Jasper Johns

I was planning to continue last week’s post, but there has been too much going in recent days, so I am posting one of the Jasper Johns chapters from The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art. The chapter begins a season or two after Johns’s first solo show, which included his Flag and several early Targets.

Jasper Johns, According to What, 1964            

The debut of Jasper Johns had prompted Alfred Barr to apply a label: “neo-Dada.”  His logic was clear.  Johns’s readymade images recalled the readymade objects the Dadaists had presented as art four decades earlier.  Man Ray’s Gift (1921) is an iron with a row of tacks affixed to its flat surface, points outward.  Dada offered puzzles and, on occasion, an affront.  In 1920 Francis Picabia nailed a toy monkey to a slab of wood and called it Portrait of Cezanne.  Johns annoyed some and baffled others with his Flags and Targets, yet the neo-Dada label did not stick firmly to these paintings.

With the violence of their wit, the Dadaists tried to inflict therapy: shock treatment for bourgeois stuffiness.  Turning prickly, Dada became an exercise in moral exasperation.  Johns’s art is never that.  In his self-absorption, he feels no need to judge or improve his audience.  He feels disconnected.  In 1964 the critic Gene Swenson asked him about the ale cans he had cast in bronze.  Doesn’t subject matter like that imply “a social attitude”?  Johns deflected the question.  Swenson asked it again, and again Johns deflected it.  With some asperity, Swenson suggested that Johns transforms ale cans into sculpture because he is too impressionable; he takes the environment’s most obvious hints too easily.  “Accept or reject, where’s the ease or the difficulty?” said Johns, finally exasperating the critic’s effort to elicit a comment on art and society. 

Dada was contentious, sometimes clamorous.  Johns’s Flag has the calm of an object encountered inadvertently--not that it looks like a secret revealed.  The painting isn’t shamefaced, nor does it flaunt itself.  Ordinarily, the stars and stripes are the emblem of the nation’s public life.  Johns turned the emblem inward, made it private.  Expecting only a few gallery-goers to take note, he was amazed when his debut at Castelli’s became the not-to-be-missed show of the season.  “I liked the attention,” he has said.  “And I thought it was interesting that other people had a reaction to my work, because prior to that time I had assumed that it was mostly of interest to myself.”  Dada is art in the public interest.  Behind the barricade of his private concerns, Johns dismissed the neo-Dada label. 

Though the label came loose, it didn’t immediately fall away, for there appeared to be shatterproof links between Johns and the proto-Dadaist Marcel Duchamp.  Never officially one of the group, Duchamp now and then professed his “sympathy” for the Dada spirit, which he had been the first to display  In 1913 he mounted a bicycle wheel on a wooden stool and declared it a sculpture.  By similar fiat, he conferred esthetic status on a urinal, a snow shovel, and other manufactured, “readymade” objects.  Duchamp had been impatient with the avant-garde styles of his time, especially Impressionism and Cubism.  Johns’s Flag signaled his impatience with Abstract Expressionism.  Both artists enjoyed the intellectual play that calls definitions into doubt.  Made famous by his first show, Johns was introduced to Duchamp.  They liked each other but never spent much time together.

After meeting Duchamp, Johns read Robert Lebel’s recently published book on the artist.  Soon he was filling his work with Duchampian devices—color charts, painted shadows, real objects in place of representations.  A note in Duchamp’s Green Box (1934) describes a hinged painting.  Johns used hinges to attach a small canvas to the surface of a big painting called According to What (1964).  Swing the small canvas outward and a Johnsian version of Duchamp’s Self Portrait in Profile (1958) appears.  This homage invites us to see Johns as the son of the older artist.  Johns himself rescinds the invitation.  In 1977 he said that “when my work was first compared to Duchamp and termed neo-Dada I didn’t know who Duchamp was. There are two reasons to believe him.  First, Johns has a reputation for honesty; second, he displays no deep affinity for Duchamp’s esthetic. 

With his readymades, Duchamp gave dramatic force to a large question: “What is art?”  Entangled in minutiae, Johns does not grapple with this issue.  Art is whatever artists make, he believes, and it does not trouble him that Duchamp intended his Dadaist gestures to “destroy art.”  “My interest in his work is not from the point of view of killing art,” Johns has said.  “I know one’s not supposed to say this, it’s not quite proper, but I regard his work as art of a positive nature.  I see it as art.”  With this mild impropriety, he denied the point of Duchamps’s career.

Not long after Duchamp died, in 1968, Johns wrote in Art in America that “it may be a great work of his to have brought doubt into the air that surrounds art.” Duchamp’s doubts had grandeur, and he brought them to bear on the large themes of Western thought.  His oeuvre forms an involuted system—or anti-system—of intellectual speculation.  Duchamp was an architect of labyrinthine subtlety.  Johns is more a carpenter, an improviser of localized solutions--or mock-solutions--to immediate problems.  Duchampian motifs appear in his rambling oeuvre, take on a Johnsian tinge, then fade, but never completely.  The shadow of Duchamp’s wit accompanied Johns as he advanced, slowly, into the 1970s and ’80s.  Yet Johns is no disciple.

He produces new works by subjecting his old ones to the faint but persistent pressures of rumination.  According to What’s waxen cast of a leg evolved from the plaster body parts in his early Targets.  The coat hanger jutting from the surface of this painting is a cousin to all the cups and brooms and other domestic objects Johns attached to his canvases in the 1960s.  Bent nearly in half, this coat hanger casts a shadow almost as sturdy as itself.  In the opposite corner, the upside-down leg on its slim fragment of a chair mixes its shadow with veils of stained-in gray paint. 

Between leg and coat hanger, two vertical rows of aluminum letters jut out from the surface.  In a reprise of the inscriptions that had been appearing on Johns’s canvases since 1959, the year of False Start, these three-dimensional letters spell “RED,” “BLUE,” and “YELLOW.”  Their shadows tangle with the same letters rendered in paint on canvas.  Sometimes the shadow-words coincide with the painted words, sometimes not.  It depends on the lighting.  From this uncertainty came the painting’s title.  In 1971 Johns told an interviewer that “the shadows change according to what happens around the painting.  Everything changes according to that.” 

The artist once said, “I don’t think there is any particular right and wrong when you’re viewing a painting.” There is, though, a mood to attain, a state of attentiveness to slip into.  One comes alive to the nuances of Johns’s paint and the textures of feeling that run through his images, preserving them as if they were childhood memories, and changing them, giving them at least a tentative place in the present. 

Sixteen feet wide, According to What was one of just four paintings in the show that opened at Castelli’s early in 1966.  Each is large enough to suggest a wall.  Together, they converted the gallery into something like a stage set, an elliptical replica of the studio where they were painted.  The canvas called The Studio (1964) is almost as big as According to What, and far emptier.  Along its right-hand edge, nine beer cans are strung on a length of wire; the pendant is a paint-encrusted brush.  Gray and murky white fill much of the canvas, recalling the neatly modulated gray scale of According to What.  To the left of The Studio appears the tilted image of a door.  Three sooty squares of primary color—red, yellow, blue—sit on the bottom edge.  In According to What, these patches of color are luminous. 

In the third of the studio-paintings, Untitled (1964-65), the color samples of the other two expand to fill the surface with squared-away expanses of red, yellow, blue, and purple.  This spectrum reappears in small swathes of paint that arc over the canvas like rainbows.  At one end of each arc, Johns placed a twelve-inch ruler—an emblem of line, to answer the sheer, enveloping fact of color.  In Eddingsville (1965), the fourth painting in the 1966 show, According to What’s upside-down leg is rendered in paint, not wax.  Eddingsville’s gray scale is merged with the color scale, and primaries are again high-keyed.

Toward the right, a wax cast of forearm and hand reaches over the surface.  To this object Johns bolted a yardstick.  His point may be that humanity is the measure of all things, though it is the fragment of anatomy that submits to measurement.  Between ruler and arm he wedged more objects—a fork, a beer can, a shell, a sponge, an ice cube tray.  Johns once told the art historian Roberta Bernstein a story that goes some way toward explicating this enigmatic array. 

In 1961 the artist bought a house in Edisto Beach, a small town on the coast of South Carolina.  Offshore lies an island named Eddingsville, where the Marquis de Layfayette and his friends are reputed to have had a champagne picnic.  Johns reenacted the event with friends, though the beer can and ice cube tray of Eddingsville suggests that he was not overly concerned with fidelity to legend.  With this painted memorial to a pleasant afternoon, Johns opened his art to the world beyond the studio.  Another interpretation—and there is always at least one other—is that he lured fragments of the ordinary world into the hermetic zone he mapped in his elliptical way with the four studio-paintings of his 1966 show at Castelli’s.

In Studio II (1966), the door of The Studio has become a wall of windows.  These paths of vision’s escape lead to the blankness of sheer paint.  Johns’s big paintings of the 1960s picture his ideal studio as a place of comfortable—and comforting—isolation.  Here he feels free to indulge, uninterrupted, his fascination with the workings of his mind, not the large gestures of thought but small, incidental acts of scanning, noticing, remembering, matching.  Willed just barely or not at all, unremarked by most of us, acts like these are the raw materials of Johns’s art.  His studio-pictures convert the idling of the mind into images of the place where that conversion occurs.           

Johns’s mind idles with compelling force and imperious reach.  He says that once, while riding in a car through Spanish Harlem, he saw flagstones painted on the side of a building.  Later, this pattern of flat, irregular ovals migrated to the left-hand panel of a painting called Harlem Light (1967), where it has the look of decoration that would be noticed only if the eye could find no way around it.  On the right-hand panel of Harlem Light, a tilted window drifts beneath smears of blue paint. 

In Untitled (1972), flagstones occupy the central panels.  On the right, an irregular scaffolding of planks supports an array of waxen body parts: toes, fingers, a knee, a torso.  To the left, a new pattern appears: short, parallel lines of bright color laid on in small clusters and separated by intervals of white.  Oriented this way and that, the clusters fit together like flagstones.  Johns’s name for this pattern is “hatching.”  Usually, there are five lines to a set, each a different length.  The outer lines are often the shortest, the middle line the longest.  The suggestion is of fingers, skeletal and wet with paint, pressed to the canvas, repeatedly, until the blankness is transformed. 

Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1979

Johns varied this pattern for more than a decade, darkening it, lightening it, blurring it to an after-image of itself, then bringing it back into focus.  Red hatch-marks interspersed with white call to mind the stripes of his Flag.  The Flag itself returned in paintings and prints of the 1970s.  An image of a human skull, which had looked out from the lower right-hand corner of Arrive/Depart (1963-4), resurfaced in a set of paintings called Tantric Detail (198O-81).  Centered now, the skull hovers near the bottom of the canvas.  Above it, a pair of testicles echoes the skull’s empty eye sockets and reverses their meaning.  Life rises above death, and from the testicles rises an erect penis, most of its length hidden by hatch-marks in black, white, and gray.   

Near the upper edge of a canvas called In the Studio (1982), a nail supports a cast of a child’s arm.  Over its surface hatching spreads like a tattoo.  This anatomical fragment reappears to the left, reversed, drawn with colored pencil on a sheet of paper.  Pasted to the canvas in fact, the paper is also attached to a make-believe wall with painted nails.  In Johns’s art, a fact is and is not equivalent to an image of that fact.  Similarly hedged equivalencies liken flesh to canvas, the human body to works of art.  The painter is and is not his painting.  For years, both were stubbornly reticent.  “In my early works,” said Johns in 1978, “I tried to hide my personality, the psychological state, my emotions.  This was partly due to feelings about myself and partly due to my feelings about painting at the time.  I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but finally it seemed like a losing battle.  Finally one must simply drop the reserve.”  Johns was becoming autobiographical.

Racing Thoughts (1983) places a silkscreened image of the young Leo Castelli against a background where Johns’s hatching blends with his flagstone pattern.  Nearby is the Mona Lisa.  She recalls Duchamp, who supplied her with a moustache in 1919, and Leonardo himself, Johns’s favorite Renaissance painter.  A skull lurks, this one borrowed from an Alpine sign warning skiers of avalanches.  Johns let it be known that he collected pots by a turn-of-the-century American named George Ohr, two of whose odd designs are pictured in Racing Thoughts.  Still the sphinx, Johns was putting his memorabilia on display. 

          The image of a whale looms up in Ventriloquist (1983).  Prodded, the artist revealed that he had found it in an edition of Moby Dick illustrated by Barry Moser.  A dark rectangle split by a thin white stripe alludes to a Barnett Newman print, as few in the art world needed to be told.  Suddenly, critics had their hands full of keys to Johns’s art.  Fresh images crowded the four canvases of The Seasons (1985-86), and Johns was willing to talk about them all: the geometric shapes he had taken from a painting by a nineteenth-century Zen master, the allusions to Picasso’s Minotaur, the snowman who recalls a wintry—indeed, a deathly—poem by Wallace Stevens. 

Picturing his studio in upheaval, slowly jumbled by the passage of time, The Seasons address life and death, the past that is remembered and the future that is feared.  Earlier, Johns had only hinted at themes of this magnitude.  The sphinx, it seemed, was becoming confessional.  Never, though, did he reveal anything more than the source of an image.  He explained, for example, that he had traced certain nebulous forms in Perilous Night (1982) from the outlines of fallen soldiers in Mathis Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 151O-15).  Before he got bored with giving explanations like these, Johns noted that the faucets and laundry hamper in Racing Thoughts and Ventriloquist (1983) are what he sees when he lies in his tub.

To reveal sources is not to explain meanings.  Commentators eventually understood that Johns had left his new images as securely veiled as the old ones--the Flags and flagstones and waxen arms that returned from the past to hover in his later paintings.  Johns neither illuminates life and death, nor tells us how he feels about these massive and murky topics.  At most, he tinges them with his sensibility.  The nature of that tinge is obscure, a matter one cannot even begin to address before withdrawing to an inwardness as private as Johns’s own.  His art induces us to be like him: entranced by the elusive but somehow always dependable hum of solitude.