What Art Critic Identified Art With No Emotional Introspection Barbara Rose

• From the Autumn 2017 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

  On a trip to Japan in the spring of 1964, Jasper Johns took a photograph of himself in a Tokyo photo booth. He had first get acquainted with Japanese culture and traditions, of import to him throughout his life, when he had served in Japan during the Korean War as a young soldier. In Nihon, ordinary activities like wrapping a package, preparing tea or arranging flowers need the same ritualistic attention and precision as high art, which appears to have impressed him. On this trip, he was returning every bit a 34-year-old tourist. The cheap, mechanically produced photograph, surrounded by stencilled letters spelling out the primary colours, was printed on porcelain dinner plates. Johns incorporated them into twin paintings titled Souvenir and Souvenir 2 that he made in a studio in Tokyo during this two-calendar month trip.

  Souvenir is an encaustic painting; Souvenir 2 is an oil. Both include a flashlight attached vertically to the right edge of the canvas pointing up towards a rear-view mirror angled downwardly, presumably to reverberate a non-existent beam of light from the flashlight directed at a wooden ledge that supports the upright plate. Significantly, all the familiar objects are deprived of their applied functions; instead they are assigned a purely formal role equally three-dimensional elements in a basically geometric assemblage composition. Every bit existent objects they are useless. The flashlight normally powered by an electronic battery is dead. The mirror reflects naught visible to the viewer from its oblique angle. It is, however, significant that its original office is to wait backwards.

• The plate in Souvenir 2 rests against the back of a stretched sheet glued to the surface, so that the viewer tin can just guess what, if annihilation, appears on the obverse. No prototype tin exist seen on the canvas sealed from view, which serves only to raise the viewer'southward marvel about the front of the canvass that is not visible. Nobody tin eat from the vertically-sited plate, which in life would serve food, but in art equates looking with eating. Like the first Souvenir, the works that outset brought Johns fame – a 1955 painting of the US flag and two paintings of targets – were painted in encaustic, an ancient tradition requiring heating wax and brushing it on evenly as one would frost a cake. Johns is known to be an fantabulous melt with an interest in food. Perhaps 1 reason he was drawn to encaustic as a medium was because information technology was like cooking. In any event, throughout his work there are constant analogies between seeing and eating, creating parallels between taste and sight. Serving his image on a plate suggests the creative person expects to exist devoured by acquisitive diners. The expressionless portrait that stoically meets our gaze, of a photo of the artist's face printed on a plate, suggests a pun, perhaps on his proper noun, since the most famous caput on a platter is that of St John the Baptist, the inspiration for the Baptist religion in which Southerner Jasper Johns was raised.

  In Souvenir, the original shadowy version in encaustic, the photograph and stencilled lettering on the plate are black and white. In Souvenir 2, the oil, both photograph and stencilled words are seen in colour; the championship Souvenir, appears in the lower center in handwritten script. This is unusually personal for Johns, who ordinarily uses standard stencilled letters to spell out words and fifty-fifty his signature on paintings. Johns subsequently made four drawings and ii lithographs based on the encaustic Souvenir, and three drawings and a lithograph inspired past Souvenir 2. Using a painting as a bespeak of departure for finished drawings and prints is typical of the fashion in which he transforms objects into images. The process of complexity and manipulation of this metamorphosis, rather than any chronological stylistic progression, is the distinctive characteristic of his development as an artist.

  The twinned Gift paintings and the prints and drawings they breed are Johns' only cocky-portraits. However, one tin can argue that Johns' entire oeuvre is in fact a cumulative self-portrait extended over a long and fruitful lifetime. It is probably no coincidence that the title evokes not a noun, merely the French verb se souvenir, which means "to recollect" and has nothing to do with tourism. First with these early on self-portraits that memorialise his two-month sojourn in Tokyo in the leap of 1964, Johns turned from obdurate objects like a flag or a target to associations of images informed not past the present but by the past. Executed at that moment Dante chosen "the middle of the journey of our life", which is likewise roughly the age, perhaps non coincidentally, that Christ was crucified, the two versions of Souvenir are not simply the portrait of the artist as a young man, but as well a preview of his modus operandi, in which objects are transformed into images through diverse forms of reproduction, allowing them to be deconstructed, reordered and grafted on to other surfaces, every bit well as displaced into a diverseness of contexts that alter their meaning in surprising combinations and juxtapositions.

• There are many ways of looking at Johns' work, which is intentional on his part. Similar the writer André Gide, author of The Immoralist (1902) and The Counterfeiters (1925), Johns does not desire to exist understood also quickly. I way we tin can understand the unabridged trajectory of his all-encompassing oeuvre is equally a single overlapping narrative in which the images are similar characters that appear, disappear and reappear in another context, altering their function and identity. This transformation from object to epitome is particularly striking in the complex works of the early 1980s based on trompe 50'oeil precedents, especially that of the moving picture within the movie, which included 18th-century paintings that inventoried aristocratic picture galleries, equally well every bit the genre of the baroque quodlibet, a pictorial inventory of objects and personal memorabilia tacked to studio walls.

  It is within this tradition, which inspired American still-life painters similar John F. Peto and William Harnett, that we may comprehend Johns' lifelong involvement in optical illusions. Have, for case, the contents of the 1983 painting Ventriloquist, which references multiple printed images. It contains a representation of the American flag in colours opposed to the original, and a lithograph by Barnett Newman that Johns owns, reversed in a mirror image as it would have looked on the original stone. The theme of the picture inside a picture used past Johns in the early '80s was ofttimes employed by Degas to acknowledge his sources and interests. In his ongoing play between reality and illusion, Johns uses rectangular "insets" in numerous works that suggest the cinematic view into some other scene used past Alfred Hitchcock in Rear Window (1954).

• Objects Johns collected, as well images from previous works, menses into and out of the painting, spilling over other works to connect them in an extended sequence that becomes increasingly loaded, complex and frustrating to decipher. There is, for example, the painted swivel and faux tapes attaching the flag suggesting the illusion of real objects, and the wicker hamper and bathtub fixtures nosotros know existed in his own home. On the left, there are a variety of alien illusions. The frontal, shaded, eccentric pots of ceramicist George Ohr are silhouetted confronting the flattened outline of a whale based on Barry Moser's 1979 illustrations of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

  Ohr'due south ceramics bladder as if in a dream over the flattened trunk of the outlined whale that is and so highly patterned with busy stripes it is impossible to read equally a background. The most peculiar images in Ventriloquist, even so, are the vestiges of the reddish, white and blue American flag cut off by the left edge of the painting, suggesting that the rest of the flag is wrapped around the back of the piece of work. Indeed, and then much that is depicted is visually contradictory in the space Johns has constructed that figure-to-basis relationships are obviated. The very location and orientation of objects is put into question. Johns is besides sophisticated an artist non to realise he is setting up a situation that is not only optically challenging only besides conceptually logically inconsistent.

  Some of the images in Ventriloquist, including the Newman lithograph, are likewise present in the 2 versions of Racing Thoughts, 1 made in 1983 in encaustic before Ventriloquist, and one in oil, painted afterward Ventriloquist in 1984. In Racing Thoughts, the image of a pair of yellow pants hanging from a hook has assuredly been likened to Michelangelo'south ain flayed hide that he painted on the Sistine ceiling. The same types of spatial contradictions and surface fracturing are found before in the 1982 Perilous Night, organised as a diptych made up of two halves that practise not lucifer. Perilous Dark, which refers non to the Star-Spangled Banner just to the title of a 1944 piano limerick by John Muzzle, also includes images of Newman'south lithographs. Perilous Night includes for the first time images taken from Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-xvi), in Colmar, Alsace, which Johns visited around this fourth dimension.

• In these picture-inside-pic works, themes and images spill from ane to another in a way that recalls the appearances and reappearances of the characters in a roman-fleuve, the stream of consciousness novel, such as Marcel Proust's seven-volume A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27). There are a number of significant parallels that link Johns' oeuvre with that of Proust. For example, in his notes for the 1964 painting Watchman, Johns refers to ii different witnesses, the Watchman and the Spy, merely as Proust is both the author too as the narrator of his rumination. While Proust the narrator recalls his life in hindsight, characters change in age, advent and social continuing as the static traditional society in which he was raised gives style to the fluidity of the social aspirations of a rise class of nouveaux riches capitalists. Thus, Odette de Crécy, the vulgar prostitute, marries elegant man-virtually-town Charles Swann – the grapheme who is besides Proust's alter ego – and by the terminate of the final volume has get the Princesse de Guermantes, the nifty order hostess at the superlative of the social pyramid.

  There are other telling parallels between Johns' paintings and Proust'south writing. For example, Proust conceives of his great work in the reverie of a dream; Johns insists the image of the flag came to him in a dream. For Proust, the distinction between intellect and feelings has to be overcome, merely as Johns cautions himself in his 1964 notebook entries to "beware of the body and the listen. Avert a polar state of affairs." In order not to split the mind from the senses, Proust'southward character Elstir, a painter peradventure based on Cézanne, claims "not to paint the object, only the effect it produces". Johns' lifelong interest in Cézanne is a reflection perhaps of the mode in which the French artist produced hovering, destabilised images that never quite resolve themselves optically into fully three-dimensional depictions of volume.

  Proust's multi-volume masterpiece is at present more often than not considered to be a single novel. Similarly, I believe that all of Johns' work in the divergent media he has mastered can be considered a single, linked work of art. Understanding his works every bit a linked sequence, as opposed to individual works constituting a series, permits us to account for the fashion in which fourth dimension and its passage become increasingly significant for Johns. There are parallels every bit well in the fashion memory inspires both writer and artist. Proust begins to remember the past with the help of the taste and smell of a madeleine that he dips in tea that connects him to his memories, allowing him to reflect and create, and to retrieve people who are expressionless, things that are cleaved and places scattered "like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the balance; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drib of their essence, the vast structure of recollection." In this connexion, I recollect we must have Johns at his word that he begins with zero specific in mind and that a random image, something seen while driving for case, may inspire him.

• Johns' interest with the passage of time – he often works on the aforementioned piece over many years, revising, reconsidering and reworking – sets him autonomously from his contemporaries and links him back to earlier masters, such equally Cézanne, whose works he as well collects. This orientation towards the past, seen if you will in a rearview mirror, is also typical of Southern writers. One thinks of the characters in the linked sagas of Yoknapatawpha Canton by the American novelist William Faulkner, who wrote about a guild in refuse, looking back rather than frontwards, whose deepest feelings were of sadness, melancholy, loss of the profound humanity of the agronomical society in which he grew up.

  Johns we must remember is intensely Southern fifty-fifty though he left South Carolina as a immature human to report art in New York. His sense of the intensity and priority of the by and its rhythms and textures is as profound as that of Faulkner. Similar Faulker, he is determined to transmit the fullness of the experience of a life lived in a certain identify in a certain fourth dimension. This ambition is announced early in a newspaper clipping sealed into the surface of the 1955 Target with Iv Faces, which refers to "history and biography". These volition be his dual themes and the content of the totality of his oeuvre, in which every action is a record of something that has happened in the past and the main chore of the artist is to testify to and preserve memory.

  For instance, the broom, a synecdoche for a paintbrush, in the 1961-62 Fool's House has already swept the floor and is a tape of its past trajectory. Information technology is 1 of various devices in Johns' work that trace circular paths, echoing the shape of the original Target paintings. Objects such as wipers and rulers scrape paths to document actions that take taken place in the past. These objects did their literal jobs in early works; in subsequently works they are transformed into mutable images that can human action every bit metaphor or allegory. Images drop out. In the 1961 encaustic and collage Disappearance II corners of the sheet are folded into the centre and so that if there is an image, it has disappeared considering it is covered over. In other early paintings, such as Adept Time Charley (1961), Device (1961-62) and Phonation (1964-67), rulers and sticks scrape paint into semicircular blurs, recording a past not only recaptured but rendered stock-still in time similar bronze baby shoes. Indeed, one tin can interpret Johns' casts of flashlights, beer and java cans similarly every bit familiar objects permanently memorialising a moment in time. Eventually these three-dimensional objects would be recalled in two-dimensional prints and drawings.

• 

  Jasper Johns, Fool's House, 1962.

  Oil on canvas with broom, sculptural towel, stretcher and cup. 182.9 ten xi.4 cm. Private collection, on loan to Walker Fine art Center, Minneapolis © Jasper Johns / VAGA, New York / DACS, London 2017.

• The transformation of objects into images occurs early on in Johns' career. Indeed, nosotros can say that his original 1955 Flag painting constitutes the first such metamorphosis, since information technology is non a existent flag but a painted representation. The question posed by the identification of the image of an American flag with the entire pictorial field is whether nosotros are looking at an actual flag or a movie of a flag, an image of a flag that depicts an object. This aquiver definition is typical of the grade Johns would pursue of flipping back and forth between object and prototype, and employing illusions that tin can be read ii unlike ways fighting for priority.

  Even in its initial iteration the flag, which has appeared in a variety of guises for decades in Johns' piece of work, is already a adequately complex riddle because the work shares the characteristics of both object and image, given that as an object it is in authenticity flat and dissimilar its conventional representation its depiction past Johns implies no 3rd dimension. The elaboration of the textured surface every bit a kind of relief, through the apply of layers of newsprint dipped in translucent wax, presents a farther complexity past introducing sensuous tactility to the instant optical recognition of a familiar image. But it is in fact this insistence on both visual complexity and unsettling conceptual reversals that distinguishes Johns' piece of work from that of any other contemporary artist.

• As his work evolves, his over-determined images migrate, assuming unstable and changing identities. Two specifically extended sequences of imagery merit consideration in this context of a gratuitous-floating consciousness: the complex illusionism and overloaded, over-adamant iconography of the Decoy sequence; and the seemingly abstract crosshatch motif, which is used to befuddle the mind in its spatial contradictions, use of chiaroscuro and implied perspective confronting itself.

  In paintings such every bit Between the Clock and the Bed (1981), inspired by a late self-portrait of Edvard Munch, the crosshatch blueprint becomes an epitome itself, reminding the viewer of how images are made in prints and drawings. Elsewhere Johns uses images from his own prints, inserting them in paintings of the crosshatch motif.

  Like everything in Johns' vocabulary of images, the crosshatch motif has multiple sources, merely virtually specifically information technology is the means past which volume is indicated in traditional etchings and engravings. Gradually images such as these evolve until their meaning strays further and farther from the object or experience that originally inspired them. Moreover, this process of distancing corresponds to the gradual degeneration of images as they are reproduced, before the invention of digital reproduction permitted their permanent stabilisation. In the seemingly abstract patterns of Johns' crosshatch works the prototype is distilled into no more than the deconstruction of the process by which it is made.

• Printing is the primary means by which Johns transforms objects into images. Often this requires an intermediate step of photography. For Johns, press is an intimate action, to the extent that he imprinted parts of his own torso in sequences of works such as Diver and Skin. He made his first prints in 1960, under the tutelage of Tatyana Grosman, a European printmaker who had set up Universal Express Art Editions, a printmaking workshop in West Islip, New York, where Johns continued to piece of work for decades. Both the Decoy sequence and the crosshatch works are inspired by the symbiosis of painting and printmaking that Johns learnt to apply to immense creative advantage, permitting him both to continue exploring sequential overlapping imagery, as well as to create new types of spatial constructions.

  In translating objects into images through reproductive techniques, Johns takes advantage of the mechanical processes he has learned from progressive proofs in the print studio. Equally he learns new printmaking techniques, he uses them to extend the range of his paintings. In the late 1960s, he made his get-go silkscreens, a print procedure in which pigment is pushed through a mesh screen to adhere to the paper beneath, which suggested new ways of elaborating surfaces and extended his range as a colourist.

  In 1970 Grosman caused an offset lithographic press usually used for commercial purposes. The upright new mechanical printing allowed the rapid proofing of subsequent states of an image, leading to the increasingly complex overlay of many layers of proofed states. This was important in producing the sequence of images involved in the 2 paintings titled Decoy (1971). The source for the sequence was a photographic reproduction of the 1966 painting Passage II.

• Similar Watchman and Co-ordinate to What (1964), Passage Ii is festooned with the bandage of a human leg bent at the knee. All three paintings have a ghoulish quality that may subconsciously evoke the activity of barbarous serial killers. In this connection we should note that in 1962, Johns visited London'due south Madame Tussaud'southward with its sleeping room of horrors, which evidently inspired him to cast a human leg to use in Watchman in 1964, in the first of his anatomical butcherings of bodies into fragments. Before, in Target with Plaster Casts (1955), Johns had cast body parts and painted them bright artificial colours. At present he wanted a more realistic epitome of flesh covered past skin. Watchman, a vertical work, would be followed in 1964 by the horizontal According to What, a magisterial indexing of all the forms of optical illusions, inspired past Duchamp'due south taxonomy of representation in his last painting, the 1918 Tu m'.

  Like the serial killers who often accept a hiatus, Johns did not paint the third canvas containing an inverted homo leg, Passage II, until 1966. This time the flesh-coloured painted plaster cast is pinioned to the canvass with a large peg through its ankle and attached to the left side of the sail. Now the familiar stencilled letters are bent back as if receding into an indeterminate viscous painterly space. On the bottom edge, a neon sign with its electrical socket revealed – ane of Johns' few ventures into technology – spells out the word RED. On the height right, two panels – i ruddy, and one yellow that looks equally if it tin slide under the ruby-red – are marked with unidentified residues of paint that suggest they were created by beingness blotted on top of each other and then reversed in orientation.

  Originally a photo of Passage II was used as the basis of the lithographs titled Passage I, a print with some of the same bright colours every bit the original painting, and Passage II, a ghost epitome in white ink on black paper. The purchase of the starting time lithography press fabricated it possible for Johns to then recycle this imagery in 1971 into a big vertical print, Decoy, which turned the horizontal imagery of Passage II on its side. This print also contained a predella of vi images from Johns' First Etching Second State (1967–69).

• Johns then made two paintings after the print Decoy. Returning to the image in another lithograph, Decoy Two in 1971–73, he reworked the same stone and 18 plates equally the original print, calculation an some other seven plates that fabricated the image even more rich, elaborate and complex. Eventually xix separate printing elements were used in Decoy, and 26 in Decoy II. All the colour plates were mitt drawn equally the artist transferred imagery from i work to another.

  Originally the paw-fed starting time printing was bought past Grosman for proofing but. Now it had get the means to create Johns' nearly extended series of overlapping imagery, which was modified, altered, revised and recycled in a series of works that resulted in a impress condign the source for a painting. In his 2007 essay Painting Bitten by A Man, Jeffrey Weiss wrote: "Uniquely, Johns' procedures incorporate the corporeal: the body as an instrument: the painting every bit body; the cartoon as skin." Weiss hints that this process is actually one of self-cannibalisation, in which the artist "eats" or ingests his own imagery. And indeed, we have seen how transforming a painting into prints and then feeding the lithographic epitome of Decoy back into two paintings cannibalises previous works. Now the painting is no longer literally bitten in an impulsive, sudden act of violent hunger; it is savoured as haute cuisine in a circuitous combination of textures that require fourth dimension to exist relished and subject to be prepared.

• 

  Jasper Johns, Painting Bitten past a Man, 1961.

  Encaustic on canvas. 24.1 10 17.5 cm. The Museum of Modernistic Art, New York © Jasper Johns / VAGA, New York / DACS, London © 2017. Digital paradigm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

• One pregnant of the title Decoy is its reference to the wooden ducks used to fool existent ducks into landing and consequently being shot by hunters. In Johns' game of illusion versus reality, the depicted versus the actual, the decoy is a false duck. Or put another way, the printed image of a human being leg, now hung from the upper right corner of Decoy, can be visually interpreted equally dead game hung from a hook, a typical trompe l'oeil subject.

  This flipping of an unstable image dorsum and forth into two opposing configurations is found in the popular drawing of the duck-rabbit, an cryptic figure the brain can interpret equally either a rabbit or every bit a duck that was published in 1960 by E.H. Gombrich in Art and Illusion, a book Johns owns. According to Gombrich, "We remember the rabbit when we see the duck, but we cannot experience both at the same time." The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose views accept too influenced Johns, was also fascinated by the ambiguity of the duck-rabbit. This unresolvable visual instability is precisely what interested the creative person whose mind had turned increasingly to the paradoxical, visual, mental and intellectual contradictions that refused resolution. Every bit already remarked, the management of Johns' work is ever towards increased complication and decreased legibility, if by legibility 1 understands like shooting fish in a barrel and clear definitions.

  As the images become more enigmatic, the surfaces become more than opaque and elaborate, more impenetrable and less ingratiating. Among Johns' more than disquieting images is that of Montez Singing (1989-90) in which the skin of a face stretched as if detached from the skull, the optics now staring out of corners. Skin, a subject he has treated in the past, has go the ground on which objects are depicted, raising the question of foreground and background that is the bedrock of pictorial depiction. In the later crosshatch paintings, the space he pictures is that of an impossible earth in which partial and perverse perspective and chiaroscuro, originally used to create pictorial illusions, are now enlisted to contradict themselves. Ultimately the field is so littered with images that are discontinuous and mutually contradictory that they verge on incoherence and stay in place but considering we believe in the permanence of their geometric confines.

• Typical of this dissolution of the background into a discontinuous fragmented surface is the 2010 print Fragment of a Letter, in which the artist draws images of a mitt gesturing in sign language as the basis on which other images are depicted. In other works, stick figures meme the mariner's message for S.O.S., which is now a voiceless cry. What is pictured is what cannot exist said. This is the signal at which language fails, when both artist and critic become silent. In the words of Wittgenstein, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." At this point both artist and critic are equally deaf and impaired.

  Peradventure Johns' objective is to bring the viewer to the signal of muteness, to silence criticism by overwhelming its capacity to analyse. Indeed, with so many conflicting illusions and spatial paradoxes, the heed ultimately boggles under the weight of excess data. For example, we are always finding out new facts about Johns. The 2007 exhibition, Jasper Johns: Gray, which contained exclusively grisaille versions of his works, revealed that over the course of his career the artist has had a doppelganger lurking in the shadows, a twin who is moody, melancholy and obsessed with expiry. These grey works as it turns out are often the twins of brightly coloured pieces, their dark opposites suggesting another world on the other side of a mirror. The concept of the evil and unsafe doppelganger was popularised by Dostoevsky in the The Double, the story of a meek, introverted government clerk who goes mad because he keeps encountering his aggressive, extroverted double who wishes to inhabit his persona.

  On a lithograph that contains the same portrait printed on a ceramic plate in Souvenir and Souvenir ii, Johns had scrawled "dish", hinting as well at use of the word to draw someone as attractive. But the expression on the face of the photograph is hardly that of cocky-satisfaction. Labelling the bleak cocky-portrait as a "dish" was more than likely an act of ironic self-deprecation. Indeed, Johns has often criticised himself, maxim at times that he was not a groovy colourist or an accomplished draftsman. This is non the portrait of the artist as a successful statesman or diplomat like Rubens, or even as a rakish maverick like Picasso. It is the portrait of an artist who is deeply self-critical, if not self-rejective, who looks if anything not smug but terrified.

  In the dark series of greyness works, death constantly lurks. In the series Tantric Item (1980-81), skulls repeatedly announced as the exuberance of the youth is replaced by the contemplation of death. T.S. Eliot's description of the playwright Webster – "much possessed by death/And saw the skull beneath the pare" – might describe Johns likewise. InSkin (1975), a large piece of work on newspaper, Johns imprints his own face and trunk. Can we not help only wonder if this trunk, which is that of an artist, is a corpse like Gatsby floating face down in his Due west Egg pond pool?

  In the form of Johns' work, there is no progress but at that place is evolution, change, redefinition, dissolution, ultimately a fading abroad and decathecting of the original retention as it is transferred and grafted, translated and faded out, until it is tuckered of any emotional significance or personal feeling. The volume, sealed with encaustic in the 1957 object Book, becomes open in Foirades, (1976-2017), a series of etchings made to illustrate five short stories by Samuel Beckett and based on fragments from the agonizing four-part painting Untitled (1972), which includes fake body parts – hands, anxiety, legs, male buttocks, a female person torso – scattered to resemble scenes of carnage. Past the time these disturbing images are reconfigured and recycled in a continuous sequence of prints, their identity is so denatured and generalised we can hardly recognise them every bit human. And although it is true the painting was made at the height of the Vietnam War, Johns has cautioned against giving any political meaning to his work, fifty-fifty his American flag.

  Then what are we to make of the meaning of Johns' deadened, silenced objects, contradictory optical illusions that will non remain fixed, casts and images of human body parts, and paradoxical spaces constructed from the remnants of pictorial representation? Obviously Johns, like the fob in Pinocchio, actively tempts the critic to see. But to come across what? The answer must be whatsoever is already in one's mind. Johns' friend Susan Sontag wrote an essay titled Against Interpretation. Simply is it possible to look at the creative person's images without interpreting them, since they are expressly intended to evoke associations in the viewer? No, I don't think so. On the other paw, each spectator volition inevitably have their ain subjective interpretation of Johns' imagery based on personal experience, and their own dreams, memories and impulses. These subjective interpretations provoked past Johns' use of increasingly overloaded, charged imagery, which he seems to use the way a managing director uses "phase business" to proceed things moving, may likewise be the artist'south strategy to proceed the states from noticing what he is actually upwardly to on a more than serious level than storytelling iconography.

• The relationship betwixt illusion and reality is the consistent concern that connects all of Johns' works. He has said that the thread connecting his paintings is defined by the space he creates. How he constructs and interprets that artificial illusion is the storyline of his art. The space he creates through a diversity of devices, including reproduction, is shifting and inconsistent like the baggy space of a dream. The possibility that life itself is a dream is fundamental to both Shakespeare likewise as the Buddhist concept of life every bit a dream. If the picture the creative person is representing is that of consciousness itself, then the relationship between illusion and reality, the dream and its contents, must remain unresolvable.

  In his about recent works light begins to play a decisive role. It is non the reflected low-cal of the Old Masters, just the illumination from within, the light that also makes the paintings of Barnett Newman so remarkable. It is equally if Johns the immature sceptic and literal materialist now aspires to the blinding epiphany of the central figure of the transcendent and Christ who rises after expiry, which is the primal paradigm of the Isenheim Altarpiece that inspires many of Johns' afterward works. Newman of course is known for his involvement with the concept of humanistic heroism. The New York School were members of what Americans call "the greatest generation". They believed their efforts were heroic. But what could constitute heroism in today's fractured, fragmented, technology-dominated global world threatened with extinction considering of man greed, brutality and ignorance?

  As Walter Benjamin observed in his key 1935 essay The Piece of work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, technological progress inevitably destroys the "aura" that defines the unique work of art. Could it exist, and then, that 1 class of heroism is the restoration of the unique aura of the handmade, finely crafted, private work of art in the age of technological "progress" and democratic multiplicity? To use the techniques and processes of printmaking, which is fundamentally a arts and crafts based on handmade reproduction that opposes the recording of reality in photography, then to resurrect painting as a living, rather than a dying, fine art grade, is at this indicate aught less than a heroic task. We have moved from the existential Historic period of Anxiety to the Age of Instability. Johns' acceptance of instability as a permanent feature of contemporary experience may too be construed every bit a heroic opinion, both painful and uncomfortable, although inevitable in gild to stand for to our shifting moment.

  I recall talking to Johns about the body parts Géricault brought dwelling from the morgue to study. Johns said he preferred Leonardo because the Renaissance master dealt with the whole corpse. All the same, what he admired nigh about Leonardo, he said, was that he could contemplate and draw the deluge that could end the world without his hand shaking. The mastery of Johns' recent works proves that at the age of 87 his hand does non shake, no affair what willpower and endurance it may have to keep it still.

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Source: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/magazine-jasper-johns

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