylic Ink, 27” x 33”

Interview from ARTLines, 1981

MOST of the time, we go about our lives not recognizing how absurd, perhaps even shocking, our actions and daily habits might seem to an outside observer. But should we find disgust in the idiosyncrasies of our neighbors — their sexual kinks, eating habits, private internet history, bathroom routines, and role play — and look upon them without reflection, empathy, or understanding, we’d only be looking at them through a clouded mirror.

But take a closer look at Carl Johansen’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. If you don’t see normal people doing normal things, then are you really looking? Yes, there’s blood, amputees, disembodied heads, references to fellatio, cunnilingus, sex dolls, and BDSM. Is this longtime resident of New Mexico merely poking fun at polite society by us showing its underbelly?

It's the world we live in, sure. But cynics don’t make art. The impassioned do. And Johansen recognizes that the society we’ve created has a shadow, which goes unloved and unrecognized. To understand the absurdity of Johansen’s imagery at all, first get to its humanity. Then, it all makes a little more sense.

A man can be a dog, bound up, down on his knees, his snout at crotch level to his mistress, which is just the way a figure is depicted in one of Johansen’s paintings. This is a metaphor. But there’s truth in metaphor; a man can be a dog. There’s a wicked humor in the reference to BDSM master and slave in this and similar works by Johansen, but there’s no judgment in them. Comedy yes. But comic foils are like sages. We need them.

In another painting, young man rises from the sea holding a head on a pike, as if it was some perverse representation of the ultimate “selfie” stick and shouts out “fuck you” — a rejection of all the folly that surrounds him, a folly of which he’s an inherent part, because Johansen drew him that way. It’s funny, but it’s painful too, because we all feel that way sometimes, like we’re a part of some crazy nightmare, and we’re drowning in it. We can’t wake up, and we don’t know what to do.

Born at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina to a father in the Marines, Johansen grew up emulating cartoonists like Ed “Big Daddy” Roth (creator of the hot rod icon Rat Fink), Robert Crumb, and S. Clay Wilson, among others, but especially Crumb. “I think he’s a genius,” he told ARTlines magazine in 1981. Crumb is a satirist of American life and founder of the underground publication Zap Comix, which provided a critical voice to artists of the 1960s counterculture. The influence of such satirical cartoonists is present in Johansen’s work to this very day. It’s evoked with the simplicity of a rough outline or sketch and caricature-like nature of his figures.

Johansen’s works might inspire laughter, then unease, because he’s shining the light on us. But they’re open-ended in the narrative sense, reflecting the roles we play in our interpersonal relationships and the nightmare scenarios that are self-created.

He never crosses the line into gratuitous depictions of sex or violence. Discomfort isn’t the point. Truth is. Rather than a glorification of the perverse, his work indicates acceptance of it, or at least a willingness to understand.

The disembodied head of a blow-up doll, its O-shaped mouth ready to receive, is a recurring motif. But it seems to be there, more or less, when a man can’t see beyond his unrealistic ideals, when he can’t see that the doll is a poor substitute for a human lover or that a human lover is no doll, but a being with a will of her own.

But does he deserve scorn over his relationship failures? The floating head tells him “You were always a loser.”

Is it comedy or tragedy? In Johansen’s work, there really is no difference. —

Michael Abatemarco

PLEASE BE ADVISED:

Due to the nature of sexual content / violence / smoking ;

Much of this show contains material that is not suitable for children.

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