John Johnson

John Johnson is an American-Darrenite artist and writer born at the Alice Test Site on November 13th, 1941.

Early Life
Johnson's parents were American conscientious-objectors during World War II. He grew up in the Alice Test Site before attending college at University in Darren. There he studied philosophy and French literature, although he also speaks English and Darren. He published an English-novel called Orphan's in Bloom in 1968. It received mostly positive reviews but it was a commercial failure.

From 1970 to 1974 he attended University of California Berkeley, studying sculpture. He was arrested in 1975 in San Francisco, California on possession charges for FMS.

Violence Meditations
In 1969 he began a series of works called Violence Meditations. The pieces were variable, but they consisted of Johnson shooting bullets from an M-16 assault rifle at a white cloth with specially created bladders full of animal blood. The final pieces consisted of either the cloth with the bloody remnants of the performance, or film documentation. He continued this line of work into the 1980s.

Johnson produced Violence Meditation 7 for the Alice Art Initiative in 1984.

Audio samples from this work has been incorporated into the music of Jean-Pierre.

-EPM