A variant on our reanimators are those artists who speak in old languages with contemporary accents. We can call artists like Rashid Johnson—whose gestural effusions, so reminiscent of postwar Abstract Expressionism, are mitigated and profoundly changed by freighted materials (in this case black soap)—a "re-enactor." In his series of more than 100 monochromatic paintings, collectively entitled “Cosmic Slop,” after an album by the 1970s group Parliament Funkedelic, Johnson introduces a wholly contemporary tension between the formal and existential concerns of traditional Abstract Expressionism and equally urgent concerns about the role of abstraction in African American art.