Don't expect confessional autobiography in the Jasper Johns exhibition that is coming to Dublin, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
In 1958, American artist Jasper Johns made one of the most auspicious débuts in modern art history with his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.
To explain why, a little scene-setting is necessary. It was late in the day for the movement that had transformed the fortunes of American painting, Abstract Expressionism. While the reputations of many of its exemplars were well- established, and some of them would go on to perhaps even greater things, for younger artists they were a hard act to follow.
The prospect of making derivative versions of what they'd already done was hardly inviting, though of course many artists did just that. There were moves in several directions that seemed to promise different lines of inquiry, moves that eventually resulted in such developments as colour field painting and minimalist, hard-edge abstraction. Then along came Johns. What he did seemed almost like a calculated riposte to the essential nature of Abstract Expressionism in that his paintings, though drawing on the painterly idiom of Abstract Expressionism, were neither abstract nor expressionist.
Johns is a southerner, born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930, and brought up in Allendale in South Carolina. He studied art at the University of South Carolina but then found his way to Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Two significant figures were teaching there: Josef Albers, late of the Bauhaus and now known for his Homage to a Square series, and the influential composer and thinker, John Cage, who became a central presence in Johns's life. He also met and befriended Robert Rauschenberg. Cage's Zen-inflected thinking, rigorous though unorthodox, clearly impacted on Johns's approach to life and art, and the effect of the analytical clarity of Albers's abstractions are evident in the flag and other paintings he made in New York from about 1955.
Visitors to the Castelli were taken aback to find themselves looking at facsimile images of the stars and stripes, rendered flatly, without distortion, but with a painterly flourish. The edges of the flag coincide with the edges of the painting. In effect, the painting is a flag. But Johns had not, à la Marcel Duchamp, simply appropriated a flag and stuck it on the wall. He had appropriated the image. Then he had painted it, often in beautifully tactile encaustic (that is, oil paint in a wax medium). It is obviously a very well-made painting, but the care in it is lavished on something so familiar as to be almost invisible, something generally taken for granted.
It is clear from the work in the show that technically Johns had everything a first-rate Abstract Expressionist painter should have. Except that his work seems to express nothing, as if he quite consciously set out to express nothing, by picking on impersonal, workaday, given images and objects as his subject matter and reproducing them neutrally, at one remove. Besides flags he painted targets, numbers, alphabets and maps, and he went on to make meticulously painted bronze sculptures of beer cans and electric torches. And, as though deconstructing painting itself, he painted blank canvases and colours (represented by words stencilled on to the canvas, sometimes misleadingly) and made bronze casts of paint brushes. Painting with Two Balls has - surprise surprise - two balls tucked into a join in the canvas, an ironic jibe at the macho swagger of expressionism.
MANY FEATURES OF what he was doing mark him as a precursor of Pop Art, but he has never at any stage been a Pop Artist per se.
At the time, the flat, literal quality of his work exerted a curious fascination. He gained a reputation for being a difficult interviewee, and he was certainly reductionist and pedantic in his responses, but all in the cause of pinning things down, or trying to arrive at an accurate description of what was going on in art. David Sylvester, the renowned expert on Francis Bacon, interviewed him in 1963 and battled to elicit the kind of conventional responses he seemed to expect.
Deep into a frustrating exchange, Sylvester suggests that surely painting is more than the result of making marks and arriving at an order that satisfies the artist. "What is it the result of, if it is not that?" Johns responds, rather unhelpfully.
For Johns, Sylvester concludes at one point, painting is about looking - but looking in general or looking at the particular things in the painting?
"I want the painting to be a thing which can be looked at," John replies gnomically. "I don't know. I don't know whether one wants anything other than to just work and stop work."
Well maybe, Sylvester suggests, he at least has an idea of what he doesn't want to do in a painting? "Yes, and that is a lot to have."
For much of the time, into the 1970s, Johns didn't want his paintings to broach personal issues in terms of their content. He was fundamentally wary of any hint of self-expression.
He did, though, embark on a process of self-exploration through his work as early at the 1960s, when he made his first Skin drawings, based on direct impressions of his own body. It is his body that appears in many of the works in Past Things and Present as a brooding, spectral presence in the various treatments of The Seasons and in other, indirect ways.
"In my earlier work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological states, my emotions . . . but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally, one must simply drop the reserve," he said in 1984.
Well, up to a point. Despite their incidental complexities, exhibitions tend to be described in terms of relatively simple stories, and the standard line on Johns, that he experienced something of a sea change in 1983, opening the floodgates to a rush of self-revelation, is a simple story. To judge by the work itself, though, the line defining before and after is not precisely defined, and those expecting a slice of confessional autobiography may well be disappointed.
THERE ARE PROBABLY more continuities in his work than differences. He may treat some overtly personal imagery, but he does so with much of the analytical detachment that characterises his 1950s paintings. And he was never going to forsake appropriation.
The relatively crowded spaces of his more recent work, from the mid-1980s on, are chock-a-block with inventively reworked, recycled and disguised versions of motifs pillaged from his own work and that of other artists, including Pablo Picasso, Hans Holbein and Matthias Grunewald, and from such sources as diagrammatic illustrations in Scientific American magazine.
He is fascinated by the working of perception, by problems of outline and surface. Time and mortality clearly preoccupy him. His literal, reductionist streak encourages him to ask obvious questions, such as what a surface actually is. He loves burying images in masses of misleading surroundings, or posing pictorial puzzles of one kind or another (many of the patterns that figure prominently are taken from the floors of houses in which he lived). And he delights in following things to their logically illogical conclusion.
Then, surprisingly, the most recent Catenary works see a return to the tone and timbre of his 1960s paintings. The title derives from an engineering term "denoting the curve formed by a flexible cord that hangs freely between two fixed points." These pieces are dominated by sombre, leaden expanses, rendered with that felicitous Johns touch, and they suggest great, though not greatly threatening, voids. They are shot through with a certain melancholy, and that too is entirely characteristic of Johns post- and pre-1983.