The word “directionless” can be a humbling one to utter. Now make it a noun. It’s a mouthful, right?
The artists Rashid Johnson and Firelei Báez witnessed me stumble through enunciating the five syllables of “digh-RECK-shuhn-luhss-nuhss” a handful of times over the course of our call earlier this month. The occasion was an expansive group show that saw Johnson tap three other prominent practitioners represented by Hauser & Wirth—Báez, Charles Gaines, and Cristina Iglesias—to select artists and work that echoes with the title “Directionless.” The resulting chorus of 28 voices, ranging from Ali Cherri and Todd Gray to Meg Webster and Teresita Fernández, is open to the public on Hauser’s Menorcan property through Oct. 25.
I mention the difficulty of saying the word because it mirrors, in a sense, the show’s underlying curatorial thrust—to disconcert, shake up, or reroute the linear logic and groupthink that’s left us worse for wear politically, energetically, creatively, and humanly in contemporary life. Báez, Gaines, Iglesias, and Johnson approached artists whose work leans into turbulence, refuses or refracts legibility, and generates unpredictable pathways. As the world decelerates ever so slightly during the summer, “Directionless” asks its viewers to privilege the slow reward of looking for looking’s sake.
Here, Báez and Johnson sound off on archipelagic thinking, cynicism, and the dangers of uniformity.
How did you two first connect?
Rashid Johnson: I think we were first connected by someone. I’m trying to think of who it was. It must have been three or four years ago.
Firelei Báez: It was either [Guggenheim curator] Katherine Brinson or [artist] Simone Leigh.
Johnson: I was already familiar with Firelei’s work, and was really intrigued by it. We had a chance, at that point, to talk about our projects and how to navigate the clumsy world we both occupy.
Where do your stories with Menorca begin? Hauser & Wirth, the gallery you both share, has had a space there since 2021. Rashid, you and Sheree [Hovsepian] announced a residency for artists and writers there just a few weeks ago. Firelei, have you been there? What does it evoke for you both?
Báez: I’ve never been there. I actually had a friend recently who moved there and purchased some land. Everyone says it has very positive vibrations. I’m looking forward to being in a sunny place that has good energy like the places I grew up in, places that have such a long history and nature as an anchor point. There were pirates on Menorca for a very long part of its history.
Johnson: It’s changed hands a number of times because it’s got the deepest port in all of Europe, so it’s been of interest to superpower navies for hundreds of years. There’s that legacy here, which is an interesting and complicated one, alongside the pirate history. It also has this interesting history of independence and independent thinking, which is consistent in a lot of islands. These very specific cultures are groomed and born there that oftentimes have a fierce autonomy.
I first came to the island 10 years ago with [Hauser & Wirth president] Iwan Wirth, when he was thinking about building the gallery here. He took me to the small island where the gallery is now housed. It was a ruin, more or less, what felt like an ancient ruin. On that trip, I fell in love with the island. My son was 4 at the time. He loved it. It’s got this patina, this certain kind of dusting, that some of my favorite places have. Now I live here part of the year.
What has it brought out of your own work, Rashid?
Johnson: There are a couple of things that have been born of my time here. I spend a lot more time looking at the work of artists like Miró, who I think share with me a post-medium sensibility and a willingness to transition to different aesthetic solutions. Thinking about the nature of the artist who lived and often worked in Spain, you see Picasso, Miró, who kept evolving their practices. There is this malleability in their projects.
Báez: And curiosity.
Johnson: Yes, curiosity. That fits my ambition and honestly, my palette. I keep recognizing how I’ve changed as far as my flexibility and my willingness to [use] new colors. There’s this Mars red that is really prominent here that I’ve been obsessed with over the past few years. I got to the island and went, Oh my God, of course it’s from spending some time in this place.
Tell me how you chose Firelei, Charles Gaines, and Cristina Iglesias to help curate the artists included in the show. What did the selection process and your conversations look like?
Johnson: It was a really simple prompt for my side. I said to myself, Find three other really great artists that you want to tell a story with. Firelei came to mind quickly, as did Charles, who I’ve been in dialogue with for years, and then Cristina, who I had a great dinner with last year in Menorca. I thought, These are three people I want to see make choices and reintroduce me to artists they’re interested in right now. It was not a project that had the ambition to be wildly collaborative. What I wanted to do was listen. My goal was to see—with this open platform and space to make choices—what these artists I respect so much would do with the prompt.
How did you land on this theme of directionlessness? The word has some negative connotations—aimlessness, a lost cause, futility. But reading the press materials it seems like you’re looking to it as a space for hope and creative freedom.
Johnson: The idea was born of the terms and conditions of the time we are currently in. I liked how complicated the word is on top of that. I like the way you have to stumble through it. “Direction… less… ness?”
Báez: Certain words will reveal the culture. I think this word is one of them. Depending on where you’re coming from, it can feel rudderless or freeing. I was reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. Directionless is a really powerful word. It’s the flow of water, the capacity to make despite obstructions. I counted that as a tenet for how to choose people for my part of the exhibition. I liked how revealing of a word it is.
Johnson: It doesn’t have to be a pejorative. To Firelei’s point, there is an opportunity to think about wandering, like Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond. There are certain things in nature that are without direction, and we do not see them wholly as a negative.
But then there are certain connotations that feel uncomfortable. The opportunity to navigate discomfort is part of the prompt. Artists organizing exhibitions do best in these scenarios because oftentimes what we want to choose is what’s close to us and what we are looking at. Any artist who’s looking at something that feels like it could be a well-organized exhibition is probably not looking hard enough. The best artists always present contradictions.
Are there any dialogues between works you selected or artists you invited that you’re particularly excited to see bubble up over the next few months?
Báez: I liked the fact that there is friction and that the word is so much of a Rorschach [test]. The people I chose have very corporeal works. They are things that help you navigate from one perspective, but then leave you rudderless right after that. I love how Hannah [Levy’s] work is straightforwardly addressing the fear of incapacity, that there is this luscious way of being but there is a very tender holding of what is able and what is disabled. What is alluring about that space? Hugh [Hayden] also has a broad way of looking at being a human in the world. I like how their work feels very concrete. It’s giving you things you can navigate physically around, but after that, your body has to contend with things it’s uncomfortable with, your mind has to put up with things it might not be used to. That is the most generative place.
Johnson: Some of the examples of things I was interested in were taking the prompt and turning it upside down, or feeling what it would look like to turn it upside down. You see the work of Georg Baselitz, of course, who’s well known for having things that are quite literally upside down or sideways and questioning orientation.
There’s Rineke Dijkstra, who, in this instance, depicts a female sitter who is looking off and feeling lost or directionless. The gaze is away from the picture-maker. Alteronce Gumby’s painting that’s included, you almost don’t know what direction it takes. Then there’s the work of Lyle Ashton Harris, an amalgamation of images that feels like a scrapbook or a choose-your-own-adventure. You have to find your way in. The most interesting artworks are unpredictable and don’t necessarily give you North stars.
Báez: I also like the idea of fugitivity in that directionlessness. In the work of someone like Joiri Minaya, you are literally given a way out, you can’t read the subject and you can’t go in.
And the work will be installed both inside and outside the gallery?
Johnson: In the invitation to Cristina Iglesias, because she’s thought about the landscape and is the most native daughter as a Spanish woman, I asked her to think about artists that could effectively employ the landscape. She included a number of artists who were able to [use] the entirety of the island effectively.
You’re both coming off, or in the middle, of these big moments of personal artistic achievement. Firelei, you’ve this mid-career survey traveling around the United States, and you just opened a new show at Hauser & Wirth in New York last month. Rashid, you closed your biggest show to date at the Guggenheim earlier this year. I’m interested in the responsibility you both feel to looking outside of your own practice to the communities that made you, which feels like it’s at the core of “Directionless.”
Báez: They’re who we make the work for. When it grows, they grow. It’s always wonderful to hear that love be reciprocated.
Johnson: It’s an interesting time for me and my project. What hasn’t changed is thinking about the practices of others. It’s enormously important to the way that I approach my work: understanding that it’s going to be ideally housed in relation to other practitioners, living and dead. I feel a real commitment to not avert my eyes, as the filmmaker [Akira] Kurosawa would say, to looking at other artists’ work, to being able to talk about it and describe it, and in certain cases, to house it in my own domestic spaces.
Báez: That’s the luckiest, Rashid.
Johnson: Yeah, that’s when you’re really blessed. As much as we are doing this show on an island, I am trying my best not to be an island.
Báez: If you think of the theories of [theorist and writer Édouard] Glissant, it’s a connecting point; if you think of the land as the isolating marker but the ocean as a connector, it’s always interconnected. The art is the ocean.
Johnson: Glissant is someone I think about a lot around issues of opacity and transparency. As much as I aspire to the opacity he imagines, I just keep opening my mouth and talking and sharing, and trying to be a part of a community, and trying to be understood, which is one of the things that my project has always aspired to do against the backdrop of a lot of cynicism. Not that my project aspires to optimism, but it aspires to understanding and it is not intended to distance people from it. Doing a big show I hope facilitates that, because it brings in a broader audience that not only will be interested in your practice, but people who practice themselves.
Báez: The studio is always a mad laboratory where you’re experimenting and you’re doing things that are connecting you with this larger thought space, but to have a material field be something that then connects you back… It’s that directionlessness. Your making, your exploration, your laboratory adds to our shared knowledge. There is an openness to exhibiting work that is not hermetic. You’re revealing a mystery, but the materiality reveals itself. In that slow look at something, you can deconstruct it and figure out not just the intended thought or the emotion, but the material speaking.
Johnson: The medium can be the message in some respects, and that inherently provides a sense of universality, as frustrating as that term often is to people.
You’ve mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurosawa, Glissant. Do you have any other reading or viewing recommendations for people who will see the Menorca show?
Báez: There is this one paper from the University of Chicago Press on Mesoamerican topology and its view of time and space. It’s just wonderful to think of reversibility and that each new direction can lead to a new cosmic revelation. And Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching is wonderful.
Johnson: I’ll keep it within the framework of a few things I’ve read recently. I’ve been reading a lot of fiction, which kind of helped bring me to this prompt. One book is Audition by Katie Kitamura, a beautiful work that is dichotomous in that it lives in two parts, and those two parts are fractured in a way that I find to be rewarding and challenging. Another is Transcription by Ben Lerner; I thought that had this interesting sense of doubling and two-ness and multiple perspectives.
But, philosophically, follow your own path. You should read and look at things that are exciting to you. One of the damning things about what we’ve done as far as educating artists is that we’ve created too much uniformity in the texts and the ideologies we consume to feel like we can be “contemporary.” Contemporariness is following a path that is yours. Real contemporary practices are born of putting together a bunch of weird things, and responding to those weird things and staying away from the platform uniformity that is so consistent in arts education today. Avoid that shit at all costs.
Báez: I would even extend that to our act of seeing. Especially now with more A.I. images taking over search engines, artists usually reach for a Google search for source images, and now those images are only generated by a very narrow parameter of decisions— what A.I. images look like. Making your own source images is even more crucial; the thing that was a shared language before is now even narrower. How to populate that more complexly is really crucial right now.
Johnson: Go outside.
Báez: Touch grass.
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