Jasper Johns. Catherine Craft
question that critics asked – “Is it a painting or is it a flag?” – come more complicated options: Is it a painting, is it a flag, is it a work of art by the artist Jasper Johns, who became famous for painting the American flag as it appeared between 1912 and 1959, or is it a defunct flag for a nation of forty-eight states that no longer exists?
Sometimes the conflict between concept and reality emerged in Johns’s process of realising a work. On two occasions when he made drawings that were studies for paintings yet to be made, he ended up with results that were rather different than he had expected. In 1958, he made a richly worked drawing of a wire clothes hanger placed on a wooden peg. In the drawing, the hanger’s crossbar is parallel to the paper’s lower edge, but when Johns executed the painting using a real peg and hanger, he found that rather than hanging straight, the hanger canted slightly. This was a physical effect of its shape, something Johns had never noticed in the hangers he had seen and thus hadn’t anticipated in his drawing.
Johns also made drawings in preparation for a work to be called Painting with Two Balls – a sly joke on the idea of Abstract Expressionism as “ballsy” painting, tough and macho. The painting Johns planned would have actual balls wedged between the stretcher bars of its adjoined canvases, but when he proceeded to make the painting (first in a grey version with one ball in 1958, followed by a colourful painting with two balls two years later), he found that wedging the balls caused the longer sides of the stretchers to bow. To make the paintings look the way they were supposed to, Johns had to construct special stretchers to offset the distortion.
With paintings and objects that behaved contrary to Johns’s ideas for them, no wonder he began to reexamine his relationship to them. This process included accepting ambiguities, even cultivating them, rather than trying to eliminate them. It meant working, in fact, with a sense of profound doubt. Toward the end of the 1960s, he explained how such experiences changed his thinking:
I thought at the time that a radiator is a radiator. We can agree on this. Now, I’m not so sure. At that time, I was willing to take the radiator as a concrete object with definition and spatial characteristics. If you please, as a real object. I was even willing to take it as a reference – something steady and set. Art has so often involved ambiguities and the possibility of ambiguities. I originally thought the radiator was not ambiguous, that it was a basis on which we might agree. I am not sure any longer that I believe or am secure in that type of thinking. I would now question the reference as much as the work.[48]
Painting with Two Balls, 1960. Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects (three panels), 165.1 × 137.2 cm. Collection the artist. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Highway, 1959. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 190.5 × 154.9 cm. Private collection. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Interestingly, Johns’s reading of Wittgenstein reinforced this shift in his thinking, for the philosopher himself had undergone similar changes in his thoughts about language. In Wittgenstein’s early works, such as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he examined the logical structure of language, taking it as the basis of what we can know, but in his later Philosophical Investigations, he rejected the idea of a language that reliably pictures reality in favor of an understanding of language as a tool with many uses that can vary from one situation to the next.
Far from causing Johns to retreat from the inclusion of objects in his art, his experiences seem to have led him to use objects more intensively; only now he attempted to allow them simply to assert themselves, rather than some idea he had about them. He secured them to his canvases, often in assemblages, with hinges, wires, or by other means that permitted them to move (or that at least implied the possibility of movement), as in Studio, Slow Field, and Painting with Ruler and “Gray.” As he explained to a Japanese critic, “I have begun to want an object to be free from the way I see it.”[49] Thus instead of a target, there were circles generated by slats of wood, and Johns’s use of stencils called attention to the physical identities of the stencilled names of colours: which took priority – what these names said, or their material presence in paint of a different colour altogether? The materiality of the names of colours became pronounced in some works. In Periscope (Hart Crane) and Land’s End, the letters comprising the names jumble together, becoming almost unreadable. In According to What, some of the metal letters spelling out the word “BLUE” have been bent, and in Passage II, the letters tumble forward from the painting’s lower edge.
The potential confusions between objects, art and language yielded the possibility for visual and verbal puns, not to mention more ambiguous plays of meaning. For example, Johns made two sculptures, one with two cans of ale and the other representing a can of Savarin coffee used as a container for his paintbrushes, rendering both with such an uncanny degree of realism that these objects’ true identities are discerned only when a viewer lifts the cast-bronze sculptures and realises that they’re far heavier than the mass-produced objects they painstakingly replicate. In an apparent response to the onslaught of critical attention Johns’s work received – and the fact that some critics seemed more interested in voicing their own pre-formulated ideas than in looking at artworks with an open mind – Johns also created two trenchantly humourous sculptures. In one, The Critic Smiles, a toothbrush has molars where its bristles should be, while in The Critic Sees, a pair of eyeglasses frame not eyes but mouths, lips parted as if in conversation. More subtle plays of humor involving objects are at work in Fool’s House and Untitled (1964–65), which both contain a broom. The attendant painterly sweeping marks make the household implement into a giant paintbrush, while suspending it from a hook suggests that it too could be used to inscribe a circle like one of Johns’s devices.
Along with brooms and devices that scrape paint, Johns’s paintings of the early 1960s, such as In Memory of My Feelings, Good Time Charley, and Water Freezes, began to include such objects as rulers, cups, forks, spoons, and thermometers. When he compared the paintings in which these items appear with his earlier work, he explained the difference in a distinctive way:
The more recent work of mine seems to be involved with the nature of various technical devices, not questioning them in terms of their relation to the concept of accuracy. It seems to me that the effect of the more recent work is that it is more related to feeling or emotion or… (there is a pause)… Let’s say emotional or erotic content in that there is no superimposition of another point of view immediately in terms of a stroke of a brush, so that one responds directly to the physical situation…[50]
Exploring the nature of various technical devices may seem distant from the emotional or erotic content that Johns characterised as the result of this process, but it’s worth noting that most of the objects that appear in these paintings are scaled to the human body in some way: eating utensils, household items such as coat hangers, and even the rulers, with twelve inches making a foot. The degree of physical intimacy suggested by this network of associations, however, also alludes to another change in Johns’s art during this period. Although some of his previous works could be thought of in terms of a sort of subtle expressive content – the vulnerability of Target with Plaster Casts, a sense of emotional withdrawal in Canvas, the stolid melancholy of Tennyson – around 1961, much of Johns’s art for a time struck an undeniably bleak emotional tone. Johns himself recognised this charged expressive element but declined to specify it, saying only that at this point in his work, “the mood changes.”[51]
Out the Window, 1959. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 139.7 × 101.6 cm. Collection of David Geffen, Los Angeles. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Thermometer, 1959. Oil on canvas with thermometer, 131.4 × 97.8 cm. Seattle Art Museum and Collection of Bagley and Virginia Wright, Seattle. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed
Roberta Bernstein,