My name is Joshua Smith. I live in New York and I make monochrome paintings. Recently a number of people have asked my opinion of a new show from a painter about a decade older than I am, Josh Smith, whose new exhibition at Luhring Augustine happens to incorporate a lot of monochrome paintings.
I first learned of Smith when I was a 20-year-old photo student visiting PS1 on a date about 10 years ago. I stumbled upon the work, something like six drawings with his name scrawled lyrically across the paper: JOSH SMITH, which is also my name. Of course it’s a common name but it was still a treat. For super-specific reasons it made me feel part of the work, in the way I feel about Wolfgang Tillmans or Felix Gonzalez-Torres, artists whose own biographies are beautifully incorporated into the content and messaging of their work.
I thought then that it was bold of him to literally use his actual name as the primary formal element of his work. I thought then that the work felt defensive, as if he was preemptively defending his name and his integrity. The work betrayed some kind of anger, or at least some kind of posturing. That’s how I read it immediately, and really still how I read those works. Not as a comment on theories of authorship or anything like that but as a willingness to present oneself as an average person. And to make a show of his averageness. Maybe these are my own class issues, but I think they’re pretty universally shared class issues in this town. Or I hope they are. I mean, they aren’t.
I’ve always loved those name paintings because here was an artist who didn’t seem particularly talented in any technical sense (just like me), who studied printmaking, which I studied a version of (photography), and who, despite his background attending a school in Tennessee, far away from a global art center (I went to college in Detroit), got to New York and was showing his work in impressive situations. And we had the same name. This is what I, selfishly, took away from those works.