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Rosalind E. Krauss on Jasper Johns

WHO AMONG US has ever prevented our ego from experiencing a new body of
work through the lens of our own current projects? This writer, for one, has not.

Recently, I found myself approaching the work of Jasper Johns, lavishly presented
in the new retrospective, through the grid of Roland Barthes, on whom I am now
working, and here, most particularly, through Barthes’s 1953 essay “The World as
Object.”

What are we to make of Johns’s constant recourse to the material object—the

maps, targets, flashlights, lightbulbs, ale cans, shoes, inanimate body parts,
partial faces? Barthes’s “World as Object” addresses seventeenth-century Dutch
painting, specifically, the still lifes. This world, he says, is reduced to an “empire
of things,” amounting already to a “‘modern’ aesthetic of silence.” He continues,

 The only logical issue of such painting is to coat substance with

a kind of glaze against which man may move without impairing
the object’s usefulness. Still-life painters like Van de Velde or Heda
always render matter’s most superficial quality: sheen. Oysters, lemon
pulp, heavy goblets full of dark wine, long clay pipes, gleaming
chestnuts, pottery, tarnished metal cups, three grape seeds—what can
be the justification of such an assemblage if not to lubricate man’s gaze
amid his domain?

In contrast with this array of translucence, viscosity, gleam, Johns exploits the
matte, the opaque, the alkaline. His wax encaustic, charcoal, grease, paint stick
all militate—it would seem—against sheen.

But that is to overlook the glassy gleam of the mirror, which holds the
represented object apart from its suspended reflection on the surface of
representation. When Johns worked with Samuel Beckett on the 1976 book
Foirades/Fizzles, Johns refused to illustrate a well-known work, such as the
suggested Waiting for Godot, instead requesting a new text. (Beckett responded,
“A new work? You mean you want me to write another book?”) Beckett ultimately
sent Johns five unpublished fragments, for which the artist created etchings of
crosshatchings that serve as reinforcements of the planar surface of the page.
Beckett chose these for the endpapers of the book, and Johns responded with
the (inevitable) painting End Paper, 1976.

The suspension of the surface of representation over the body of the

represented manifests itself most clearly in a group of drawings and prints from
the early ’60s, for which Johns pressed his lubricated face onto drafting paper,
later brushing the imprint with charcoal dust. Another obvious example is Liar,
1961, comprising a flap stenciled with the word LIAR beveled onto a planar
surface whereupon the word’s mirror image appears as a stamp also reading
LIAR. In Johnsian fashion, we have here the construction of a liar’s paradox: The
stenciled flap above the plane is itself the representation of the word, with its
imprint below asking the viewer to decide which of the two is illusion and which
is “truth.”

The large “Seasons” canvases, 1985–86—which owe much to the projected

shadows of Duchamp’s readymades in his Tu m’, 1918—feature images of the
artist’s silhouette as it was cast onto the floor by the intense sunlight flooding
into his Saint Martin studio. Likewise, in a photograph of Johns at work on
Untitled, 1984, the artist’s shadow falls across a large canvas as a projector
throws a lattice  onto the canvas/screen and the artist reaches out to trace the
projected lines. 

Already by the ’60s, Johns had gone beyond the unclenched layers of
representation in his drawings to the ninety-degree projections of freestanding
letters that swivel on the axis of the gap between the panels of Field Painting,
1963–64, and According to What, 1964, mirroring the colored words RED,
YELLOW, and BLUE on the surfaces abutting the gap.

To that end, we might return to Barthes’s piquant lines on the represented

object:

 All art which has only two dimensions, that of the work and that
of the spectator, can create only a platitude, since it is no more
than the capture of a shopwindow spectacle by a painter-voyeur. Depth
 is born only at the moment the spectacle itself slowly turns its shadow
toward man and begins to look at him. 

Rosalind E. Krauss is university professor of art history at Columbia University.

She is a cofounder and coeditor of October.

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