Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror—a mammoth two-part show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art through February 13, 2022—is the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to Johns’s work.
What entitles him to an exhibition of such unprecedented scope? In the Whitney’s exalted view (generally shared by the artworld mainstream):
Johns’s groundbreaking work sent shock waves through the art world when it was first shown in the late 1950s, and he has continued to challenge new audiences—and himself—over a career spanning more than sixty-five years. . . . [His] early use of common objects and motifs, language, and inventive materials and formats upended conventional notions of what an artwork is and can be.
Circumstances have kept me from visiting the exhibition in person. But I know enough about Johns and his work to suspect that I would have found it mind-numbing in the extreme. Because I subscribe to the old-fashioned idea that art needs to do more than challenge prior notions of what art is.
In lieu of an exhibition review, therefore, I cull here some of my previous thoughts about Johns and his ill-founded artworld repute.
To begin, here’s what I wrote in Who Says That’s Art? (links are added here):
The pointlessness openly admitted to by [Robert] Rauschenberg also characterizes the work of his younger colleague Jasper Johns. Typical works by Johns featured in a 2008 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum included such banalities as Coat Hanger II and Flashlight, both from 1960. Johns first achieved fame in the 1950s, with paintings of flags and targets. Regarding his choice of these pictorially unpromising subjects, he told Time magazine: “[P]ainting a picture of an American flag . . . took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets—things the mind already knows.”1 On another occasion he explained: “My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterward—by those who look for it. . . . I feel that what I am doing is quite literal.”2 And another: “[Such subjects] are just the forms . . . which I have chosen to limit and describe space.”3
Nor do Johns’s notebooks suggest any deeper meaning or thought. Among their aimless jottings are the following: “Put a lot of paint & a wooden ball or other object on a board. Push to the other end of the board. Use this in a painting.” And “Take a canvas. / Put a mark on it. / Put another mark on it.”
What Johns and Rauschenberg did is in no significant way comparable to what true artists have always done. As their own words attest, they made no attempt to embody meaning intelligibly. Instead, they were engaged in what my grandmother might have referred to as potchkeeing around in the studio. As translated by Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish, that apt term means “To fuss or ‘mess around’ inefficiently and inexpertly.” One of Rosten’s sentences illustrating the word’s proper use fits perfectly here: “He potchkees around with paint and they call him a painter.”
In “Modernism, Postmodernism, or Neither?,” I had previously cited Johns’s inane sketchbook jottings and further observed:
Notwithstanding the mindlessness of such an approach to the creation of art, the head of the prestigious Wildenstein art gallery in New York—a gallery famed for its handling of Old Master paintings—recently referred to Johns as today’s “greatest living artist.” Surely a sign of just how precipitously the artworld has declined from any meaningful standard!
Also indicative of the artworld folly regarding Johns’s work was this brief note by Louis Torres and me in the January 2004 issue of Aristos:
When the expanded and renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York reopens next year, one of the new acquisitions you will have a chance to see is a drawing by Jasper Johns entitled Diver (1962–63)—“one of the most important works on paper of the 20th century,” according to the ever-credulous Carol Vogel of the New York Times. At nearly seven feet tall and six feet wide [!], the work is said to be worth over 10 million dollars. According to John Elderfield, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, it is “the most profound and intense work of art that Johns has created in any medium.” Purportedly alluding to novelist Hart Crane’s suicide by drowning in 1932, the drawing was a study for the painting of the same name. Just in case you can’t make out much from Johns’s inept scrawl, here is Vogel’s description: “Drawn on brown paper with charcoal, chalk, pastel, and probably watercolor, the work abstractly suggests a diver in motion, showing two sets of hands, one touching and pointing down as though preparing to dive and the other coming back up as if the figure were rising.”
Which led us to ask: “What?”
On the mental somersaults engaged in by critics who strive to find meaning in Johns’s inane work, I noted the following in Bucking the Artworld Tide:
In suggesting a possible lesson for a high school art class studying American painting after World War II, [Arthur] Efland unquestioningly accepts a highly dubious interpretation of a work by Jasper Johns. He approves the notion disseminated by the critic Robert Hughes (in his televised American Visions series) that the “submerged text of Johns’s target paintings connects to the stresses of Cold War America.” In addition, he accepts Hughes’s claim that Johns’s Target with Four Faces (1955) may also relate to the sense of personal paranoia that Johns, a homosexual, probably felt in a period when homosexuality was thought to have (as Hughes put it) “secret affinities with Communism.”
Such interpretations fly in the face of everything Johns has ever said about his work, however. To judge from his own repeated statements, his creative choices were arrived at casually, the product more of whim and happenstance than of paranoiac feelings of any kind. On his use of flags and targets as subjects, for instance, he told Time magazine in 1959: “[P]ainting a picture of an American flag . . . took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets—things the mind already knows.” He told another interviewer: “My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterward—by those who look for it. . . . I feel that what I am doing is quite literal.” And another: “[Such subjects] are just the forms that interest me and which I have chosen to limit and describe space.” Finally, Leo Steinberg, the art historian who first put Johns on the artworld map, has reported: “I . . . once ask[ed] why he had inserted these plaster casts [in the target painting], and his answer was, naturally, that some of the casts happened to be around in the studio.” As for why Johns cut off the masks just under the eyes, he told Steinberg: “They wouldn’t have fitted into the boxes if I’d left them whole.”4 So much for paranoia—Cold War or homophobic.
I rest my case.
Notes
- Jasper Johns, quoted in “His Heart Belongs to Dada,” Time, May 4, 1959, 58. Johns added: “A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.” ↩
- Jasper Johns, quoted in Selden Rodman, The Insiders: Rejection and Rediscovery of Man in the Arts of our Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), Ch. 6. ↩
- Jasper Johns, quoted from Milwaukee Journal (June 19, 1960) in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. by Kirk Varnedoe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 82. ↩
- Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 35, 37, 32. ↩
25 Responses
Kamhi’s fallacy is to assume any objects have stable or inherent meaning. Objects are like empty containers. Meanings can be put into them and taken from them. If some of those meanings seem inherent it is simply because of cultural habit/tradition to see them that way. One task of artists is to remove meanings from containers in order to allow new meanings to be put into them. Almost always that effort only partially succeeds and then the new meanings add ambiguity or even contradiction to the residue. It’s no small task to add new meanings into emptied or partially filled containers. When Jasper Johns effectively, yet not fully, emptied the American flag (a container) of its normalized meanings, he made it possible for others to add fresh or non-normalized [meaning] to it. These include new ambiguities about flag symbolism and — most of all — reiterate the non-stability of any meanings. Kamhi’s other bad habit in critical writing is to lead the subject with unproved adjectives, such as declaring a Johns drawing as an “inept scrawl” without explaining what inept is in his case. Kamhi is a forceful and informed writer but she errs when she assumes that meaning is stable and inherent to objects, especially those that serve as symbols of cherished values. Meaning is [a] complicated notion but it is certainly created independently of objects which may contain it, like a basket which contains an apple today and an orange tomorrow.
Modern ways of thinking make it hard to understand what meanings are or what connection they could have to bearers of meaning. But our ability to discuss anything at all depends on stability of meanings, otherwise we wouldn’t be able correctly to identify or refer to anything, so it seems evident that the problem is with modern ways of thinking rather than stability of meanings.
Agree that it’s all very complicated, though. The American Flag seems a special situation because it’s so completely a matter of convention, all the more so today since views differ so radically on what America is all about. It would be more difficult to remove inherent meanings from the human body although I’ve seen the attempt made. To me it seemed a falsification.
William,
When did it become the “task of artists . . . to remove meanings from containers in order to allow new meanings to be put into them”? Your subsequent claim that meaning is “created independently of objects which may contain it, like a basket which contains an apple today and an orange tomorrow” is surely not applicable to traditional works of art.
With respect to traditional art, meaning connotes the creative intent. The proper task of viewers in that case is not to create a new meaning (as you suggest) but to discern or discover what the artist intended.
Johns’s declaration that “A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator” places him squarely in the realm of postmodernist anti-art in my view. Could you imagine Rembrandt or Michelangelo–or even van Gogh or Hokusai–saying anything comparable?
I agree with James Kalb that the problem here is the relatively recent “ways of thinking,” not my failure to find meaning in Johns’s work.
Excellent article and response. I so appreciate your sane and rational voice in the art world. I feel, as author C.S. Lewis wrote:
Thanks for your kind words, Michael, and for sharing the wisdom of C.S. Lewis.
I urge reference to The Intentional Fallacy. An artist’s intentions are not a reliable guide to interpreting or valuing an art work because the artist may not have clear intentions, or they may never be known or they might be wrongly understood by the artist. My own view of this is that intentions — whatever they may be — are always necessary in any sentient act but they are never sufficient as criteria for interpretation or judgement. An artwork can only be understood in a context that may include the artist’s intentions mixed with the values and intentions projected to the artwork mixed with social, political, and material conditions. All of these undergo constant change and none is a truly reliable guide. But no artist is above criticality and even Jasper Johns may be wrong or cynical in describing his aesthetic values or intentions. There is only the artwork and its audiences and the continually unfolding of projected meanings.
Artists often try to subvert or cancel the habituated or culturally normalized meanings of images and form in order to embed new meanings. It’s an effort to see something as a “container” for alternative or layered meanings. Sometimes this happens by direct effort. Sometimes by evolving societal or functional purposes.
Proponents of traditional art rely on artists’ intentions and redundancy of habituated links between image and function and content. They narrow Art to artisanship and exclude originality and criticality. Their artists are mere craftsmen, or at best, virtuosos. This is not to exclude a new Rembrandt (actually a radical innovator in his time) obtaining high merit today but (his art) it must critique the status-quo art values, even to the point of irony. Less than that fails. It always has. Anyway, a wonderful topic.
Is it fans of tradition who tell us intentions determine meaning, so they side with Humpty Dumpty against Alice? (‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’) Or are they neoclassicists who believe true art is about presenting “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”?
It seems to me those views reject tradition in favor of rationalism. Traditionalists agree that meaning is connected to tradition (of course!), but the latter can’t be reduced to “habituated links between image and function and content” because it’s not an arbitrary social construction. Instead, it’s about something real and important that cannot be made entirely explicit. There’s a religious impulse behind it. Without that, meaning disintegrates and we end up in the world of late Samuel Beckett.
But there are no doubt multiple kinds of traditionalists. So perhaps I am only pursuing my own thoughts.
I suggest linguist Roy Harris who formulated Integrationist Linguistics. Although he denies stable meanings for words (and images/objects) he also accepts a societal context that can transitionally integrate habituated meanings, giving the illusion of fixed signifier-signified. So meaning is not fully detached from objects in practice but what maintains traditional meaning is simply a cultural habit that always fades. When old meanings are held in the same “container” as new meanings then irony and ambiguity develops. Most powerful and lasting art is highly ambiguous and —in a modern sense— ironic. This is exemplified in Jasper John’s’ work, on purpose.
I think the value of ambiguity in art has been greatly overstated by modern critics. And it is very difficult to convey irony in static works of visual art, because they lack sufficient context to indicate that they are not simply to be taken at face value.
“Powerful and lasting” equals “ambiguous and ironic”? Seems odd. Something’s been lost. “Can’t be nailed down completely because after all why have art and symbolism otherwise” seems better. Modern ways of thought reduce the latter to the former, which can’t be right. They impoverish. That was my original point.
WC’s view seems to favor arbitrary social constructivism. I don’t see how that goes with “powerful and lasting” art. P&L A must have something to do with something we don’t simply make up. Or so it seems.
But this discussion has to do with JJ, about whom I know very little and others involved know a great deal.
William,
Your reference to the “Intentional Fallacy” in support of your essentially postmodernist approach reveals a common misunderstanding of what was meant by the term.
As I explained in Who Says That’s Art?:
In my view, as I further noted:
I would argue that Johns’s inane stated intentions are entirely consistent with the banal and often arbitrary characteristics of his work. Critics who try to read more into his work give him far too much credit.
Michelle purposely misrepresents my reference to the Intentional Fallacy. I summarized it perfectly by saying “intentions are necessary but never sufficient”.
Further, Heinrich Wolfflin’s classic Principles of Art History (1915) essentially begins with the assertion that with art not everything is possible at all times. (See his Introduction p 11). Thus as art changes so too must the modes of criticality change. There are no universal art values. Art meaning is contextualized in a history of change. It emerges, flourishes, and passes. What’s inane is to pretend that a value or meaning can persist beyond its time. Finally, Michelle dismisses ambiguity in art meaning. Ambiguity, or layering of meanings, is the very essence of our times. Wolfflin would agree.
“Not everything is possible at all times” does not exclude “some things are basic eternally.” And it seems likely that our understanding of things that are basic eternally would be real but imperfect and so involve approximations a.k.a layered partial meanings.
All of these specious arguments against new art —always propositional —are silly because not all art is made for all people and especially not for uniformed people who come to it with fixed expectations. The world museums and the digital universe are filled with marvelous examples of “traditional” art that will please the most demanding —least curious— conservative audiences. And those who are mad about sky-high market values for some new art should look to the greedy speculators in the art market who exploit artists and art.
Why be curious when there isn’t something to find? I can’t help but think that marvelous new art somehow has something in common with marvelous old art. But there are many artists and each presents something different.
The great hope is that metaphysical confusions – e.g. modern nihilism – won’t interfere with understanding what’s there. Or lead us to overvalue X and undervalue Y, maybe for some conceptual reason. But the experience of what’s good must come first and then arguments, propositions, etc. must follow. They can’t be forced.
Thanks for your comments, which are obviously based on a great deal of thought.
William, I did not “purposely misrepresent” your reference. I responded to what you appeared to be saying about the original concept—as contrasted with your own view that “intentions are necessary but never sufficient.”
In any case, it turns out that we are largely in agreement on the relevance of intentions in general. The question that remains is how this applies to Johns. You appear to entirely discount what Johns has said about his work, whereas I argue that it is perfectly consistent with the apparent emptiness of the work itself, and therefore highly relevant. Instead of responding to that point, you refer to Heinrich Wolfflin. Published in 1915, his Principles of Art History dealt with different styles of relatively traditional pictorial art, figurative sculpture, and architecture, however, and one can wonder if he would have even recognized Johns’s postmodernist concoctions as “art” at all; it is essentially incommensurate with the works he was considering.
No do I entirely “dismiss” ambiguity in art. I merely stated that it is highly overrated. Can you cite a particular work of visual art whose value is enhanced by ambiguity?
Michelle, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Excellent critique.
I’m delighted to hear that. Thanks, Brian!
Why don’t you people write about the art you like and say why instead of ridiculing art you don’t like and don’t understand?
William, it is an ignorant assumption to think that a critic doesn’t understand an artist’s work.
Brian; To be a critic one must exhibit . . . an informed understanding of the history and contexts or uses of ideas and concepts of the work being critiqued. Your own statement above is an embarrassing example of subjective, summative presumption without any reasoned argumentation. Michelle and her pet audience continually ridicule (yes, look at Michelle’s abundant use of demeaning adjectives) much contemporary or modernist art for its not aiming to do what they would prefer. It’s like taking a trip to Rome and then complaining that the sights of London are not seen.
William, I removed your use of the term criticality, because it does not conform to ordinary usage.
I’ve done both.