Jasper Johns: Painting By Numbers

Jasper Johns, '0 Through 9', Oil on Canvas, 1961, Tate Gallery Collection

Writing the previous post caused me to reflect a little more on the aesthetic/poetic aspects of numbers (or more precisely, 'numerals' - I suppose), in opposition to, or in parallel with, their purely functional aspect.  For all my childhood alienation from the operations of 'number-machines', as experienced through the discipline of mathematics, the intrinsic beauty of  numerals, as visual signs/symbols (or even, more simply - as shapes) cannot be denied. And, just as the combination of individual letters into words, sentences, and whole texts provides an infinitely variable system for explaining experience, so does the sequencing of numbers, and their operations one upon another, supply a means of accounting for it of equally boundless scope. Thus, it becomes impossible not to find oneself drawn into a kind of semiotics of the numerical.

Even the simple ordering of numbers into the standard counting sequence suggests a sense of both expansion and forward motion expanding beyond the simple quantifying of goods or financial beans. Viewed in this manner, we must soon recognise their vital role in rationalising our apprehension of both space and time. This clearly leads, in one direction, towards physics - a realm in which the entirely consistent system of numbers quickly becomes paramount in the service of understanding the universe. However, in another direction, it may just as easily  lead to Philosophy - a field in which strictly striated/gridded structures give way to more rhizomatic conjunctions, and the fraught relationship between quantitive and qualitive world views comes into full focus [1.].

 

Jasper Johns, 'Numbers In Colour', Encaustic & Newspaper on Canvas, 1958-59, 
Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York

...Which mostly just makes me think - what a wonderful excuse to revisit the work of Jasper Johns for a brief spell. He is, after all, an artist in whose work the deployment of numerals and numerical sequences as visual motifs, often seems to point to such ideas with far more intrinsic poetry then any stumbling verbal attempt might achieve. For all that one might feel some sorrow over a certain perceived dilution of Johns' powers as the decades rolled by, there is a distilled intensity and philosophical scope in his earlier work which I still find irresistible. The many and various number-based pieces he produced throughout his career are often the purest epitome of that. Certainly, there can be few other artists who have quite so seductively united the worlds of visual beauty, semiotics and functional numbering systems within their work.

Jasper Johns,  'Zero To Nine', Encaustic & Newspaper on Canvas, 1959,
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Jasper Johns, '0 Through 9', Lithograph, 1960, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Jasper Johns, 'Figure 5' (From 'Black Numeral' Series), Lithograph, 1968, Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Jasper Johns, 'Numbers', Cast Aluminium, 2007, Courtesy: Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC

[1.]: This also makes me value my childhood notion of 'Twenteen' all the more. Not only did it feel/sound right at the time - but might also be seen as a valuable randomising factor, and essential disruptor of the grid.