Jasper Johns. Catherine Craft
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Название: Jasper Johns
Автор: Catherine Craft
Издательство: Parkstone International Publishing
Жанр: Иностранные языки
Серия: Temporis
isbn: 978-1-78042-997-7, 978-1-78310-772-8
isbn:
If Johns’s lively new paintings were simply embodiments or analogues of this perception of the world, they could be understood as essentially representational, evocative of an experience if not of a recognisable object. However, other elements in these works make it difficult to understand them in such a simple way. In False Start and its grisaille counterpart Jubilee, the stencilled names of colours dot the surface of the painting as erratically as the bursts of brushwork that surround, underlie and occasionally obscure them. The words are positioned at various angles, but more importantly, they are patently “wrong” – that is, the word “green” is shown in blue, “red” in orange, and so on. These apparent contradictions immediately raise a number of philosophical questions in which language is implicated as unstable and ambiguous: How do we know what we know? How do we acquire knowledge and accept it as such? When we say “red,” how do we know that someone else will understand what we mean? Johns’s intense curiosity about such issues during this period would be fed by his interest in the writings of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was concerned with language and meaning and the relation of both to visual information.
Drawing with Two Balls, 1957. Graphite pencil on paper, 25.4 × 22.4 cm. Collection of Mrs. Lester Trimble. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Johns described the works of this period as speaking an “unsettled language,” and indeed their evolution is difficult to trace in a straightforward sense, especially since Johns’s life itself was somewhat unsettled for most of the 1960s.[43] In 1963, he moved his New York living space and studio from downtown to the Upper West Side, and then in 1967 lived at the Chelsea Hotel and worked in a friend’s studio while a building he bought on Houston Street was being renovated. He visited Japan in 1964 and 1966, staying long enough to make some work, and he also spent time at the printmaking studios of Universal Limited 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 СКАЧАТЬ