Originally published in Modern Painters (Summer 1996)
With
Jasper Johns, as with Samuel Beckett, everything means something, or two
things, or nothing. On one occasion,
he admitted that the idea of painting the American flag came to him in a dream. Then in an interview with David Sylvester,
when asked why he uses such things as flags, targets, maps or stencilled
numbers and letters, he replied, "They seemed to me pre-formed,
conventional, depersonalised, factual, exterior elements." At once, therefore, the motif came from the
artist's innermost being (revealed, like the best romantic inspiration, in a
dream) and yet satisfied a need for impersonality, blandness, nonchalence, for
a negation of the artist's self.
Elsewhere
Johns has recounted how, as a boy, he was walking through Madison Square in
Savannah, Georgia, when his father, who bears the same name as him, pointed out
the statue of Sergeant William Jasper, who twice during the War of Independence
risked his life to save the American flag (not, as it happens, the stars and
stripes, but Georgia's state colours) the second time making the supreme
sacrifice. Johns Senior proudly told
his son that they were both named after this hero. The painter who looses himself in flags is named for a soldier
who died for the flag.
The
American flag, Johns's "flagship" motif, is not his only motif. If he never painted a flag, we would still
think of him immediately on seeing one of his targets. Or on seeing a cluster of brushes in a
Saverin coffee tin. Or on seeing a
distinctive pattern of hatched lines, a sort of decentred herring-bone. And yet, what is so distinctly his about
these things? The flag belongs to every
American. That, at one level, is why
Johns painted them. Other Americans
have painted targets: Alfred Jensen, Kenneth Noland. The hatching can be seen elsewhere, too. Johns encountered a similar pattern
(subsequent to his own use of it) on the bedspread in Edvard Munch's late
self-portrait, "Between the Clock and the Bed" (c1949), and has since
made a picture of the same title (1981), by way of backdated hommage. It is not the "thing itself" which
makes a Johns motif Johnsian so much as the insistence with which it
recurrs. We are put in mind of Morandi
and his jars: "his" because he paints them again and again. But Morandi fills his jars with painterly
intensity to bursting point. Can anyone
really say the same of Johns? Sure,
there is an unmistakable Johns touch: brushy, but deadpan; agitated, but
mechanically so, in no wise meismic.
The predictable agitation behind the brush is borrowed from the language
of expressionism, but devoid of expressiveness as such. His ecriture is as contrived (mannered,
affected) as copperplate lettering, as ubiquitous as his trademark stencils. Even
when, later in his career, a more dashed-off spontaneous look emerged, there
was still no convincing urgency to take the edge of its deliberate
banality. It never seems worth trying
to enjoy a Johns for its painterly accretions, its abstract qualities. His nonchalence inverts the Kantian dictum:
we get the purpose (conceptual superstructure) without the purposiveness
(energy, beauty, rythm).
Johns
in dialogue can sometimes read like a Beckett play. Just like his work, his interview style is riveting or
excruciating, depending on your taste and the threshold of your endurance for
tedium and obfuscation. After several
exasperated attempts to get Johns to comment on the typography of his
appropriated stencils, Leo Steinberg finally thinks he has nailed him. "Do you use these letter types because
you like them or because that's how the stencils came?" The reply: "But that's what I like
about them, that they came that way."
Johns
and his buddy Robert Rauschenberg shot to meteoric fame in the mid 1950s, when
New York had had its fill of Abstract Expressionism, and modernist afficionados
were ready for the next step. After an
overdose of the romantic sublime, these young men seemed to offer a much needed
shot of canny subversion. They were the
alternative to the post-painterly alternative.
The "second generation" abstractionists offered precision
impersonality, a further advance towards formalist purity; Rauschenberg and
Johns came up, instead, with something hazey and haphazard, artfully
reintroducing the real. They were
labelled neo-dada, and Rauschenberg certainly fitted that bill; while his
"combines", with their stuffed goats and paint-spattered beds, are
flamboyant props from the theatre of the absurd, he pushed appropriation to its
anti-aesthetic extreme by taking a De Kooning drawing and rubbing it out. It was too readily assumed, however, that
Johns was a chip off the old block.
Actually, there is hardly any anger or bitterness or satire in Johns;
his motifs are more ambivalent in their banality (the flags have angered and
delighted both the left and the right); his juxtapositions rarely that
disconcerting (disconcerting if anything for not being disconcerting enough);
his laboured brushiness not sufficiently tongue in cheek to be straightforward
pastiche. He might have said about his
brushstrokes and murky, muted (very fifties) colours, just what he said of his
stencils, that what he liked about them is that they came that way. Stylish and styleless, personal and
impersonal, his and everyone's, post-Abstract Expressionist and proto-Pop, just
coming that way and going that way, he was way ahead in nonchalence. Looking back to their art historical
double-act, Johns seems to play Laurel to Rauschenberg's Hardy, messing up the
latter's audacious schemes with his simpleness.
There
is a whole history to be written of how an aesthetics of nonchalance gripped
the Manhattan avantgarde in the 1950s - if one can be gripped by
nonchalance! - with its mixture of Zen, existentialism (without the angst),
Duchamp, Wittgenstein, and various home-spun influences too. An impressionable Johns obviously took much
from the charismatic composer John Cage. Fascinating stuff for intellectual
historians, no doubt, but where does it all leave a viewer confronted by the
actual works? There have been two shows
of Johns in England recently: the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, presented what
they claim to be the first exhibition solely devoted to the sculpture while
Anthony d'Offay held a show just of flags.
Both these shows were seemingly intent on emphasizing the artist's
monomania.
Johns's
sculptures mostly date from a four-year period early in his career, 1958-61,
suggesting a short-lived interest. But
although Johns's enormous reputation rests on his painting and printmaking, the
object is a crucial aspect of his work.
His paintings often include a collage element, with plaster casts or
found objects protruding from the surface, or the support itself being an
actual, identifiable object, such as a crate or an inverted, stretched
canvas. Furthermore, his sculptures,
which are mostly in his own collection, often feature as subjects in his
paintings or prints: Painted Bronze (Savarin) 1960, for instance,
(brushes in a coffee tin which he had cast in bronze and then proceeded to
paint, quite convincingly but in such a way that they look more like a three
dimensional painting than the original) is a frequently recurring motif in
paintings and prints. Of course, this
begs the question (the sort of question champions of Johns find so pregnant and
exacting): is he painting his own sculpture, Painted Bronze (Savarin),
or is he painting an object in his studio, some brushes in a coffee tin, which
hitherto just happened also to be the subject of a sculpture, Painted Bronze
(Savarin)?
Because
Johns can offer seemingly little else by way of aesthetic consolation, this
sort of epistemological tease can sometimes constitute the main interest in his
work. And however spiritually removed
he is from the aesthetic that followed in his trail, Johns was undoubtedgly a
prototype for the minimalists and conceptualists. Donald Judd's dictum that art has only to be interesting is
implicit in much appreciation of Johns.
At
the time of writing, I have not seen the d'Offay show, or had sight of David
Sylvester's text for it, but the Leeds show gathered half a dozen flags as a
foretaste. The first impression, on
seeing them hung together, was of a series: the flags as haystacks. On closer inspection, however, they
transpire to be different casts of the same image. The original, lent by Robert Rauschenberg, is in sculp-metal and
collage on canvas. Sculpmetal is a
commercially produced material popular with model aeroplane makers: you can
model it very easily, you can even paint with it, and then it will dry into
metal. In truth, the flag in
Rauschenberg's collection is a painting in sculptural materials from
which a set of reliefs has been cast.
It is a misnomer to classify these pieces as sculpture. The other flags are cast in plaster (two),
and in bronze (an edition of 3; one was presented to President Kennedy on Flag
Day!), resin, and silver. A doubt is
left in the mind of the curious visitor: from which "original" were
the later casts cast? The more
illegible of the two plasters looks as if it might have been taken from the
(earlier?) plaster, not from the (so to speak) original original - the image
created ex nihilo, that is. This is the
sort of question you start asking yourself with these works, just to keep busy,
if you haven't walked away already.
But
the connoisseur will look in vain to Fred Orton's ponderous catalogue for an
answer to so mundane a question. A
heavy-going deconstructionist, Orton dances on a different plane, or plods
around on one at least. He recently
published "Figuring Jasper Johns", 214 pages and 481 footnotes of
turgid beffudlement which maps back onto Johns all the tedium and pseudery one
associates with Orton's cohorts - and Johns's progeny - the Art and Language
collective. Orton should have heeded
Johns's "The Critic Sees" (1961), a brick containing a pair of
spectacles with a pair of lips behind each lense. Actually, Orton treats this work exhaustive(ing)ly; what would
really have been better would have been to note Johns's confession to Peter
Fuller that this sculpture was really just a cartoon. After Orton's prose, Johns's sculptures offer light relief.
Jasper Johns: The
Sculptures, Leeds City Art Gallery, 18 April-29 June 1996
Jasper Johns Flags,
Anthony d'Offay Gallery (check venue for title and dates)
Fred
Orton Figuring Jasper Johns Reaktion Books, 1994, £12.95