[ED: This essay by Peter Frank was written on the occasion of the exhibition, “Open Workyards,” Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001.]

The fruits of Jim Johnson’s labors and logic are on the walls (and vitrines and tables). The key to Johnson’s thought, however, is on disk and online. His interactive CD-ROM and his Website carefully set out Johnson’s modus operandi—not so much through explanation as demonstration—inviting the visitor into the game-playing and icon-building with which the artist constructs the seemingly errant appearances, arrangements, and relationships of symbols that comprise the crux of his oeuvre. The formal and technical range of that oeuvre, from paint to print to postcard to pixel, is impressive, though secondary to the consistent—even unified—but staggeringly varied nature of its content. Picture, image cipher, sign: these are not simply the manifold building blocks of Jim Johnson’s art, they are its raison d’etre, the provocations as well as the equipment for the elaborate structures that comprise his work, work that well predates and in many ways prefigures, the desktop cybernetics of our time. The structures may be elaborate, but the artworks themselves seem simple; information-laden, perhaps, but relatively easy to see and to ‘read’ or at least acknowledge as legible. If a viewer is foreign to any apparent code, the fact that there is a process of encoding is quite evident as are the visual components of that code. Indeed, the visual components may be as familiar as the code itself is opaque. That familiarity serves to assure the viewer that the code is not as foreign as it may seem. Such assurance is not always genuine; the ever-present element of play sometimes prompts the artist to tweak our expectations—but Johnson’s encryptions, word plays, concrete poems, and typographic rhapsodies are normally little harder to decipher than a good crossword puzzle. What might throw one off, at the same time that it leads one on, is the self-contained, self-sustaining, and in-and-of itself satisfying visual presence of the image.

Johnson would have image and language conflate. He returns our attention to the iconic quality—indeed, the hieroglyphic origin—of writing. Likewise, he reminds us that the image itself is a loaded icon: nuanced, certainly, by its context(s), but possessing a fundamental power, one that derives from the fact that we read and see such an integer of meaning at the same time. This is the small revelation afforded us by the art of typography, and that revelation is writ large by Concrete poetry.
more “Jim Johnson’s Iconophoria”