Johns is an artist whose currency is the cryptic, whose cards never get put on the table. Most motifs repeat over and over.īig anchor works such as Studio and According to What (both 1964), Harlem Light (1967) and Racing Thoughts (1983) are not only ugly and bad, they are irrelevancies. There are coffee cans, strings and things, beer cans, flags, maps, numbers in many media, and most recently, stick figures and skeletons. After, say, the early 1960s, though, it is a long slog of small vision. He burnt all his juvenalia in 1954, had a dream about the American flag, and, as the Whitney show tells us, a legend was born. As a minority of one, a Vermont art critic, I’m happy to wish Johns many more years. I am not a contrarian, but I do not belong to the New York echo chamber. Only Johns fanatics will see both versions of the exhibition.įrom left: Pinion (1966), From Eddingsville (1969), Edisto (1962) and Studio (1964) Photo: Ron Amstutz As it is, the two are sharing the same catalogue. When it comes to Johns, though, I wish the two museums flipped a coin to see who went first and then decided on roughly one curatorial version. And he eventually found even his own art a bore. Duchamp is many things, I know, but a con artist and tease are among them, as he acknowledged. Philadelphia might feel it has first dibs on a big Johns show since his professed muse, Marcel Duchamp, was much admired and collected there. The version of Mind/Mirror in Philadelphia is marketed as a fascinating case of doubling curatorial takes, but I think this is contrived, self-indulgent and economically inefficient. Castelli and Johns developed close relationships with curators at the Whitney and Museum of Modern Art in New York and with the Hamptons set of buyers. Leo Castelli, Johns’s longtime dealer, smartly and assiduously marketed him. Otherwise, Johns is no David Wojnarowicz. Liar, a 1961 painting Johns created after he broke up with fellow American artist Robert Rauschenberg, is refreshingly loud and bitchy. As targets, they responded with effacement. Target With Four Faces is said to concern the hide and seek gay men needed to play in the 1950s to survive. Johns's 1982 Savarin monotypes and (foreground) Studio II (1966) Photo: Ron Amstutzįor New York critics, he was a gold mine of allusion and safe otherness as well as so prolific there was always something new to say about him, however trivial it might have been. Johns had a passage of creative genius when he combined encaustic and collage to make surfaces that compelled close looking. They are rightly taught in every survey course in post-war American art. Target With Four Faces (1955), Three Flags (1958) and Map (1961) are arresting though odd beauties, cool and detached but dense like icing on a cake. Where to start? Johns is an artist of consequence. But you do not want people to leave your show liking the artist you revere less. A retrospective is a good idea – Johns has not had one in New York in more than 20 years. It is the supreme flower of an inability to edit, and a measure of how herdish New York critics and collectors are. Rather, the Whitney show is an invasion of sameness and ultimately numbing. We are not looking at an embarrassment of riches. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is also in the mix, hosting a simultaneous companion retrospective of around 250 works by Johns. Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror is the well-deserved though excessive retrospective of the 91-year-old artist’s work over 67 years, with 246 objects at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
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