The Brooklyn Rail

Daniel Johnston trafficked in truisms. A legend of the lo-fi music scene, he penned songs with titles that read like decrees: “True Love Will Find You In The End” or “Some Things Last a Long Time.” Lost love was a persistent theme. In “Some Things Last a Long Time,” Johnston employs ekphrasis to pay tribute to a former paramour. “Your picture is still on my wall,” he warbles off-key. “The colors are bright, bright, as ever.” Typically, red and blue pigments are the first to fade. But in the portrait Johnston describes, they remain strong and pure, a symbol of his abiding affection.

“There’s something about Daniel Johnston that can break your heart,” wrote musician Dean Wareham. “Something about him that really makes you feel his pain, a bit like Elvis Presley.” The Presley comparison feels apt, though Johnston croaked more than he crooned. Like Presley, Johnston grew up in a small southern town and battled mental health issues throughout his life. Unlike Presley, he never achieved worldwide acclaim; for a long period, he worked at a McDonald’s to pay the bills. But when he died in 2019 at the age of fifty-eight, he left behind a prolific catalogue of over twenty studio albums. Also a visual artist, he left thousands of drawings as well, some of which served as his album covers. Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was even photographed wearing a t-shirt of one in the early 1990s.

Curated by Lee Foster, the retrospective I Think, I Draw, I Am at Pioneer Works brings together over three hundred of Johnston’s drawings, created between 1972 and 2019. If asked to imagine the kind of art made by a man whose music stoked comparisons to Elvis Presley, you might not think of comics and cartoons. Johnston’s songs told stories of vulnerable characters, not superheroes and villains. And yet the form makes sense: the binaries that drive comics—love and hate, good and evil, pleasure and pain—also drive Johnston’s music. Human features are abstracted into rudimentary collections of lines and colors, allowing us to see reflections of ourselves in the generic visage of another. The straightforward messaging of a splash panel cuts right to the chase. Just as in a Johnston lyric, there’s no room for second-guessing the sentiment.

Yet a lot of second-guessing takes place within the diegetic world of Johnston’s drawings. Iconographic question marks hover in the sky or pop out of bisected craniums. Characters pose queries to themselves and to others. In one, a small monster asks an oversized woman, “Mommy, can I ever love again?” He articulates two additional platitudes, not quite sure of what he thinks. Johnston himself can be found in no single avatar—he splinters across characters such as Casper the Friendly Ghost, Captain America, and his famous frog Jeremiah the Innocent.

The exhibition’s installation is similarly unsettled. Works are hung neither chronologically, nor by theme, but in a large grid pattern that pulls the viewer’s attention in multiple directions. No checklist is provided, leaving us to guess the year or title of each work. What we are given is a soundtrack of Johnston’s own music, which echoes throughout the space, sometimes distracting us from fully engaging with the drawings. But this distraction serves a purpose. In a synesthetic move, the lyrics of the songs color our experience of the drawings, providing a mutating affective framework for how we might interpret any given piece.

Johnston has often been deified in the music press for his childlike purity. But he was also a difficult figure, prone to violent outbursts and delusions of persecution. Listening to his music, I identify with his vulnerability—but viewing some of his drawings, I find myself alienated, my empathy tested. I bristle at his depictions of women in particular. They are comically voluptuous and often headless, like a more menacing version of Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Nanas”. They portend the possible misogyny of a man who suffered a bevy of heartbreaks, who might have unconsciously blamed women for his malaise. Yet the artist would be the first to admit his moral imperfection. In one drawing, a woman goes nowhere trying to rationalize with her male partner. Her thought bubble reveals joyous scenes of flowers and birds, while his is overwhelmed with skeletons and thunderstorms. If nothing else, Johnston was clearly aware of his own cognitive distortions.

Perhaps this awareness is what kept him from fully miring himself in the muck. Glimmers of hope illuminate the exhibition’s darkest moments. “There is a love … a happiness such as I’ve never seen … and it lies just ahead,” he writes in one drawing, as a male figure looks toward a sun-like eye glowing in the sky. In the aforementioned drawing of the small monster and large woman, the latter assures the former, “Laurie loves you more than you know.” Those familiar with Johnston’s musical oeuvre will get the reference. Laurie was his longest muse, the unrequited love who inspired some of his most heartfelt songs. Appropriately, the two met in art class. It is to her that my mind turns when I view one curiously out-of-place drawing in the show. The paper is darker, creased, and tarnished by tape marks. There is no narrative, no dialogue: only a woman in a yellow dress with shoulder-length red hair.

I’ve long taken for granted that the picture that Johnston describes hanging on his wall in “Some Things Last a Long Time” is a photograph. But now, I imagine, it is actually one of his own drawings.