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Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Georgia and raised by his grandparents
after his parents divorced when he was two. Images of his grandparents'
house feature in Johns' late work. At the University of South
Carolina he studied for only six months before moving to New York
where he enrolled in a commercial art school. In New York he met Robert
Rauschenberg and they were studio neighbours in Pearl Street, downtown
from 1955 to 1958, a crucial stage of their development. Johns was
greatly impressed that Rauschenberg was able to support himself as
a window dresser. Rauschenberg got Johns a job doing the same; he
also introduced Johns to Leo Castelli, Andy Warhol's dealer.
Castelli gave Johns his first exhibition in 1958, which was a sellout.
Three pieces were bought by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He
was represented at the Venice Biennale the same year. Rauschenberg
also introduced Johns to composer John Cage. Cage has described Johns'
ability to give almost magical effect to precise perceptions while
placing these within the context of lived, everyday meanings.
Johns belonged to the same philosophical camp as Rauschenberg and
Warhol. Art was a representation or expression of something; it
did not belong in the European tradition of transcendental abstraction
that was developed in America by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and
Jackson Pollock. Jasper Johns concerned himself with the materiality
of the object. Like Warhol, his art reflected the prosperous consumer
society of post-war America. The work of Johns shares the same process-oriented
approach to art as Marcel Duchamp's 'ready-mades'
or John Cage's musical compositions, which he described as
'… not objects, but processes, essentially purposeless'.
The same definition can be applied to the work of Jasper Johns.
Perception is the central criterion in the genesis and
effect of Johns' paintings… 'the perception
of the object is through looking and through thinking'.
'Meaning' is a product of unmediated 'looking'
and should therefore not be distorted by expectations, prejudices,
knowledge, feelings or ideas. What Johns calls recreation
arises during the process of working, through visual and
intellectual activity. 'I have attempted to develop
my thinking in such a way that the work I've done is
not me - not to confuse my feelings with what I produced.
I didn't want my work to be exposure of my feelings'.1
There are over 90 works in the Edinburgh exhibition, all done since
1983. Many are self-referential and form part of a dialogue with
his own artistic practices over his lifetime. The first work in
the show, one of many prints, is a small lithograph of 1990 which
explores the theme of the psychology of perception. This theme pervades
all of his work in fact. Here he uses an anamorphosis - an image
that can be read in one of two ways but not both at once, for example,
a picture of a duck or a rabbit. Wittgenstein's notion that
recognition combines seeing and thinking is illustrated by Johns'
work.
Johns uses many art-historical borrowings and references in his
late work, ranging from Grünewald's 1515 'Isenheim
Altarpiece', which he visited several times, Hans Holbein's
1541 'Portrait of a Young Nobleman holding a Lemur', to
works by Da Vinci, Picasso, Munch and his own early work. A drawing
by an anonymous schizophrenic child which psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim
reproduced for an article in Scientific American in 1952,
has been copied by Jasper Johns and used as a basis for a number
of his own works. Bettelheim claimed that a fantastical picture
such as this could not be classified as art because it was not part
of a creative process, given the child's condition. Johns,
however, has taken the large, strange eyes in the same way that
he has borrowed aspects of Picasso's haunting portraits. The
result is intentionally confounding, where meaning may not actually
exist. Johns is a most accomplished printmaker, using the layers
and processes of his craft to mirror or run parallel to his thought
processes. Unlike his early work these are personal statements with
unclear messages.
Reference
1. Tilman O. Pop Art. Taschen, 1999: 157.
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