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JASPER JOHNS
Robert Rosenblum
The situation of the younger American artist is a particularly
difficult one. If he follows too closely the directions established by the "Old
Masters" of
that movement inaccurately but persistently described as Abstract
Expressionism or Action
Painting, he runs the risk of producing only minor embellishments
of their major themes. As an alternate approach, he may reconsider the question
of a painting's reference to those prosaic realities banished from the Abstract
Expressionist universe. Like many younger artists, Jasper
Johns has chosen
the
latter course, yet unlike them, he has avoided the usually tepid compromise
between a revolutionary vocabulary of vehement, molten brushwork and the traditional
iconography of still lifes, landscapes, or figures. Instead, Johns has extended
the fundamental premises rather than the superficial techniques of Abstract
Expressionism
to the domain of commonplace objects. Just as Pollock, Kline, or Rothko reduced
their art to the most primary sensuous facts - an athletic tangle of paint,
a jagged black scrawl, a tinted and glowing rectangle - so, too, does Johns
reduce
his art to rockbottom statements of fact. The facts he chooses to paint, however,
are derived from a non-esthetic environment and are presented in a manner that
is as startlingly original as it is disarmingly simple and logical.
Consider
his paintings of the American flag. Suddenly, the familiar fact of red, white,
and
blue stars and stripes is wrenched from its everyday context and forced
to function within the rarified confines of a picture frame. There it stands
before us in all its Virginity, an American flag accurately copied by hand,
except that it now exists as a work of art rather than a symbol of nationalism.
In so
disrupting conventional practical and esthetic responses, Johns first astonishes
the spectator and then obliges him to examine for the first time the visual
qualities of a humdrum object he had never before paused to look at. With unerring
logic,
Johns can then use this rudimentary image as an esthetic phenomenon to be explored
as Cézanne might study an apple or Michelangelo the human form. But if this
artistic procedure of reinterpreting an external reality is essentially a traditional
one, the variations on Johns' chosen theme seem no less extraordinary than
its first pristine statement.
To our amazement, the American flag can become
a monumental ghost of itself, recognizable in its tidy geometric patterns,
but now enlarged to heroic size
and totally covered with a chalky white that recalls the painted clapboards
of New England houses. No less remarkable, this canvas-flag can be restored
to its
original colours, but unexpectedly considered as a palpable object in space
from which two smaller canvas-flags project as in a stepped pyramid. Or in
another variation, the flag, instead of being
tripled outward into space, can be doubled vertically, coloured an and slate-gray,
and painted with erratic and nervous brushstrokes that threaten the dissolution
of those once immutable geometries of five-pointed stars and parallel stripes.
If
we expect to salute flags, we expect to shoot at targets. Johns, however, would
have us realize that targets, like flags, can be the objects of esthetic
contemplation and variation. The elementary patterns of concentric circles,
as recreated by Johns in a monochromatic green or white target are to be stared
at, not aimed at, and offer the awesome simplicity of irreducible colour and
shape that presumes the experience of masters like Rothko, Still, and Newman.
Again, as with the flags, this symbolic and visual monad can be transformed
and
elaborated. Such is the case in another target, whose circles are painted in
different colours and whose upper border is complicated by a morbid exbibition
of plaster body fragments. Or then, there is a target drawing in which, as
in the double gray flags, the impetuous movement of the pencil disintegrates
the
circular perfection of the theme. Johns' capacity to rediscover the magic of
the most fundamental images is nowhere better seen than in his paintings of
letters and numbers. In "Gray Alphabets" he makes us realize that
the time-worn sequence of A to Z conveys a lucid intellectual and visual order
that has the
uncomplicated beauty and fascination of the first page of a children's primer.
Similarly, the "Gray Numbers" presents another chart, whose inevitable
numerical patterns are visually translated into that ascetic geometric clarity
so pervasive in Johns' work. At times, Johns even paints single numbers, as
in "Figure
One," in which the most primary of arithmetical commonplaces is unveiled
as a shape of monumental order and a symbol of archetypal mystery. Such works
look as though they might have been uncovered in the office of a printer who
so loved the appearance and strange meaning of his type that he could not commit
it to practical use.
If the almost hypnotic power of most of Johns' work is
in part the result of his disconcerting insistence that we look at things we
never looked at before,
it is equally dependent upon his pictorial gifts. In general, he establishes
a spare and taut equilibrium of few visual elements whose immediate sensuous
impact is as compelling as the intellectual jolt of monumental flags and targets
in picture frames; and his colours have a comparable clarity and boldness.
Nor should his fastidious technique be overlooked. Most often he works with
a finely
nuanced encaustic whose richly textured surface not only alleviates the Puritanical
leanness of his pictures, but emphasizes the somewhat poignant fact that they
are loved, handmade transcriptions of unloved, machine-made images. Although
Johns has devoted most of his young career to the manipulation of target, flag,
number, and letter themes, he has also made many other discoveries. There are,
for example, the chilly expanse of mottled gray geometries that becomes a tombstone
for the Victorian poet whose name seems to be carved at its base; and the small
open book, transformed from reality to art by the process of painting, and
therefore concealing, the print on its page, and by fixing its mundane form
in a position
of heraldic symmetry within a framed box. And no less inquisitive about the
interplay between art and reality are the "Drawing with Hooks," an
intellectual and visual speculation on the curious mutations of two- and three-dimensional
illusions when a canvas with two projecting hooks is viewed from both the front
and the side; and the more recent "Thermometer," in which painted
calibrations, fixed by the artist's brush, permit us to read on a real thermometer
those fluid
variations of temperature determined by nature rather than by art.
It remains
to be said that Johns' adventurous inquiries into the relationship between
art and reality have often been equated with Dada, but such facile
categorizing needs considerable refining. To be sure, Johns is indebted to
Duchamp (if hardly
to other, more orthodox Dadaists), whose unbalancing assaults on preconceptions
were often materialized in terms of a comparably scrupulous craftsmanship,
yet he is far more closely related to the American Abstract Expressionists.
For if
he has added the new dimension of prosaic reality to their more idealized
realm, he has nevertheless discovered, thanks to them, that in the mid-20th
century,
the simplest visual statements can also be the richest.
Art International 1960: 75-77
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