Jasper Johns. Catherine Craft
Art Editions in West Islip, New York. In 1961 he bought a house in Edisto Beach, South Carolina, where he would establish a studio, beginning a habit of having several paintings going at once in both South Carolina and New York, a somewhat discontinuous pattern of working that allowed ideas and motifs to migrate and recombine in various ways from work to work, place to place.
This chapter will follow Johns’s example, exploring his work through 1967 – when changes in his life and art, discussed in the next chapter, would set the stage for the decade to come – not by offering a linear narrative of development but instead an examination of five themes that animate his creative activities during this period: the changing role of objects in his art; the emergence of deeply emotional content in his paintings; intensified examinations of the relationship between artist and viewer; a deep engagement with the work and thought of the artist Marcel Duchamp; and the impact of printmaking, which Johns took up in 1960, on his art overall.
The Critic Sees, 1961. Sculp-metal over plaster with glass, 8.2 × 15.8 × 5.4 cm. Collection of Steven A. Cohen. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The Freedom of Objects
The stencilled colour names in such works as Jubilee work conceptually to challenge assumptions about knowledge and language, but they are also recurring visual motifs in Johns’s paintings, drawings and prints of this period. As such, they are part of a group of visual elements that would recur as the decade progressed. Unlike Johns’s use of the flag, the target, or numbers, each of which tended to serve as the single focus of a given composition, these new elements could – like components of a language – be combined and recombined in various ways with each other in work after work.
The most important of these elements was also one of the first to appear. Johns’s 1959 painting Device Circle derives its title from a slat of wood used to scrape paint in the shape of a circle. The work takes Johns’s targets as its point of departure, or, rather, it takes what may have preceded the targets themselves: instead of presenting the “subject” of a target, Device Circle presents instead the mechanical process by which the circular shape of a target can be made, an action that can presumably be continued by the viewer.
Devices that scrape paint appear in numerous works by Johns from the first half of the 1960s, although the circle the device generates is often truncated to a semicircle or arc, as in Device or Good Time Charley. Sometimes, the device is dramatically reconfigured; in Watchman, for example, a piece of wood pushes a ball along the painting’s edge, leaving a smeared track of paint behind it. Implicit in the action of such a device is the possibility of change from one physical state to another, the before-and-after that the movement of the device dramatises. Many of Johns’s paintings from this period would include a growing array of impressions, tracings and imprints revealing a process of change brought about through the action of objects that may no longer be present by the time a viewer sees the finished work. In Arrive/Depart, for example, Johns put paint on a skull and pressed it on the canvas’s surface, while Passage displays the imprint of an iron. Other objects used during these years to leave such marks include brooms, cans, rags, squeegees, stretcher bars, and wire screws, in addition to the assortment of brushes and palette knives that painters typically use.
Light Bulb II, 1958. Sculp-metal, 12.7 × 20.3 × 10.2 cm. Collection the artist. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Flashlight I, 1958. Sculp-metal on flashlight and wood, 13.3 × 23.2 × 9.8 cm. Sonnabend Collection, New York. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Device Circle, 1959. Encaustic and collage on canvas with wood, 101.6 × 101.6 cm. Collection of Denise and Andrew Saul. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Johns’s use of casts in his early works had played on this idea of presence and absence, and he again included them in such paintings as Watchman and According to What, only in these cases he used the cast of a leg mounted upside down, with the resulting sense of disorientation offsetting the psychological overtones characteristic of Johns’s use of the casts in the 1950s. Johns also used his own body to leave such traces. Handprints appear in Wilderness II, Arrive/Depart and other paintings and drawings, as does a footprint in Field Painting. In such works as Land’s End, Periscope (Hart Crane), and Diver, Johns combined his handprint with the trace of a scraping device to produce the attenuated suggestion of an arm, and in a group of drawings called Study for Skin I–IV, he applied oil to his face and hands and pressed them onto a sheet of paper; when he rubbed charcoal over the surface, the oily residue produced ghostly images hinting at a figure trapped behind the barrier of paper. Most dramatically, Johns left an impression of his own mouth and teeth in the thick waxy surface of the aptly titled Painting Bitten by a Man.
As these strategies suggest, a given painting’s identity as a physical object was still very important to Johns. He began making more oil paintings, but he also continued to use encaustic, in part for the way it captured the precise moment of the artist’s touch as it cooled and set. In some paintings, such as Zone, Johns used encaustic in one part of the composition and oil paints in the other, challenging viewers to notice the differences between them. Johns also seems to have felt that he had sufficiently established the materiality of painting’s identity to begin asking questions about the status of its physicality over time and whether it was possible, as he put it, “to make an object which is not so easily defined as an object.”[44]
These were issues raised by Johns’s own experiences with his art, including a few incidents that prompted him to question his assumptions about the everyday objects he had chosen as the first subjects of his mature work. For the 1958 sculpture Flashlight, for example, Johns had selected one of those things the mind already knows as his subject. Or so he thought. When he went out to buy the flashlight that would serve as the basis for the sculpture, he found that he had unconsciously made an assumption about the appearance of this supposedly familiar everyday object:
I had a particular idea in my mind what a flashlight looked like – I hadn’t really handled a flashlight since, I guess, I was a child – and I had this image of a flashlight in my head and I wanted to go and buy one as a model. I looked for a week for what I thought looked like an ordinary flashlight, and I found all kinds of flashlights with red plastic shields, wings on the sides, all kinds of things, and I finally found the one I wanted. And it made me very suspect of my idea, because it was so difficult to find this thing I had thought was so common.[45]
The following year, another development reinforced Johns’s doubts. Hawaii and Alaska became states, and the flag that had initiated Johns’s career suddenly changed. Things the mind already knows? The flag had had forty-eight stars since before Johns’s birth; it was the only flag he had ever known.
Spending a little time with Flag suggests what Johns may have liked about its design. Forty-eight stars produces a neatly aligned pattern, six rows of eight white stars each, a compacted harmony with the six white stripes of the body of the flag. Fifty stars throws this harmony off completely. The field of stars becomes a restless, scattered affair, a decisive move away from the quiet balance of the flag Johns had always known. In fact, Johns more or less stopped painting flags, explaining: “They added two stars. Since then the design does not interest me anymore.”[46]
Johns didn’t stop painting flags entirely. In 1962, for example, he painted Two Flags, and in a number of subsequent works in which he quoted motifs that had previously appeared in his oeuvre, the flag would put in an occasional appearance. But whenever it is possible to count the stars in one of these later flags, wherever excessive markings have not obscured their individuality, there are still usually only forty-eight of them, and when Johns has depicted flags with fifty stars, he has often juxtaposed them with flags containing only forty-eight