JOHN WILL | AS GOOD AS GOLD

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John Will, “AS GOOD AS GOLD,” 2025

installation view, Norberg Hall Gallery (courtesy of the Gallery)

In 1973 John Will proclaimed “THE END IS NEAR” in his print of the same title, which depicted the artist dressed as a Mountie—a poignant image then with renewed resonance in today’s political climate. Yet clearly this was just the beginning of the end since, over fifty years later, the artist is still tempting fate by drolly predicting the proverbial, if elusive, END. THE END, in fact, is a recurring event in Will’s oeuvre, a million little deaths prefiguring the actual finality. Many of these recent works point to the artist’s impending demise and his unsettled if not perturbed response to it.

AS GOOD AS GOLD exhibits seventy-three new vertical paintings on paper from the ongoing series of 1,745 works catalogued in Will’s BOOK OF WONT (No. 1 and 2), a project started in 2016 that also includes several works produced sporadically between 2010 and 2015. Each work is titled, signed and embossed with Will’s Tamarind master printer’s chop mark WONT[1], and numbered on the back to correspond to the ledgers, which are peppered with notes recording the names of friends to whom John has gifted works or works in public collections. The sheer number of pieces is overwhelming—it is already practically impossible to see the series in its entirety, except perhaps in the Louvre as John deliriously suggests—making the ongoing production of them irrational to the absurd, maybe even devaluing them in the eyes of the market. But making them gets him out of bed in the morning.

Arguably (John will argue) the BOOK OF WONT is his magnum opus. In it, he synthesizes a wide range of interests and styles he has incorporated into his prints, paintings, photographs, performances and videos over the last sixty years. The works are graphic—double entendre intended—a word Will has repeatedly used to describe how the content is communicated through the formal elements of art, including the clever play between text and image. While earlier works were semi-autobiographical, revealing a glimpse of the artist, his close circle of friends, and the goings-on around him, current events, politics, sports, celebrities, anomalies, and the art world, the BOOK OF WONT casts a backward gaze on things past. In the end, once the content fades away, which is inevitable with the passage of time or change in context, the artist requires the work to still work as an artwork: Will notes “the work has always been a combination of the personal, the narrative and perhaps, most importantly the visual, the latter being, in my mind, the element that determines the success or failure of it.”[2]

In the BOOK OF WONT, Will continues to challenge the historical conventions of art and good taste by choosing the trials and tribulations of ageing as its main taboo subject, and John Will, his former and ageing self, is the main character of this historiography. The exhibition, as with the BOOK OF WONT, starts in media res and thrusts us into the action of some grand metanarrative where the story is incomplete or illegible, intentionally obscure and obtuse, relying on the viewer to fill in the blanks. Morbidly humorous text and exaggerated gestural mark making in fields of saturated colour self-consciously recall his earlier work while indulging in the emotional expression and spiritual contemplation associated with abstract expressionism and colour field painting. While his earliest paintings elevated the status of the everyman and the everyday to immortalize them, or some comic version of them, in his art, the BOOK OF WONT again attempts to ward off the inevitability of being forgotten—Will won’t go willingly into oblivion.

A self-proclaimed Mr. Crabby Pants, Will uses self-deprecating and morbid humour to battle fear and blunt the sting of grief and loss. It’s Time (2023)—completed the same year as M.S.W. a work commemorating the life of his late wife, artist Mary Shannon Will, who died in 2021—comes with instructions for the collector: “Once I am dead erase pencil number and replace with proper year. If penciled number happens to be correct replace penciled numbers with correct ones in ink. JW.”  With this gesture, the artist leaves it up to the collector to seal his fate, playing into the collector’s urge to rescue John Will from the threat of oblivion with their purchase even as they record THE END.

Exhibition text by Diana Sherlock