FEATURES ARCHIVE

"I have an unusual experience of Johns because I have looked at him as a writer and because he has been such a profound influence on me for so many years." - Michael Crichton

"In the 1970s, artists used to go to Los Angeles in the winter to make prints at Gemini, G.E.L., the master printers, and Jasper came out most of those years. One year, the weather was terrible all the time that he was there and a friend driving him to the airport apologized for the bad weather. "That’s all right," Jasper said. "Gray is my favorite color.”

I admire Jasper and I have loved his work for most of my life. I am going to speak informally, touching on some of the qualities that I think make his work so powerful and some of the methods he has used to retain a fresh approach to an essentially limited repertoire of images. My argument is a familiar one—that Johns’ work provokes a visual search and that when confronted by his art, the characteristic posture of the viewer is one of searching. The search can take many forms. An effort to decipher a puzzle, to uncover a secret, to resolve the contradiction, to answer a question posed or implied by the canvas.

And of course, a lot of art is puzzling and ambiguous. But it does not often have the intensity that I, at least, experience with Johns. What Johns does to provoke the search, I would argue, is several things simultaneously. Target with Four Faces is the first painting I ever saw by Johns. It seemed to me quite straightforward. It did not seem to me awful or upsetting and I think it must have been because I was young. An interesting feature about this work is it that the casts are of a woman’s mouth and that Johns had to arrange them carefully so that there would not appear to be any sequential change.

He did not want the mouth to be appearing to be about to speak, for example. These paintings proceed from a plan and it is often a rather formal and precise plan. I mention this because it is one of the first things the eye picks up, that the image has an underlying order, that the order can be discovered or made explicit by searching. In fact, as we will see, sometimes the formal plan for these images is so intricate that it is extremely difficult to decipher the underlying order, but that does not prevent the search.

Johns always makes you aware of the paintings as an object. What Johns is doing is, in essence, indicating to you that the canvas is not a window on the world and not an insight into the artist’s imagination. He is genuinely doing something to emphasize the object-ness of the thing that hangs on the wall.

He will go very far with this. He will attach objects to the canvas and he will even label them for us. Although we know what they are, we are left wondering why he labels what we can see clearly that they are. He will put neon on a canvas; he will put plastic casts. He will put electronic devices. He will put moveable lettering. He will dangle strings, lights, even music boxes. These appendages are moveable and they can be placed in different positions, but the painting is still a painting. And even though the painting is an object, it still tends to provoke the search that I am speaking of.

But there is almost always some illusion at work in Johns’ paintings. These range from devices that seem to structure the picture, such as in the 1959 painting Device Circle. When I was talking to him, I would always say, “Well, in Device Circle where the device makes the circle...” And he would say, “Where the device appears to make the circle.”

There is also usually a strong element of play in Johns’ work. A woman once went up to him and said that she liked his work, but she did not know whether it was serious or a joke. And he said that he hoped it was always both.

That was an answer that satisfied him but he said that did not satisfy her. By play, I also mean an enthusiastic use of basic artistic procedures, the kinds that kids use. Plastic casts, tracings, cutouts, collage. Even when these are used for very serious purposes, they are often still imbued with a kind of youthful pleasure.

Finally, there is usually some contradiction implied in a painting. To the extent that a question is raised and is answered: it is often an extremely simple answer. One that feels unsatisfactory. Why? What’s wrong with it? And you are set to search the image.

Once, Johns went to see one of his earlier paintings called Tennyson and he was sitting there admiring his own work and he kept coming back day after day. And finally, the owner said to him with a great deal of puzzlement, “If you like the painting so much, why don't you just paint another one?” And he explained that he could not do that—to do something again would be to do it differently.

I think it is important to take Johns seriously when he says he is just trying to find a way to make pictures. False Start derives its name from a racing print at the Cedar Bar. Many people saw it at the time as a kind of erroneous step on the part of the artist. But it is a comment on his desire to move away from the flags and targets and organized images that he had been previously associated with. In fact, I think it is a very extraordinary image and very carefully controlled. Here is what he said about it: “The idea is that the names of color will be scattered about on the surface of the canvas and there will be blotches of color more or less on the same scale and that one will have all the colors but all the colors by name more than by visual sensation.” This is clearly an artist who knows exactly what he’s doing.

Johns wants an organization for the image. He does not want to make it all up. He wants to feel, or to show, or to have it seem to be the case that the image is used for other reasons: other than for his personal choice.

I can remember when I first saw the “Catenary” paintings in San Francisco. I was bowled over and very excited. I thought they were a wonderful step in this artist’s work, and I still feel that today. He did have a tendency to associate these paintings with notions of death and sexuality. But I, at least, just feel that by looking at the sheer beauty and inventiveness of this work in recent years, and the extraordinary qualities of it, that it gives me a wonderful feeling to see somebody who I’ve known my whole life, whose work I have admired and who is able in his seventies, to make a fresh surface— to again present us with extraordinary beauty. I have nothing but gratitude for it.

Abridged transcript of Michael Crichton’s final lecture on Jasper Johns at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. April 2008.