![]() ![]() In addition, despite Johns’s fastidiously ironic detachment, the early paintings could seem to symbolize American imperial confidence at its peak and on the march, waging the Cold War. To my mind, his art jibes with America’s chief contribution to philosophy, the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Tellingly, Johns has never been as esteemed in other countries as he is on these shores. Incredulous on this score, some observers at the time took refuge in calling him Neo-Dada, but there’s an Atlantic Ocean’s worth of distance between his work, which is dead serious even when playful, and, say, the satiric displacements of common objects by Marcel Duchamp. Johns’s early paintings declared independence from European influence like nothing before them. If you are like me, you may alternate between revering Johns and itching to slap him. But now and then the effect feels coy in the passive-aggressive way of people who are quick to let you know that they have secrets they won’t tell. The payoff is a reliably powerful condensation of a perceptual dynamic-a dance between seeing and understanding-that is common to all successful painting. ![]() Johns’s muteness about his work is a refusal to take responsibility for how it affects us. Dealing with them is like being conducted to a certain place and looking back to discover that your guide has vanished. The meanings of Johns’s art are pantomimes of meaning: cerebral hooks baited with visual seduction. Attempts to make sense of the disjuncture and of what it may entail or suggest fill library shelves of exegetic prose. © Siah Armajani, courtesy MAMCO, GenevaĮver since his first painting of the American flag, begun in 1954, Johns has mastered a trick of replicating schematic motifs with an expressive hand that feels indifferent to what it describes. “Dictionary for Building: Street to Roof,” by Siah Armajani. You may find yourself in a state of doing neither, your neuronal toggle stuck, buzzing, between the two functions. The wiring of eyesight in your brain won’t let you do both at once. You can seek to make out the figure or contemplate how Johns painted it. As always, his beautiful touch-as patient as solitaire, as unpredictable as roulette-simultaneously establishes and etherealizes the image. Burrows did not.) Perhaps cued by Farley’s camouflage uniform, Johns renders the scene to, or beyond, the limit of legibility, in various mediums, chiefly puddled ink and watercolor on plastic. His name and that of the intrusive photojournalist appear on some works in the series, in Johns’s familiar stencilled, paint-thick lettering: in the fullest versions, “ Farley Breaks Down-after Larry Burrows.” (Lance Corporal James Farley survived the war. © Jasper Johns / VAGA at ARS, courtesy Matthew Marks Galleryįace in hands, the stricken soldier contorts in agony, evidently weeping and plainly oblivious of being observed, alone in an equipment shed. I’m not so sure about the dozen or so paintings and drawings derived from a photograph that was published in Life, in 1965, of a young Marine helicopter gunner in Vietnam after a disastrous mission during which a crewmate was killed. Most sport flat, Buster Keaton-ish hats: comical but not funny. There are more than two dozen small vertical pictures of individual, standing skeletons or bodies with their bones revealed, presenting themselves like visitors in doorways. In the present show, they run to death and sorrow, with a fillip of political history. Johns is a riddler, even-or especially-when his themes are blatant. This rankles, because what he makes seems positively to pant for discussion. He doesn’t-will not, don’t waste your breath asking him-discuss his works. Many of the writers, who now include Alexi Worth, a contributor to the catalogue of a show of recent work by Johns at the Matthew Marks Gallery, remark with some ratio of awe and exasperation on the artist’s taciturnity. Critical verbiage spumes in the wake of a sixty-some-year career (Johns is eighty-eight) that began with revolutionary paintings of flags, targets, sets of numbers, and maps-or, per a standard paradox, paintings that virtually are those things. More words may have been written about Jasper Johns than about any other American artist who isn’t Andy Warhol. ![]()
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