Barry Johnston: Final Party

Barry Johnston’s project envisions art as an articulation of fleeting thresholds, provisional gateways from one state of being into another, exits from the materiality of art into a space of play and intensity. His ecstatic and propagandistic performances embody this same spirit of apocalyptic transformation through the material and ideological concept of his “Final Party”—a phrase that appears in titles, across banners, and as the name of his KCHUNG radio program. Johnston asserts the creative possibilities of annihilation—the anarchic dream of wiping the slate clean. It upholds the potential for a pause, a space where the aggregation of bodies works against the spirit of commodity fetishism and the pleasure of a “final” party might be the best form of resistance.