Under every picture-perfect surface dwells a host of contradictions and realities. Bubbling under the facade of the happy, down-home, meatloaf-eating American Dream was the Civil Rights movement, McCarthyism and the Cold War. It was during this increasingly unsteady time that Jasper Johns grounded the theoretical rebellion of his art.
An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965 warns visitors not to be disappointed by expecting a survey of Johns’ work during this time read: Sorry folks, no American Flags today. Instead, the curator emphasizes a de-familiarization with a man who has become a well-known figure of pop art.
Upon stepping into the first room, the visitor is boldly greeted with the image of a target. With concentric circles of bright primary colors, this tidy and balanced image harkens back to the days of playgrounds, Sesame Street and Velcro sneakers. There is even a small box frame entitled Do It Yourself (1960) that includes an unpainted target, a paintbrush, a primary color palette and Johns’ signature with a blank signature space for whoever chooses to follow his lead.
The seemingly interactive nature of this work flows deeper than the child-friendly paint-by-number feeling of the piece. Between 1955 and 1965, fine art was undergoing an identity crisis: art was no longer about subject matter or the finished product but instead about the interplay between image and medium. With Do It Yourself, Johns was commenting on the mass production of images in advertising and the media. Anyone could pick up a brush and fill in his target, but it takes an artist to come up with the inane, or perhaps brilliant, idea of turning it into a work of art.
The exhibit groups four mechanical motifs that Johns used in varying combinations during the ten-year period. His fascination with this process yielded canvases accentuated with forks, rulers and plaster casts of hands and legs attached by wire and nails. By abstracting the typical creative process and replacing it with something machine-borne, his work plays with the contemporary state of American values and identity. The setting was the height of suburbia; just as lawns were tidily manicured in cookie-cutter fashion all the way down the block, art and image were becoming packaged products to be consumed by the masses.
The last rooms of the exhibit contain a series of studies for a work, Skin, that never came to fruition. Here, Johns uses his body like a cylinder seal to imprint the paper with his image. Of all four motifs, the body imprint is the starkest. Johns appears immortalized in paint, suggesting that he is no more than a tool in the mechanical process that endeavors to achieve high art. Johns’ gift lies in his ability to have foreseen abstractions such as these.
The exhibit is at the National Gallery of Art East Building and will be showing through April 29, 2007.
