David L. Johnson
Artist David L. Johnson condenses centuries of enclosure into “Diggers,” repurposing hostile urban fixtures as provocations against privatisation, surveillance, and racial capitalism.
The enclosure of the commons—land traditionally held and used by the public—began in medieval England, and has continued ever since. In his 2014 book Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, American historian Peter Linebaugh contends that the enclosure and privatisation of the commons was inseparable from England’s industrialisation, as well as the development of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. In other words, enclosure played a foundational role in the rise of racial capitalism—a global system of value extraction and capital accumulation dependent on what abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as “the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death.” Linebaugh identifies three major waves of enclosure.
Exclusive to the Magazine
David L. Johnson by Dana Kopel is featured in full in Issue 3 of Memo magazine.
Get your hands on the print edition through our online shop or save up to 20% and get free domestic shipping with a subscription.
Related
Dean Kissick’s Downward Spiral chronicled the art world’s contradictions with the breathless urgency of an end-times prophet. Now, with the column closed and the critic in semi-exile, the question lingers: was he a voice of his generation, or just another scenester burning out on his own myth?
The Tennant Creek Brio transform mining maps, dead TVs, and frontier wreckage into new cultural claims—rejecting imposed “otherness” and forcing the settler gaze into confrontation. If their art is a shock, who’s really being unsettled?
Seriality animates Maria Kozic’s art in 1990s Melbourne. Her fleshly weapons and pin-up girls mutate across media, trace the tangled circuitry of sex, violence, and mass culture’s compulsive pulse.
