The conditions of seeing
Even people who love Jasper Johns’ art call it enigmatic and indecipherable.
“Artists are obsessed with seeing, and he keeps showing us things we cannot see,” said poet and critic John Yau during a talk last Wednesday at the Menil Collection.
Yau was referring partly to what he called the “inevitable dissolution” of images in Johns’ paintings and drawings — the artist’s penchant for making things almost disappear, practically camouflaging elements with his layering of dense marks.
That theme and others are very much present in “The Condition of Being Here,” the first show of the recently opened Menil Drawing Institute. There are so many ways to look at the 41 drawings on display, produced from 1954 to 2016 by the elder statesman of American art, who at 88 hasn’t stopped yet.
For those just treading into the Cult of Johns, discovering his deft hand with materials and techniques — ink, graphite, charcoal, pastel, paintstick, metallic powder, gouache, watercolor, frottage and collage; on plastic or paper of various kinds — may be entertainment enough. As assistant curator Kelly Montana writes in the gallery guide, the show is “a testament to the joys and possibilities of committing a mark to paper.”
Thanks to the way the works are grouped, a viewer also quickly recognizes how Johns uses recurring images from a relatively small canon, including American flags, targets and numbers — common things he contended were “seen but not looked at” and “things the mind already knows.”
Be here now
Back in 1954, Johns’ flags and targets challenged ideas about modern art that had been dominated by the New York school’s minimalists and abstract expressionists. He made it cool again to paint identifiable subjects — “found” subjects, such as the found objects of the witty Marcel Duchamp.
“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it,” Johns once wrote in a notebook. So his art is also about how to look at art, by showing us different ways of seeing a thing.
The show’s title comes from a famous entry in a notebook Johns kept in 1968: “Remove the signs of ‘thought.’ It is not the ‘thought’ which needs showing. The application of the eye. The business of the eye. The condition of a presence. The condition of being here.”
Sensitive viewers can’t help but hear the emotion in that. They also can see it in the intensity of Johns’ mark-making.
The watercolors send me over the moon. They are seductively slippery and palpably chaotic with their puddles and pools and depth and shallowness of grays and black. Or greens and yellows, as in “Farley Breaks Down,” drawn with ink and water-soluble encaustic on plastic in 2014.
Farley is one of Johns’ most affecting recurring images, lifted from a vintage Life magazine photograph of a demoralized soldier during the Vietnam War. Farley sits in a room, hunched over a table, maybe crying, with his head in his hands. Johns also sometimes employs another figure, sitting on a bed but similarly with his head in his hands; its source was a photograph of Lucien Freud, taken by Francis Bacon.
The latter, Yau suggested during his talk, “is not about a photo of Lucien Freud. It’s about a man whose face is hidden.”
In the early decades of Johns’ career, Yau noted, “meaning” was considered extraneous in the work of artists like Johns. And Johns doesn’t explain it. If he did, Yau probably wouldn’t find it nearly as intoxicating.
He has had too much fun investigating it over his own long career. Yau wrote “The United States of Jasper Johns” (1996) and “A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns” (2008). One of his many books of poetry borrows a title from Johns, “Corpse and Mirror.” And his deft verse frequently backflips across the page, employing repeating poetry forms that have much in common with Johns’ mirrored images.
Yau can suss out a story behind virtually every mark, every image, in every Johns composition he considers — whether it’s a figure adapted from a Renaissance painting; a dozen things a single star on a flag might imply; the positioning of female heads above “bodies” masquerading as vases or targets; the shape of the faucet in the artist’s bathtub; and all that could have been churning in a middle-aged head as he soaked there.
‘The Broken Man’
Across all of it, he recognizes a preoccupation with mortality and what he calls “the broken man” in Johns’ work — the expression of a “fundamental solitude that all of us experience,” but also Johns’ explorations of gender identity and his “damaged masculinity” as a gay man; and his awareness of “living in time, which has a chaos we can neither avoid nor escape.”
Veteran painter Carl Palazzolo, whose explorations of memory and longing also employ recurring symbols and numbers, sees narrative at play in Johns’ art, too. “It’s a narrative only he can decipher,” he said — although he recognizes and empathizes with the clues about a persona that isn’t whole or is partly hidden.
Johns is one of his lodestars, along with Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg. “He showed me a way out of the desert of minimalism,” Palazzolo said. “When I went to school in Boston in the 1960s, there weren’t a whole lot of ways forward.”
Palazzolo wanted more from the Menil Drawing Institute show than a casual visitor. He went to examine the unusual techniques, especially curious about works that were on view for the first time. He wanted to savor how Johns creates visual poetry from mundane objects, returns to images that might have been put away for years and creates work on a human scale. His own work has similar attributes.
Inadequate light
But he was dismayed by the darkness of the institute’s 31by-91-foot gallery, which was designed for the conservation of light-sensitive drawings. Too disturbed to focus.
He was right, I realized on my next visit. He isn’t the only friend disappointed by the gallery.
I was so engrossed by the deep dives into Johns’ forms, methods —and dare I say it, meaning — I hadn’t paid much attention to the conditions of the environment. Knowing the light was low for a reason, I hadn’t thought to question it.
“You can do the right thing, and it can be wrong,” Palazzolo said. “It’s not good for viewing. Couldn’t they just could turn up the lumens a bit, even for a few hours a day?”
Artists don’t necessarily consider their works so precious they must be saved for future generations, he added. “I’m here now, you’re here now, they’re here now; so look at the things.”
Two windows in the gallery are covered by walls for this show but can be exposed when less light-sensitive drawings are on view. The next exhibition, “Roni Horn: When I Breathe, I Draw,” opens Feb. 15. It contains just a few monumental works. Light or dark, that will be a radically different viewing exercise.