established the materiality of painting’s identity to begin asking questions about the status of its physicality over time and whether it was possible, as he put it, “to make an object which is not so easily defined as an object.”[44]
These were issues raised by Johns’s own experiences with his art, including a few incidents that prompted him to question his assumptions about the everyday objects he had chosen as the first subjects of his mature work. For the 1958 sculpture Flashlight, for example, Johns had selected one of those things the mind already knows as his subject. Or so he thought. When he went out to buy the flashlight that would serve as the basis for the sculpture, he found that he had unconsciously made an assumption about the appearance of this supposedly familiar everyday object:
I had a particular idea in my mind what a flashlight looked like – I hadn’t really handled a flashlight since, I guess, I was a child – and I had this image of a flashlight in my head and I wanted to go and buy one as a model. I looked for a week for what I thought looked like an ordinary flashlight, and I found all kinds of flashlights with red plastic shields, wings on the sides, all kinds of things, and I finally found the one I wanted. And it made me very suspect of my idea, because it was so difficult to find this thing I had thought was so common.[45]
The following year, another development reinforced Johns’s doubts. Hawaii and Alaska became states, and the flag that had initiated Johns’s career suddenly changed. Things the mind already knows? The flag had had forty-eight stars since before Johns’s birth; it was the only flag he had ever known.
Spending a little time with Flag suggests what Johns may have liked about its design. Forty-eight stars produces a neatly aligned pattern, six rows of eight white stars each, a compacted harmony with the six white stripes of the body of the flag. Fifty stars throws this harmony off completely. The field of stars becomes a restless, scattered affair, a decisive move away from the quiet balance of the flag Johns had always known. In fact, Johns more or less stopped painting flags, explaining: “They added two stars. Since then the design does not interest me anymore.”[46]
Johns didn’t stop painting flags entirely. In 1962, for example, he painted Two Flags, and in a number of subsequent works in which he quoted motifs that had previously appeared in his oeuvre, the flag would put in an occasional appearance. But whenever it is possible to count the stars in one of these later flags, wherever excessive markings have not obscured their individuality, there are still usually only forty-eight of them, and when Johns has depicted flags with fifty stars, he has often juxtaposed them with flags containing only forty-eight of them.[47] To the original, polarising question that critics asked – “Is it a painting or is it a flag?” – come more complicated options: Is it a painting, is it a flag, is it a work of art by the artist Jasper Johns, who became famous for painting the American flag as it appeared between 1912 and 1959, or is it a defunct flag for a nation of forty-eight states that no longer exists?
Sometimes the conflict between concept and reality emerged in Johns’s process of realising a work. On two occasions when he made drawings that were studies for paintings yet to be made, he ended up with results that were rather different than he had expected. In 1958, he made a richly worked drawing of a wire clothes hanger placed on a wooden peg. In the drawing, the hanger’s crossbar is parallel to the paper’s lower edge, but when Johns executed the painting using a real peg and hanger, he found that rather than hanging straight, the hanger canted slightly. This was a physical effect of its shape, something Johns had never noticed in the hangers he had seen and thus hadn’t anticipated in his drawing.
Johns also made drawings in preparation for a work to be called Painting with Two Balls – a sly joke on the idea of Abstract Expressionism as “ballsy” painting, tough and macho. The painting Johns planned would have actual balls wedged between the stretcher bars of its adjoined canvases, but when he proceeded to make the painting (first in a grey version with one ball in 1958, followed by a colourful painting with two balls two years later), he found that wedging the balls caused the longer sides of the stretchers to bow. To make the paintings look the way they were supposed to, Johns had to construct special stretchers to offset the distortion.
With paintings and objects that behaved contrary to Johns’s ideas for them, no wonder he began to reexamine his relationship to them. This process included accepting ambiguities, even cultivating them, rather than trying to eliminate them. It meant working, in fact, with a sense of profound doubt. Toward the end of the 1960s, he explained how such experiences changed his thinking:
I thought at the time that a radiator is a radiator. We can agree on this. Now, I’m not so sure. At that time, I was willing to take the radiator as a concrete object with definition and spatial characteristics. If you please, as a real object. I was even willing to take it as a reference – something steady and set. Art has so often involved ambiguities and the possibility of ambiguities. I originally thought the radiator was not ambiguous, that it was a basis on which we might agree. I am not sure any longer that I believe or am secure in that type of thinking. I would now question the reference as much as the work.[48]
Painting with Two Balls, 1960. Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects (three panels), 165.1 × 137.2 cm. Collection the artist. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Highway, 1959. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 190.5 × 154.9 cm. Private collection. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Interestingly, Johns’s reading of Wittgenstein reinforced this shift in his thinking, for the philosopher himself had undergone similar changes in his thoughts about language. In Wittgenstein’s early works, such as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he examined the logical structure of language, taking it as the basis of what we can know, but in his later Philosophical Investigations, he rejected the idea of a language that reliably pictures reality in favor of an understanding of language as a tool with many uses that can vary from one situation to the next.
Far from causing Johns to retreat from the inclusion of objects in his art, his experiences seem to have led him to use objects more intensively; only now he attempted to allow them simply to assert themselves, rather than some idea he had about them. He secured them to his canvases, often in assemblages, with hinges, wires, or by other means that permitted them to move (or that at least implied the possibility of movement), as in Studio, Slow Field, and Painting with Ruler and “Gray.” As he explained to a Japanese critic, “I have begun to want an object to be free from the way I see it.”[49] Thus instead of a target, there were circles generated by slats of wood, and Johns’s use of stencils called attention to the physical identities of the stencilled names of colours: which took priority – what these names said, or their material presence in paint of a different colour altogether? The materiality of the names of colours became pronounced in some works. In Periscope (Hart Crane) and Land’s End, the letters comprising the names jumble together, becoming almost unreadable. In According to What, some of the metal letters spelling out the word “BLUE” have been bent, and in Passage II, the letters tumble forward from the painting’s lower edge.
The potential confusions between objects, art and language yielded the possibility for visual and verbal puns, not to mention more ambiguous plays of meaning. For example, Johns made two sculptures, one with two cans of ale and the other representing a can of Savarin coffee used as a container for his paintbrushes, rendering both with such an uncanny degree of realism that these objects’ true identities are discerned only when a viewer lifts the cast-bronze sculptures and realises that they’re far heavier than
Johns once made a drawing of a flag with sixty-four stars (eight rows, rather than six rows, of eight stars each), but he has said this was a mistake. Subsequently, he has also on occasion returned to this version of the flag in his work.
