Jasper Johns's True Aim

Johns's decision to take the U.S. flag and make it count as art was seminal for the pop art of the 1960s. His idea that art might be about a single bite, or some other simple gesture, panned out in the conceptual work of artists such as Bruce Nauman. Johns's play with words carried on in work by younger heroes of the avant-garde such as Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. Even the postmodern artists of the 1980s and '90s, who rejected much of classic modern art, echoed many of Johns's central interests: in the body, in how language carries meaning, in the willful accumulation of conflicting signs and symbols in a work of art.

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For all Johns's vast range and influence, the National Gallery exhibition isn't your standard full-career survey. That's lucky for us all. For one thing, Johns's main achievements all came within his first, great decade. (Many famous athletes only get a 10-year career. Few artists can expect to last much longer.) More important, Johns's early paintings are so stunningly dense -- packed so full of the pictorial thinking he's so good at -- that even one decade's worth of work is more than can be taken in at once. Keeping that in mind, and using tremendous self-discipline, curator Jeffrey Weiss has chosen to leave out some of Johns's most famous images: his pioneering flag paintings; his number and letter pictures. Instead, he focuses on only four bodies of work that he thinks speak most clearly about what Johns is all about: the "target" paintings, the pictures that play with color names, the works where Johns imprints his body or an object onto them, and the "device" pictures where a pivoting stick marks a circle on a surface. Weiss has also included a few ambitious, monumental "masterpieces" where Johns combines more than one of these approaches. These four bodies of work, Weiss thinks, are most clearly about how pictures work and convey meaning, and therefore show Johns's exploratory genius as a painter at its most intense.

Taking radical steps away from the safety of abstraction: "Target With Four Faces," part of the National Gallery's look at Johns's work from 1955-65.(Jasper Johns - Licensed by VAGA, New York)

Take Johns's famous target pictures, which open the exhibition. The National Gallery has pulled in 23 of them -- paintings, assemblages, collages, drawings and prints -- which is almost every one Johns made. (Miraculously, each of the four bodies of work in this show are captured almost complete.) The targets look like simple things at first, just a few concentric rings on a square background. When you look again -- and again and again, as they beg you to do -- you realize they are fiendishly complex, smart and important.

Old Master pictures had mostly been about depicting distant objects so that they seemed present in front of you: an absent friend, or landscape, or Bible hero, brought before your eyes by art. Those works dwelt on how the flat surface of a painting, just an arm's length away, can seem to give you access to some fully 3-D world that could be miles off. Then, out of the blue in 1954, Johns's art comes along and asks whether that gap between the "here" of the picture and the "there" of its subject is the only choice for showing things in art.

What, his pictures ask, if you were to choose to paint a target, like the kind you'd shoot an arrow at? Then your picture is clearly of something -- the target that you see in it -- but it is also the thing itself, right in front of you. What is a target, after all, but a bunch of concentric circles marked on some flat surface? You might not be able to neck with Leonardo's Mona Lisa, but you could set up a Johns target and take potshots at it. (These days, you'd be shooting up a fantastically valuable object -- the next big one to come on sale might very well break $100 million.)

But Johns's targets don't just ask the question, like some kind of academic exercise. They try out what happens when a painter actually walks the walk and paints two dozen different versions of a target picture.

There's one that is white-on-white, with strips of paint-soaked canvas stuck onto the surface; it recalls bandages and plaster. This target draws the eye to it -- you have to look with sniper care to make out its subtleties -- but it also points outside itself, to the carnage targets have helped bring about. (Once you learn that Johns was born and raised in the South, you're tempted to think of Civil War bandaging stations, or genteel linen suits and crumbling antebellum mansions, when you see this painting's pile of distressed white.)

Or there's a modest work on paper that shows a classic Johns target -- concentric rings in yellow and blue, filling up a square of red -- set askew inside a larger field of mottled orange paint. Here, because of the most subtle shift in composition, we're back to the Old Master model for artmaking: The picture isn't simply the target itself, filling Johns's surface from edge to edge, as almost all his other targets do. Now it's truly a picture of a target once again, shown in a particular skew position, against some particular background, as it might appear at one particular place and time. A picture of a target can be the target-thing itself, but as he works out his theme's potential, Johns also explores how it doesn't have to be.

Or there are Johns's two most famous, most obviously ambitious targets, in which he rests a line of little wooden niches, filled with little plaster casts of body parts, along the top edge of his canvas. It's not absurd to imagine that these artworks also evoke the carnage bullets cause. (Johns was fresh from military service when he made these pieces, though he never made it to the war in Korea.) But they also work to make clear that Johns's target, however much it may be like the thing it represents, is also clearly, centrally living in the world of art. By making his targets keep company with obviously arty items such as fragmented plaster casts, he tells us that his targets, too, are art supplies -- that he's playing with what happens when you paint a picture of a target, not with how a real target might be made to count as art. Johns wants to stir things up from inside the history of painting -- and to let us know that's what he's doing -- rather than simply stepping outside that history into a conceptual approach, the way Duchamp did when he took a urinal and declared it to be art.

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All of this critical blather, though it barely scratches the surface of these pictures -- and would have to be multiplied tenfold to begin to talk about the full range of Johns's pioneering art -- does essentially no justice to the work itself. (In his first published bit of prose, from 1959, Johns attacked what he called the "rottenness" of Hilton Kramer's art criticism. "Thank God," Johns concludes, "art tends to be less what critics write than what artists make." Hear, Hear!)

Or such blather even does an injustice to the work.

It turns Johns's art into a wordy disquisition, making ideas follow one another like good little soldier boys out on parade. Whereas the real experience, the real genius of Johns's art, is not about words or ideas at all, but all and only about pictures, and how we experience them, and how they bounce off each other and the world, and off all the imagery and artworks that have come before. It's about a fertile, brilliant confusion of images and ways of making them, not about using images to effect a tidy tying-down.

Maybe the true secret to this exhibition lies in a strange fact about the photographs of Johns that fill a passageway in it. Johns, as a young man, had an uncanny resemblance to Buster Keaton. Same strangely vacant stare, same cross of deer-in-the-headlights panic and world-weary poise in his expression, same mix of vulnerability and grace in his posture. Sad-sack clown and wise fool, all at once -- in both these artists' looks, and in their work as well.

That's the crucial thing in Johns that's almost always missed. His work is comic, even sometimes giddy in its inventiveness. Just as all hockey is built around the joy of games, no matter how many dollars and careers may be riding on it, so art always has its roots in play, in the joy of spreading mucky stuff around. Johns's art gets at that more profoundly than many other artworks do, and more than almost any critic's writing ever will, present company included.

Like Keaton, Johns, as the maker of his work, becomes a kind of still center poised in a chaos of his own creation. Like Keaton, he comes off as a character whose presence is buffeted by that chaos but somehow stays untouched by it. And he's also recognizable as the virtuoso director by whom that chaos is created and controlled.

Or Johns's comedy might be even broader that that. A recent New Yorker profile said he keeps a cheap toy in his studio, of an outhouse with a boy inside who relieves himself on anyone who opens its door. Maybe that's the real spirit behind the work. Johns is the painter already inside the tent of art, happily peeing on all his foolish tentmates, and on himself as well.