Jeremy Johnston: The Anxiety of the Open Question
Darling Green is a collaborative studio based in New York City. They have been working with a broad ecosystem of art organizaations both in and outside the New York area. Beyond curating and organizing art exhibitions, they apply their restless curiosity to a wide variety of self-initiated projects—from facilitating workshops to conceiving and designing exhibition catalogs; to dreaming up new ways of bringing art to underserved groups.
Somewhere at the center of all of this is Jeremy Johnston, who established the studio 15 years ago. A seasoned curator, exhibition designer and a bit of a polymath, Jeremy initiated Darling Green as a way to focus less on the structural aspects of the art world and to focus more on creating a “mutual aid society” for making interesting things in the world.
Recently, Jeremy has been leading Had To Tell You, a weekly virtual discussion group that has been reading through Walter Benjamin’s groundbreaking text, The Arcades Project. I’ve been lucky enough to have been able to attend the majority of them and they have been endlessly fascinating and helpful. Jeremy and I sat down recently to discuss his work with Darling Green, Had To Tell You and the gifts of the open question.
Eric Hurtgen
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New Rural (NR): We’ve known each other for quite a few years now and most of that time I've known you as a principal of Darling Green. You guys have been doing this for well over a decade at this point, I think — I'd love to hear from you what was the impetus for starting the studio?
Jeremy Johnston (JJ): It's been 15 years now, and has gone through different phases. It was initially a very practical way of freelancing in New York. I just had an instinct that a business name would help me get more work — kind of just be cooler to work collectively right away — but then I also realized what it was really enabling me to do was to survive and function more independently. This is really common in the design world, but not so common in the art world, which is more oriented toward full-time jobs in an institutional kind of enclosure. And once it was going, it really quickly evolved into an alternative political and economic and creative entity.
We started to ask: how can we operate under the business entity in a way that protects us from having to spend all our time in a rudimentary, almost brutal institutional framework? How can we make a business where if you don't show up, nobody's going to yell at you? We all just assume something came up — something important, or maybe it's not something important, maybe it's just a day at the beach — and we just adapt. We don't have titles; we don't assume that in two years we'll each want to do the same set of tasks we're doing now. Everyone can be involved in whatever direction they need to be, and ideally the business follows along — we could all end up being journalists, we could run a health food store, it becomes whatever each creative impulse takes us toward. To some extent, that's been successful.
It does require a certain kind of personality — an advanced version of the freelancer personality, because it shares that kind of precarity or irregularity. We don't know what's happening next year, we don't know the schedule for next week, but when it works at its best, it really is a kind of mutual aid society — we care for each other.
NR: One of the things that's so interesting to me is this anti-structure you've all created — which is also a structure in its own right. Over the last few years I've seen you champion these discussion groups, like Telephone Telephone, and it seems like there's been a lot of energy there.
JJ: We've gotten a lot of response from those. I'd say all the exciting things we do lately involve no monetary exchange — Telephone Telephone is a no-money-in, no-money-out program, and a lot of the smaller curatorial projects, and things we do for artists and sometimes for institutions, are completed for a very low fee and sometimes we just waive the fee. I think people should be doing more for each other when they have the ability to — and we do have the ability. A certain amount of paid work is involved, of course, but we have enough time in the day to help out our friends. And it's not purely selfless — we get dragged into the most amazing things. You can do the most interesting things when you don't want a huge amount of compensation for it, and weirdly, I think that kind of gift-giving creates a little feedback loop where you end up getting better and better commercial work.
Telephone Telephone #21, Off Paradise, June 26, 2024
NR: I remember when Darling Green was tasked with moving the work by Scott Burton from the space it had been in for a long time, and I feel like I saw it lead to a lot of really interesting conversations and growth in the direction of Burton's work. It seems, at least from the outside, that these waves come in and you catch them, and they lead to these beautiful places.
JJ: That's the way life goes — it's complicated, but it's been joyful. It's pure curiosity. It's 95% just constantly asking questions: what's the right direction for this work of art? How should you install it? Will it survive outdoors? By asking these questions, by expressing curiosity, you're in a train of thought that leads to the most interesting places. In the Burton work — I think what sustains it, and maybe this is also something of our personality as a studio — is not reaching, not forcing it into one conclusion or another.
We're not art historians — or, I'm not an art historian, per se. I'm not involved with the Burton estate in any official capacity — I don't have the authority to answer questions on behalf of the artist. The only power I have is to ask questions, and when we don't receive sufficiently documented answers, the questions stay open. It's the openness — the anxiety of the open question — that becomes so fruitful. The willingness to keep it in the air, to keep that energy from closing down and reaching some false but perhaps convenient conclusion, ends up being the most beautiful thing in life. When you stop to think about it — a marriage is like this, being a parent is like this, driving a car is like this. Skiing is like this. In skiing, you have to let go, you know, and just rock with it. It's like this with the open question.
NR: That absolutely seems correct — the beauty of the open question, and the journey of the open question, seems to be what I've observed of Darling Green over the years, at least from outside of it. You've done these discussion groups; these meetups in galleries and art spaces, for a long time, and earlier this year you launched I Had to Tell You, a year-long online discussion group on the whole of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. What was the impetus for that — for doing the discussion group virtually, as opposed to your in-person discussion groups?
JJ: I've been interested in the Arcades Project since I was in college but never really had the time or structure to pursue it. I never took a class that involved it, and I always wanted to read it, but it's a little daunting to do on your own. It's not a normal book — it's not a linear thing. I don't even know if it is a book. We did get involved with a postgraduate seminar group called the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, and we spent a year with them working on the Arcades Project — an in-person, application-based seminar that met on Friday afternoons. We were maybe halfway through it, and I realized that in the format of the roundtable discussion, we weren't always getting into the nitty-gritty of the Arcades itself. It was really productive and wonderful, but it was kind of meandering. I selfishly wanted something more rigorous, where I could work through the Arcades week by week — small chunk by small chunk — and see if I could grip it. So we set up a reading group so that at least we could get through a section a week, and see if we could pull something new out of it as participants.
NR: I definitely feel like I've seen you pull new things out of it almost every week.
JJ: It feels that way to me too. Isn't there something crazy about the idea of reading such a complicated text, with so many references, that you'll never be able to fully digest it — and doing something with it every Friday morning is...I don't know what it's like. It's like training. It's like training for a marathon or something.
NR: I was thinking about the work of Tehching Hsieh in that regard — a project that lasts over a longer period of time that you return to. Clearly it's not as brutal as his work, but it does have that kind of rhythm to it, I think.
JJ: Yeah, he did that piece where he was tied to his partner for a year, right? Yeah, it does share some of that intensity, and I think it relates to the other programs we've done. I often describe Darling Green as singing and dancing rather than reading and writing, because almost everything we do happens, to some extent, in public. We work in a shared office — everyone can hear our conversations. We do these public meetings, the Telephone Telephone thing, and making exhibitions is, of course, public. So our successes and our failures are happening in real time. There's an actuality to it that's enchanting, and I think productive. You can't just revise and revise and revise. You can't hide the draft in the drawer. It's in public. You either did a good job or you didn't, or something happened you didn't expect, or somebody lost their cool and got really upset and you had to resolve it ...all these things that happen through the process.
I think I Had to Tell You has been a little like that. Whoever is presenting that week — if they don't get it together, something's going to happen in that timeslot regardless. And maybe not being fully prepared is actually better sometimes than being prepared.
Installation view, On The Air, Ulterior Gallery, 2026
NR: I'm sure at this point you're starting to feel a rhythm.
JJ: I think I’m beginning to know how much preparation is the right amount. I moved (the discussion group) for a little while, because we have good friends in San Francisco who wanted to participate. So I moved it to a new slot on the East Coast for five weeks or so. I really enjoyed hearing from our colleague—he's an amazing guy, but I found that having it at noon meant I'd wake up at 7am in a total sweat and just work on my presentation from seven till noon, and go into it with too much of a script. You might think it's better to have extra time to prepare, to get it together, but there's something better about when you just have to wake up and do it.
NR: I completely agree with you. There's something magical about doing an art discussion group at seven in the morning. It's a new experience for me — there's a kind of energy at 7am that's qualitatively different from noon energy. It's almost as if these people are waking up together.
One of my favorite discussions of the project was early on, when you gave a talk on the Convolute I: Interior, The Trace, and used Benjamin's section on interiors as a springboard to talk about Kasten — these Dutch cabinets — and how they made it to America and changed in their new context. There was something about the way you framed that presentation that stuck with me, and it made me think about America at large, and also about the curatorial urge to collect. I'd love to hear more about your own connection to these Dutch cabinets.
JJ: I first saw the Dutch cabinets when I was really young — like five or six years old — and I think they're attractive to children because there are so many kids' books that involve, say, a wardrobe being a doorway to another world. Their proportions really suit that — the doors are set up like they're really for a nine-year-old. They're these strange, big doorway-objects that adults kind of glance at and move past. An adult looks at one and thinks, "oh, this is a linen cabinet" — and even historians who work with them tend to reduce them to some very factual things. So for an adult, it's a linen cabinet. An old linen cabinet. But for a child, it's a puzzle and perhaps actually a doorway to another world.
For a child, it's this confusing shadow — a place bad dreams could emerge from. I wouldn't have wanted to sleep at night in a room with one of these big pieces of furniture — in the dark it would freak me out, like demons were going to come out and do their soul harvesting or whatever. In terms of my own imagination, that connects to what it means to be a colonial person in the United States — the settler-colonial encounter between Indigenous people and these newcomers really fascinates me. The people who made these cabinets, up in the Catskills in New York, were engaged in constant warfare with the people who actually belonged to that land. So there's this funny childhood interest that's now connected to something I think makes up the American character today. People don't tend to think about our relationship to the landscape and how it forms our everyday actions, but I think it does — and it also neatly summarizes this misunderstanding, where one people could come to another people's land and believe no one owns it, or believe it's open and available for them to take, for them to occupy.
NR: Yes, and that complication of the violence of it, and also the beauty — it's hard to pull those things apart. As an American, it can be disorienting — all of those things are in there, in the cabinet, so to speak...
JJ: We were staying with someone once and there was this book lying around, and I read it over the weekend we were there, then promptly forgot the title. I can't locate it now, but it was about the difference between the East Coast American landscape and the European landscape people had come from. England in the 17th century would have been mostly deforested and very organized — a small market, a small church, a larger market, a larger church, arranged in these radiating orbits. Goods could move from farm to market, and religious life was organized along that route, all within a very organized topography. In the United States, there was none of that. So instead, what you'd do is adopt native canoe technology, get an upper-creek homestead on a piece of land, grow as much tobacco as you could, defend that land with a gun, float your harvest back down the creek to sell it, buy as much ammunition and alcohol as you could afford, and get back up the creek.
There's no real religious structure or interdependent market structure in that activity. It's entrepreneurial, defensive, and entirely oriented toward ownership and an attitude of dominance. It requires basically the same skills and awareness it takes to open a used car dealership in Indianapolis.
It's like — if Americans are walking down the street and see a pair of shoes sitting on the sidewalk, a brand-new pair, it's finders keepers: "I'm grabbing those, they look like my size." Whereas if a Dutch person walks down the street and sees a pair of shoes, they assume someone owns those shoes — maybe they went for a swim nearby, or whatever. These two attitudes are fundamentally different. And when the cabinets are being produced in Holland versus here, there's a fundamental difference in what they represent. You can see this aesthetic representation of what's happening to people — and the interesting thing is, it's the exact same story as they're pushed further west and their culture keeps changing.
You could tell the same story in the Pacific, in an Asian context. Migrating people carry these older ways of doing things — these histories, this collected wisdom — into a new space, and there's this immediate recontextualization, a new layer of learning. And I wonder how much of that gets carried subconsciously into the way we still do things here in the United States. In the art world, there's this constant willingness to recontextualize — to bring things from the edges to the inside, and take things from the inside and move them to the edges. It's this constant exchange, and you wonder how much of that is inferred, or powered by, this history that keeps moving us along.
Installation view, On The Air, Ulterior Gallery, 2026
NR: Maybe that was one of the things that interested me so much about the Dutch cabinetry — it seemed to be a very specific representation of this overarching experience of the way things change and shift here, and get recontextualized and, kind of, reborn. I think that's one of the things that's been so interesting about reading the Arcades Project — Benjamin was living through a pressing time, a time of immense change, as he was writing in the 1930s, and he was looking back into 19th-century Paris, into another time of momentous change — looking at a historical moment of modernization from his own sweeping era of modernization. And now, in the I Had to Tell You discussion group, we're reading it from our own period of what feels like very fundamental shifts and just immense technological change. In some ways, I think reading through the Arcades Project has been very helpful for me personally in this time — has it been similarly helpful to you?
JJ: Well, I think the form of the book is a really powerful challenge to the typical book format, which is linear and offers that concluding sort of narrative — a thesis statement followed by the 25 reasons why, and all the footnotes, et cetera. In the Arcades' case, it doesn't have any of that — so it becomes a tool of understanding for us, rather than something we simply learn from. In a way, it becomes like a giant set of dice that you roll, and it tells you what you need to know about your encounter with history in the present.
It really helps me understand, or position myself in relation to, this set of proto-fascist developments in the world. Benjamin lived his life as a Jewish intellectual in a profoundly anti-semitic European context — a life with the knowledge that you may never find a home, but also with this intense belief that somehow our intellectual lives, as artists and critics, can determine the fabric of the future. That's so powerful — this ability to deal with knowledge, this sense that we're changing the very fabric of the world through our work — and I think that's the one thing fascism can't digest, or handle, or appropriate: this kind of European intellectual tradition he's working within. I think he sees it as always dangerous, in a way — his concept of an inherent danger in any ideology, and inquiry or theory as an antidote to it, in service of something. Which connects right back to the cabinets, I think — the reason they stay so interesting is that they also can't be understood the way we might want them to be.
I've read everything there is to read historically about Kasten. For the most part it's dry as a bone — talking about who made it, which cabinet shop, what wood species — it rarely approaches meaning, because I think meaning is kind of unavailable, too hard for us to summarize with our language. So they function a little like the Arcades itself — like something that's never going to settle down for you, the way a sentence does. It's always going to yield different meanings at different times. Maybe this is the power of art in our lives, and maybe not just art but also the power of landscape — how are you ever really going to describe it? We do it every day, in one way or another, and we're never really going to nail down how it feels to sit under a tree as a little kid. You're never going to figure that out with language — almost as soon as it happens, it slips away.
NR: I think you're right on it. Benjamin was doing so many different things, but I think he's showing us that — in a fascist era, across a fascist landscape — his preferred method of combat was, it seems to me, to tell as much of the truth as possible. And the way he did that was by letting so many different people speak at once, right next to each other. Benjamin lets one voice speak, then he lets in people who are satirizing that person, then people who are praising it, then people who are suspect. He includes all of these together. It's like — how do you resist fascism while staying as truthful as possible?
It's like opening the doors all the way up — that goes right into your point. He's a stateless figure, someone without a home, and he's almost trying to make his home in all of these places at once, or something like that. I guess — maybe I'm reading too much into it — but he's trying to find this place of what's true. So he's just going to put all these things on the table. And you wonder how much he's doing that for us, and how much for himself. It's a question I keep asking myself as I read through it.
JJ: Yeah, I think it's in the complexity, in the indeterminate, where we get to reside for a while. One of my favorite Benjamin phrases, one I keep returning to, is where he says something like: the transient is not transient — in other words, the transient is the one constant that can't change. Constant change is the one thing you can rely on. It's the fundamental truth — change, and a kind of fluidity that's almost too large and abstract to feel real. You can get a handle on things by understanding that your words for them are just placeholders for something vastly more complex. The truth is always too complex to reduce to its parts, but you can grip a little side handle by saying: this complexity is the truth.
NR: Now that you're getting closer to the end of the Arcades Project, are you starting to get a sense of what you'd like to throw yourself into next? Are there threads starting to appear that you're getting interested in pulling on?
JJ: I'm strongly drawn to Deleuze and Guattari— I think that 1000 Plateaus presents an equivalent complexity, one I can't tackle alone. I've tried, and I can't get anywhere near it by myself. I was talking to somebody about comparing Benjamin to Deleuze, and he basically laughed out loud — said no, he didn't think the two relate. Which, of course, made me even more fired up to see if I could draw some connections, even as an amateur. I want to build those bridges and see if they hold. It'll be interesting to open it up to our little group and see if anyone wants to take it in a new direction. We could go anywhere with it, which would be fun. At this point there's a bit of a book-club vibe to the group — pretty much a steady set of people who show up, with some newcomers who come and go. Maybe what we should do is just start over with the Arcades from the beginning and see what happens. Maybe we’ll keep it open for as long as we can.
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