Jasper Johns. Catherine Craft
Coming near enough to operate the boxes is a risk to a viewer seen by others, but it also creates a sense of intimacy with the work that renders it more difficult to see it as a target at which one “takes aim” by looking at it. Instead, a viewer stands at arm’s length, as Johns did when he made it, looking at parts of the body normally only glimpsed in very intimate situations.
Such situations are often erotic, but they are also intrinsic to the process by which Johns himself made the casts to begin with, enlisting friends as models. We see the positive impressions of a negative process of casting that also required losing sight of the whole in order to focus intensely on a single part. In doing so, Johns displaced a moment of great physical and visual intimacy from the realm of artist to that of the viewer.
Although Johns continued to make paintings of targets, usually in a single colour, he no longer incorporated plaster casts into their compositions. Target with Plaster Casts and Target with Four Faces remain somewhat unique in Johns’s works of the 1950s in the sense of unease they provoke in most viewers, but Johns continued to explore the questions they raised about the relationship between looking and making, artist and viewer, vision and touch, in other ways. To understand the crux of Johns’s fascination, it is important to recall his early experiences with art as a viewer – for example, seeing his first Picasso. If for Johns-the-viewer the first glimpse of a Picasso was an experience of intense, even ugly, physicality, it should perhaps come as no surprise that the birth of Johns-the-artist lay in paintings that stressed the materiality of their surfaces even as their conventional meaning remained irresolvable. Instead of having works borne out of personal feeling, Johns was making works borne out of an equally personal experience, one that defined feeling as also existing on a physical level, creating an experience that the viewer could share.
In Johns’s first years of maturity as an artist, a painting’s identity as an actual, physical object was of overriding importance to him. It was the conduit of the relationship between the artist and his viewers, and it was also what provided both with the experience of being fully present, in one particular place, at one particular moment – the “right then” when Johns was able, simply, to be an artist. Painting subjects such as targets and flags emphasised the flat plane of the painting’s surface, and these were soon joined by stencilled numbers and letters. Like the plaster casts, the stencils were part of his studio’s usual paraphernalia, nothing special, he insisted. Johns made paintings of single numbers and occasionally arranged his stencils to forms words that, usually placed near the bottom of the painting’s edge, provided its title. One of the earliest of these, The, is perhaps the perfect verbal equivalent of Johns’s motifs; as a part of speech, the definite article exists only in relation to the names of things to which it provides stress and individuation: the flag, the target, the painting.[32] Johns also used stencils to create grid compositions that recall his small green collage of torn paper, but now he used numbers and letters in sequence to determine the format of the grid: eleven by eleven squares for zero through nine (Illustration) or twenty-seven by twenty-seven for A through Z (Illustration), including one blank square to mark the end of the sequence.
In many of these paintings, Johns also drew attention to the material support of the underlying canvas by routinely leaving the bottom edge of the composition unpainted so that the bare canvas was visible as a ragged border. He also continued to use encaustic. The series of careful touches to the canvas intensified the painting’s literal, physical presence, bestowing upon it an undeniable beauty that sometimes seems almost poignantly at odds with the carefully conceived subject matter and denial of conventional forms of self-expression.
These qualities were also characteristic of Johns’s drawings, which as early as the drawings of dried oranges had evinced a great facility not so much for skillfully rendering objects as for endowing a surface with a subtle yet almost palpably sensuous physical presence. Attentiveness to paper and the materials and means by which marks could be made upon it were Johns’s primary motivations in drawing. Although he occasionally used drawings to sketch out ideas for paintings, more frequently he chose motifs that were already familiar from his own paintings.
Painting’s identity as a physical object also prompted Johns to reduce the colours of his palette, painting American flags in the usual range of red, white and blue, and the targets in the three primary colours. Not surprisingly, he also favored working in monochrome; as he explained to a journalist, “I’ve always thought of painting as a surface; painting it in one colour made this very clear.”[33] Thus, one of the first paintings he made after Flag was the very large White Flag; Green Target soon followed Target with Plaster Casts and Target with Four Faces; and Tango was painted in shades of blue. Soon, grey became Johns’s favored colour for exploring the object nature of painting. Grey was neutral and stable. Unlike other colours or even black and white, which to Johns also seemed to lead viewers toward a preordained response, grey was less likely to provoke a specific emotional reaction. Instead, grey’s very reticence encouraged viewers to experience the painting not as a “picture” but as a thing.
As an object, a painting was not merely a surface. Canvas was stretched over a wooden support: a stretched canvas has a front, but it also has a back and sides. Making a painting out of separate canvases, such as Johns did with Flag, drove this point home. He explored it in other works as well, often painting the sides of the canvas’s stretcher, for example, so that the painting “continues” around the edges. In Gray Rectangles, the titular geometric shapes have been cut into the painting’s surface, while Drawer suggests the possibility of a literal space behind the picture plane. In Shade, a lowered window shade doubles the canvas surface, concealing what’s underneath as well as providing another surface on which to paint. Similarly, Canvas presents two stretched canvases painted grey, placed front-to-front so that the backside of one is shown to the viewer.
Any expressive qualities enter such paintings not through obvious references to the artist but through the physical properties of the work itself. What is on the front of the canvas whose reverse we see in Canvas, or on the front of the canvas it obscures, is unknowable, as is whatever is behind the titular Shade, and the drawer of Drawer will never open. Johns’s Book and his Newspaper are likewise unreadable. In such works it is difficult to escape a sensation of eternal abiding melancholy, a sort of endless waiting for something that will likely never happen. As much as anything, the feeling of loneliness that these works provoke in many viewers serves as a potent reminder of how much we have come to rely on the artist as a source of meaning. Beginning with these first mature works, Johns’s art instead leaves us to come to terms with the physical fact of his paintings’ existence on our own.
Tennyson, 1958. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 186.7 × 122.6 cm. Collection of the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines. Purchased with funds from the Coffin Fine Arts Trust. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Numbers in Color, 1958–59. Encaustic and newspaper on canvas, 168.9 × 125.7 cm. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Flag on Orange Field II, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 137.1 × 92 cm. Private collection. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
White Numbers, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 71.1 × 55.8 cm. Mildred and Herbert Lee collection. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Private and Public
Johns’s attentiveness to the relationship between the artist and the viewer is rooted in part in the very circumstances by which he became an artist, a very private situation in which the roles of artist and viewer continually doubled back on one another in his relationship with Rauschenberg. Looking and making, making and looking became almost inseparable in their dialogue with each other and became in fact the virtual subject of Johns’s first mature works. It was a very limited subject, both in the sense of being narrowly
Harry Cooper made these observations in a talk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on 2 March 2008.