JOHNS, Jasper

JOHNS, Jasper (b. 15 May 1930), artist.

The enigmatic work of Jasper Johns, perhaps America's most respected living artist, invites many interpretations. No line of analysis, however, has proven more controversial than that linking his fascination with masking and codes to his homosexuality. Johns's career offers a case study in debates over the relationship between homosexuality and art, including the potential of minority sexual identity to create community and prompt creative insight, as well as the power of homophobia to limit the recognition and development of these accomplishments.

Born and raised in South Carolina, Johns moved to New York City, planning to study art and poetry. After two years in the Army, he returned to New York and joined the avant-garde circle around the composer John Cage and Cage's lover, the choreographer Merce Cunningham. In 1953, Johns met an artist in this group, Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he would be intimately—though secretly—partnered until 1961. Five years older than Johns, Rauschenberg had already gained art-world attention for work that challenged Abstract Expressionism's emphasis on expressive mark making. Quickly extrapolating from Rauschenberg's ideas, Johns in the "Flag" and "Target" series mounted a powerful critique of Abstract Expressionism's claims to have developed an American form of individualistic self-expression. Flags and targets are clearly learned symbols, not personally imagined abstract marks. Their connotations—the American-ness of the American flag, the emotions of aggression and vulnerability associated with the target—reveal the formulaic quality of the values Abstract Expressionism claimed as original inventions.

Johns's flag and target paintings rocketed him to fame. Throughout his career, however, Johns lashed out at critics who read their own personal meanings into his work. At the same time, his art returned repeatedly to codes and hidden meanings. One controversial analysis of this dynamic is that Johns's influential art expresses that the price of fame for gay men of his generation is to accept the condition of keeping their sexuality secret.

Kenneth Silver's and Jonathan Katz's studies of Johns's early work relate both his subject matter and his techniques to his sexual identity. Johns's targets, especially as they were often combined with plaster casts of body parts in little closet-like boxes, are described by Silver as a "portrait of a homosexual man of the postwar period …The besieged gay body—and gay psyche—is fragmented and sorted into compartments, each one capable of being alternately closeted or exposed."

Johns's paintings invoking the gay poets Frank O'Hara and Hart Crane allude even more clearly to the intertwined history of art and homosexuality. Johns's In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O'Hara, which includes its full title stenciled across the bottom of the image, was painted in 1961, immediately after his break-up with Rauschenberg. O'Hara was among the most openly gay men in the New York art world, a poet, art critic, and curator who championed Johns's career. Johns's title quotes the title of an O'Hara poem, and this painting also includes the words "DEAD MAN" almost obscured by paint. Jill Johnston's analysis concludes, "It was O'Hara's human nature that Johns wanted, the fearless homosexual poet … open to Walt Whitman and Hart Crane before him." Johnston's analysis extends to Johns's later work, which juxtaposes collaged newspaper articles about the AIDS crisis with quotations from his earlier works (quotations that, given the nature of his work, themselves quote other kinds of imagery, most prominently a sixteenth-century altarpiece for the victims and caregivers of an earlier plague).

Interpretations of Johns's work in relation to homosexuality rely, however, less on subject matter than on how this imagery is presented. Silver describes Johns's early use of a thick wax encaustic embedded with shreds of newspaper as a way to "mummify" Abstract Expressionist "marks of vitality, so that we sense ourselves distanced from both the work as a record of activity and from the artist whose activity is recorded." The complex layering of Johns's later works has, likewise, been seen as a strategy of masking or veiling, not to obscure the secret of homosexuality, but to perform the habits of dissembling and coding adopted by homosexuals in the public eye. Jonathan Weinberg, while skirting the issue of Johns's homosexuality, has analyzed the dynamics of anal and autoeroticism in his work.

Johns' resistance to such interpretations—notably his refusal to allow reproductions of his art to be printed in Johnston's book—does not undermine their validity. On the contrary, as Johnston's accounts of her conversations with the artist show, his verbal strategies of silence, distraction, and intimidation echo the visual effects of his work, consciously or unconsciously confirming her portrait of a man for whom sexual identity is experienced as secret and expressed as code.

Bibliography

Harrison, Charles and Fred Orton. "Jasper Johns: 'Meaning What you See.'" Art History 7, no. 1 (March 1984): 76–99.

Johnston, Jill. Jasper Johns: Privileged Information. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996.

Katz, Jonathan. "The Art of Code: Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg." In Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership . Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.

Katz, Jonathan. "Dismembership: Jasper Johns and the Body Politic."In Performing the Body/Performing the Text. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, eds. London: Routledge, 1999.

Silver, Kenneth E. "Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art." In Hand-Painted Pop . Russell Ferguson, ed. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992.

Weinberg, Jonathan. "It's in the Can: Jasper Johns and the Anal Society." Genders 1 (Spring 1988): 40–57.

Christopher Reed

see alsoart history; cage, john; crane, hart; cunningham, merce; rauschenberg; robert; visual art.