'Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth' At Royal Academy Of Arts, London

Jasper Johns, 'Target', Encaustic & Collage On Canvas, 1961

Over the recent Half Term holidays, I went to view The Royal Academy’s current 'Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth' retrospective exhibition, along with my friends, Tim and Andrew.  It’s a show I’ve been anticipating all year.  Here are some of the things I learned:

• The early pieces with which Johns made such an impact, still feel strangely – almost hermetically, unassailable.  We’ve lived with copious reproductions of those targets, Stars & Stripes flags, US maps and numerals for over half a century, and yet the effect of the originals remains urgent and immediate.  And, despite such familiarity, the chances to see the real things, here in Europe - have been few and far between.  My initial reaction, on approaching these pieces for the first time, was a surprisingly emotional one of real joy.

Jasper Johns, 'Flag', Encaustic & Collage On Canvas, 1967

• There’s a crisp freshness about many of these pieces.  The target and flags that greet the visitor at the start of the exhibition show little of the aging or loss of vibrancy one might expect from paintings of their vintage.  Does the wax involved in Johns’ encaustic technique help to somehow fix the pigments – or were they just always particularly well cared-for as a result of their almost instant market value?

Jasper Johns, 'Map', Encaustic & Collage On Canvas, 1962 - 63

Jasper Johns, '0 Through 9', Charcoal & Pastel On Paper, 1961

• That initial celebratory rush gave way to a more reflective appreciation of just how much of an influence Johns’ characteristic aesthetic, and general demeanour have been on me over the years.  It emphasised the extent to which I have quoted him, both wittingly and unwittingly, on numerous occasions.  My ‘Vestige’ paintings from last year may - I now realise, be as much a subconcious paraphrasing of his ‘Canvas’, as they are a response to the actual street-based subject that triggered them.  My enthusiasm for a certain variety of battleship grey (Johns is a master of the greys), and deployment of text elements within my work - are as attributable to the influence of Johns as to that of any other artist possibly associated with them. 

Jasper Johns, 'Canvas', Encaustic & Collage On Canvas, 1956

• The established art historical significance of Johns’ breakthrough pieces is well rehearsed, and the passage of time has inevitably cemented them into the general canon of Modern Art.  It’s hard for us to fully appreciate now, the real disruptive effect their recourse to external ‘subject’ must have presented to the Abstract Expressionist certainties of mid-century New York painting.  Johns’ destruction of his very earliest work indicates his emergence wasn’t quite as fully formed and instantaneous as official history suggests, but does emphasise the degree to which it represented a significant step-change in everyone’s artistic priorities (including his own).  If Duchamp once pointed the way out of established European tropes, perhaps Johns (and Rauschenberg) did the same for American art.

• In fact, it actually feels like Johns’ agenda was often one of repurposing Duchamp’s pioneering promotion of the idea over the sensory appeal of the artifact - back in favour of the resonant art object.  There is a certain stripe of conservatism running through Johns, who remains, at his core - a maker of beautiful things.  He seems to epitomise my own trite personal mantra that Art is certainly a branch of Philosophy – but one in which you still get the joy of making stuff.

Jasper Johns, 'Fool's House', Oil, Sculpt-Metal & Charcoal On Canvas
With Objects, 1961-62

• Johns has naturally beautiful visual handwriting.  He is one of Art’s consistently elegant scribblers and possesses an enviable deftness with the nominally expressionistic brush stroke.

Jasper Johns, 'Periscope (Hart Crane)', Oil On Canvas, 1963

• For all that, his deployment of the gestural mark actually appears to serve a different purpose.  There’s a distancing effect in the early works, in which Johns appears to quote expressionism as a formal option, rather than an unconscious outpouring - and as a means to create nuance and a friction of new implications within his utilitarian, given subjects.  Put simply - to modulate and encrust formal elements that we expect to be functional signs, is to invest them with new layers of potential meaning.

• …And, I’ve always loved the pictorial tension between a loose, painterly fields and a crisp, precise edge – of which Johns is a consummate master.

Jasper Johns, 'The Critic Sees', Sculpt-Metal On Plaster With Glass, 1961

• Sculptures like ‘The Critic Sees’, or the ‘Painted Bronze’s, are among the most elegant jokes in Modern Art, and feel distinctly part of Duchamp’s legacy.

Jasper Johns, 'Painted Bronze', Oil On Bronze, 1961

Jasper Johns, 'Painted Bronze', Oil On Bronze, 1960

• If Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were once roped together, (even more intimately than Braque and Picasso, at another pivotal moment in western art), how fortunate are we to have been presented with major retrospectives of both artists in recent months?  The chance to compare and re-evaluate works so emblematic of their particular moment - and so freighted with significance, (and to mostly find them still vital and enduring in resonance) feels like a luxury.  This show hasn’t been without its detractors, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

• In the light of this, is it too obvious to observe the inconvenient (but oft-repeated) sense of a diminution of power in the later work of both artists?  Of course, these things never travel in an undeviatingly straight line, or as explicably as art critics and historians would wish.  Nevertheless, both retrospectives seem to suggest a certain dilution in the intensity of each artist’s powers or effect, as time went on.  Is this the price to be paid for such early acclaim? - or a debilitating function of the foaming art market? - or simply an assertion that almost no one can keep scaling the same lofty heights of eloquence they once did, whilst simultaneously avoiding the spiral into repetition and self-parody?

Jasper Johns, 'Spring', Encaustic On Canvas, 1986

• And this is, of course, the real dilemma with John’s career.  The prevailing theory that his work beyond the 1970s represents a notable fall-off in quality and purpose is commonly heard, but I was determined to seize the opportunity to make up my own mind.  The sad fact is, all three of us found more foundation in that view than we might have hoped for.  Regrettable though that may be, 'Something Resembling Truth' must surely trump any desire to airbrush an artist’s reputation.  Perhaps we should instead be grateful that an artist who seems almost too good to be true, early on, proved himself merely human after all.  And ultimately, I’d defend the right of any artist to struggle on for as long as they feel the need to – regardless of the outcomes.  The truth is, it’s probably less of a problem for Johns than it is for his audience and critics.

Jasper Johns, 'Racing Thoughts', Encaustic & Collage On Canvas, 1983

• For what it’s worth, my own ‘problem’ seems connected to John’s desire to replace his earlier, peerless demeanour of cool detachment, with one in which he admitted personal emotions and insights into the work.  But that’s hardly a crime per se.  Indeed, it still forms the main agenda of a huge proportion of artists.  And the impulse to collage more personal allusions, obscure signifiers and tangential references into an oeuvre where once elegant distillation or a tendency toward minimalist concentration once held sway, is a forgivable ambition.  It might even represent a degree of personal growth on Johns’ part.  The real issue is a seeming difficulty in realising his new agenda.  There’s a sense of an artist forcing the ideas more, at the same time as the ability (or energy) to resolve them is somehow diminished.

Jasper Johns, 'Montez Singing', Oil On Canvas, 1989-90

• What feels most disappointing is the transition in Johns’ work from sublime plasticity (be it painterly, sculptural, or in print), to a dispiritingly thin variety of illustration.  It seems ironic that his shift to more personal subjects, and emotional insights, should seem them merely described (often poorly), rather than evoked.  It’s a seeming reversal of his earlier state of sensual philosophy.  The use of supposed trompe-l’oeil effects, feels particularly shoddy (all those corny peeling corners and badly-rendered nails).  It could have been an interesting strategy, but actually ends up feeling lazy and lame.  The quotation of child-art eyes and lips is especially embarrassing (when it might have been a effective paraphrase).  A painting like ‘Montez Singing’ looks like a waste of a lunch break.  It’s all somewhat dispiriting, and I was surprised by how much anger it seemed to unleash within us.  Is that just an inevitable pit-fall of hero worship, I wonder?

• Of course, it could just be that John’s mark-making is better suited to the abstract that to the representational.  Could my adverse reaction be because that is how I feel about my own?

Jasper Johns, 'Between The Clock And The Bed', Oil On Canvas, 1981

Jasper Johns, 'Corpse And Mirror', Oil On Sand On Canvas, 1974 - 75

• Although it represents a transitional phase between ‘classic’ early Johns, and the more questionable later work, I still find much to like in his works from the 1970s and early 80s – in which all over patterns of hatching and flagstones take precedence over the more overtly emblematic motifs of previous years.  These new devices might appear to hark back to the painterly concerns of the Abstract Expressionists, but there’s still a sense of conscious deliberation about Johns’ new methods of getting across a canvas.  They feel like signifiers for certain Ab Ex. tropes, rather than an unmediated outpouring of emotion or spirituality, and despite their more obscure, personal origins are essentially just new elements of vocabulary within Johns’ own invented pictorial language.  There is a sense of layered meanings filtered through these broken fields; but they are mainly still references to external sources or quotations from other artists (such as Edvard Munch) – rather than any non-specific expressionism.

Jasper Johns, 'Dancers On A Plane, 'Oil On Canvas With Painted Bronze Frame', 1980

• Thankfully, not all the news from the latter portion of the exhibition is as bad.  The ‘Regrets’ series feels to me like a moderate return to at least some of Johns’ intrinsic strengths.  He selects a single, found motif in a photo of Lucian Freud, commissioned by Francis Bacon.  Instead of overburdening it with additional imagery, he allows its resonances to emerge through the layering and mirroring of this single source; for the negative shape created by the photo’s damaged portion to become a formal pictorial element of some significance; and for the ghostly skull which haunts the series to be found through pictorial chance operation - rather than tritely imposed.  Lest we forget, Johns moved in the same circles as John Cage, back in the day.

 

Jasper Johns, 'Regrets', Oil On Canvas, 2013

• Whilst the exhibition closes with a perfectly acceptable painting derived from the Freud image, the full implications of the ‘Regrets’ series really play out in a suite of printed variations on the theme.  Johns continues to quote himself (and others) in all this, but it feels like he’s digging a bit deeper again, and releasing things rather than merely forcing them.

Jasper Johns, 'Regrets (State 13)' Aquatint On Paper, 2013

• The underlying theme of ‘Regrets’ is a fairly standard one of ageing and impending demise -  underpinned by a distinct sense of existential despair.  But, surely that’s forgivable from an octogenarian artist – isn’t it?  Would that we might all be working as productively as Johns, at a similarly advanced age.

'Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth' runs until 10.12.17 at: Royal Academy Of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1S 3ET.