on jasper johns' according to what

On Jasper Johns' According to WhatAuthor(s): Patricia KaplanSource: Art Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring, 1976), pp. 247-250Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/775943 .

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On Jasper Johns' According to What

PATRICIA KAPLAN

Painted more than a decade ago, Jasper Johns' According to What (Fig. 1) remains one of the artist's most challenging and

disturbing works. Its provocative imagery is the source for a series of lithographs, Fragments-According to What, made in 1971. That same year Johns produced the Decoy prints and

paintings which share with According to What a staggering complexity.1 Even in Johns' latest work, strange markings and traces of objects are cryptic reminders of the spirit of the 1964

According to What. The 16-foot composition is a pivotal work in Johns' career.

It draws visual incidents from such earlier canvases as Diver (1962), Arrive-Depart (1963-64), Field Painting (1963-64), and Watchman (1964), and generates imagery for Passage !1 (1966) and the Decoy group. Like many of the related paintings, According to What might be seen as a dramatization of activ-

ity relevant to the making of art, divulging its own processes and intentions with Johns' tendentious destruction of mean-

ing. Meaning, indeed, is the central issue. The painting presents a motley assortment of aggressive

real objects and strange painted elements including: cast leg and kitchen chair, hinged stretched canvas, twisted coat

hanger, metal template, metal swinging letters straight and bent, painted circles and rectangles of color, splashy brush- work, silkscreened newsprint, and, most baffling, an image of Marcel Duchamp. A sense of story permeates all of this. Filled with objects, marks, impressions, and "clues," the

painting begs for interpretation in the light-or shadow-of

Duchamp whose Self Portrait in Profile is concealed on the inside of a hinged flap beneath the title. Since Duchamp's spirit as well as his image inhabits According to What, seem-

ingly sanctioning its enigma, Johns' well-documented rela-

tionship to the mentor demands careful assessment here. I

suggest another, perhaps more intriguing, parallel to Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur.2

The painting, like the novel, unfolds its objects and elements in a chain exerting an unrelenting pressure. It is this

pressure which gives continuity from surface to surface-six stretchers in all-across the broad and discontinuous facade. If objects sacrifice their clarity, they gain new powers of

mystification. Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur holds the reader

similarly engrossed. Discussion of the striking affinities between novel and painting will consider Johns' odd verbal formulations, known as the Sketchbook Notes,3 written early in 1964 and bearing directly upon According to What.

The direct reference to Marcel Duchamp in this large work

is unusual for Johns, who tends to be more devious in his allusions. As Max Kozloff has observed of the relationship between the two artists, "It is as if Johns had so taken over the contradictory, Pirandello personality of Duchamp that he had no alternative but to outflank and subvert him."4 Upon closer examination, the method of recalling Duchamp in this

painting is quite in character. Johns has commented on his choice of the particular image:

Duchamp did a work which was a torn square (I think it's called something like Myself Torn To Pieces). I took a tracing of the profile, hung it by a string and cast its shadow so it became distorted and no longer square. ... I have deliberately taken Duchamp's own work and slightly changed it, and thought to make a kind of play on whose work it is, whether mine or his.5

In a 1971 lithograph, Hinged Canvas (Fig. 2) focused on this detail from the painting, Johns appears to have crossed out his own signature. It is this quality of gamesmanship which

prevails in According to What-Johns versus Duchamp and art versus reality. Whole and fragmented "real" objects cast "real" shadows and, in addition, some create illusions like the coat hanger which is traced on the canvas and then bent away leaving a "ghost" of its original form. Colors assume many guises. They are named by hinged free-swinging letters, read as impressions, presented as a chart of circles and seen as rectangles of red, yellow, and blue. This

intermingling of the concrete with the conceptual parallels Duchamp. Johns admitted wishing to confuse the issue of identities on one level; on still another, he alludes to Du-

champ's alleged farewell to painting, Tu m' (Fig. 3). Accord-

ing to What begins to come within grasp via subtle connec- tions recalling the authority of this prototype.

Both paintings are organized across a vast lateral expanse which reads like an inventory of the real and the illusory. Tu m' includes meticulous renderings of shadows from Du-

champ's ready-mades, projected from outside the composition next to depicted objects and objects themselves. The most imposing of these, a bottle brush projected through a false rent in the canvas, might explain the peculiar mark which Johns placed conspicuously to the left of Duchamp's profile and above the identifying initials, MD, on the inside of the hinged flap. A lollipop-like form with a splash-drip effect, made by a spray gun, the mark resembles the shadow of the bottle brush in Tu m'. A similar mark has appeared in

SPRING 1976 247



Fig. 1. Jasper Johns, According to What, oil on canvas with objects, 88 x 192", 1964.

Fig. 2. Jasper Johns, Hinged Canvas, lithograph, 1971.

Johns' work before, in Field Painting and in Souvenir. It is

entirely consistent for Johns to play with a shape, altering it each time it is used. Marcel Duchamp's suggestion "To reach the impossibility of sufficient visual memory to transfer from one like object to another the memory imprint," is acknowl-

edged by Johns as a most interesting idea.6 Tu m' and According to What both incorporate something

akin to a color chart. Johns' explanation of the motif adds to the confusion:

The colors are a spectrum progression-yellow to orange, then it

skips. To explain that: yellow, green, blue, violet, red, orange are right out of the spectrum, but adding and subtracting-yellow plus blue equals green: minus yellow equals blue: plus red equals violet: minus blue equals red ...7

Fragmentation further links the two paintings-the dan-

gling, indeterminate title makes this immediately apparent. Johns, not uncommonly, chooses titles that confuse and

challenge, leaving out important information-No and Liar are examples. Significantly, Johns gave the title The to a 1957

encaustic, a title also used by Marcel Duchamp for a brief text written in English in 1915, just after the artist landed in America. While unlikely that Johns knew of the manuscript at the time he painted The, it points up the concordance of their ideas.

If According to What gains its ideational coherence from association with Duchamp's Tu m', its strength and intensity are of a different order. As Johns participates frankly in the

ART JOURNAL, XXXV/3 248



Fig. 3. Marcel Duchamp, Tu m', 1918.

arena of painterly activity, he diverges from Duchamp who, after all, refuses to show his hand, wittily incorporating that of the sign painter, A. Klang. For Johns, art and art processes are not the witty sport played by the French master with delight and ironic detachment; instead we feel the tensions of a grim, even desperate, struggle. Johns hides-"I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings," and he is evasive, constitutively ambiguous about his work-"l have attempted to develop my thinking in such a way that the work I've done is not me."8

Such qualities, perhaps, explain Johns' fabrication of per- sonages "spy" and "watchman," like alter egos, taking crea- tive risks. They made their appearance in the cryptic Sketch- book Notes. The apposite paragraph from the Notes corre- sponds closely in tone to the multipaneled According to What; the language, threatening and opaque, conceals rather than reveals.

The watchman falls "into" the "trap" of looking. The "spy" is a different person. "Looking" is and is not "eating" and "being eaten." (Cezanne?-each object reflecting the other.) That is, there is continuity of some sort among the watchman, the space, the objects. The spy must be ready to "move," must be aware of his entrances and exits. The watchman leaves his job & takes away no information. The spy must remember and must remember himself and his remembering. The spy designs himself to be overlooked. The watchman "serves" as a warning. Will the spy and the watchman ever meet? In a painting named SPY, will he be present? The spy stations himself to observe the watchman. If the spy is a foreign object, why is the eye not irritated? Is he invisible? When the spy irritates, we try to remove him. "Not spying, just looking"-Watchman.9

If Johns' Sketchbook Notes resemble Duchamp's Green Box in character,10 there is a difference in the degree of self- doubt. Indeed, Johns creates a very disturbing impression. "Looking," "remembering," "warning," and "spying" are suspended conditions. We can no more read intention into this monologue than make coherent sense of the painting which closely parallels its tone and terms. If there is, as Johns suggests, "continuity of some sort," it is not a logical or narrative kind, either in the Notes or the related According to What. Rather, continuity is felt in the steady and compelling pressure from piece to piece.

The character and intensity of this pressure bring Robbe- Grillet to mind. In The Voyeur, he weaves a similarly dense fabric. As Mathias, the traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth and begins his movements and percep- tions, a tension mounts through scrupulously described ob-

jects. A passage like the following alerts the reader to this order of experience:

The continuous light rain may have blurred the horizon, but did not obstruct the view for shorter distances. On the contrary, it was as if in this new-washed air the objects near at hand profited from an additional luster ... 1

The probability of criminal events having occurred in the novel is felt through the recurrence of the commonplace: "He quickly concealed his hand in his pocket where it en- countered the unopened pack of cigarettes, the bag of gum- drops, and last of all the wad of cord...." 12 Such objects appear and reappear in constellations throughout-string, candy, cigarettes for Robbe-Grillet are like Johns' hanger, wire and spoon, or cast leg and chair. Through deliberate repetition (for Johns, repetition takes place from painting to painting), the objects themselves create the possibility of a plot, a crime.

A sense of something criminal pervades Johns' painting. It is no coincidence that Johns devours detective stories. Ob- jects and clues strewn about haphazardly cause an alarming level of confusion, as if an unknown presence had made his "entrances and exits." But, in the painting as in the novel, the event or actuality of a crime never comes into focus. Robbe-Grillet makes us aware instead of distinct phases, a voyeuristic phase followed by a mendacious one-the con- struction of the alibi. "Looking" is juxtaposed to "lying" like Johns' way of linking "looking" to "spying." And, Johns has admitted that he, too, is engaged in lying. Regarding the letters in According to What, he confesses, "I couldn't bend them myself so I had to send them to a metal worker to have them broken and then filled in. I'm a real liar." 13 The letters in the painting lie in other ways: like chameleons they deceit- fully create the wrong color impression on this or that side of the hinge. A familiar trick. In 1959, Johns produced several paintings, notably False Start and Jubilee, which introduced the issue of verisimilitude regarding color.

Willful contrariety extends beyond the letters; the painting, like Robbe-Grillet's novel, abounds in deceptions and unpredictable changes. Change is a central notion in Johns' work. It operates on physical and implied psychological lev- els which have nothing in common with Surrealist metamor- phosis. He revealed this interest in a comment: "The shadows change according to what happens around the painting. Everything changes according to that. Everything changes according to something and I tried to make a situa- tion that allows things to change." 14

Johns does not merely transform, he deforms. There are

SPRING 1976 249



things to beware of. The hanger that dangles from a wire attached to the spoon is bent. One of the color stencils at the bottom is twisted out of shape. Another jumps out of line and hides beneath a swipe of paint. The objects perform while

being "watched" by an ominous and precarious presence at the upper left. An inverted kitchen chair, with an attached cross section of a plaster cast of a human leg, hangs, defying gravity. Perhaps there is an echo of the "pendu femelle" from Johns' favorite Duchamp creation, the Large Glass. Does association of the cast leg and chair with the "watchman who serves as a warning" portend the presence of a

"spy," a voyeur? The first time Johns used this kind of ele- ment was in a painting called Watchman. Is it to be identified with critic, friend or foe? Johns often makes his casts from critics, literally introducing them within the framework of the art object. He dealt explicitly with critics as subject in several works. The 1961 sculpmetal and plaster, The Critic Sees, is followed by several variations on the theme, Summer Critic and The Critic Smiles. The menacing "seeing" critic has no vision. In a Dadaesque ironic inversion, Johns substituted a

pair of toothy mouths for eyes set within the frames of

glasses. Critic Sees seems to invoke Tristan Tzara's proposal from a Dada manifesto: "No more looks! No more words!

Stop looking! Stop talking!" 15

The frightening psychic resonance of these images recalls a statement from the Notes: "Looking is and is not eating and

being eaten." Equation of the oral and the visual goes be-

yond talk into more basic functions. Johns went so far as to bite a canvas, a 1961 encaustic, titled Painting Bitten by a Man

(Fig. 4). Since "looking" is somehow to be associated with

"eating," it is no wonder the artist frequently supplies forks and spoons. A dinner plate was used in Souvenir. A spoon in

According to What is almost lost amid the brash scramble of elements. On the piece of wire connected to the hanger, it

swings freely in the air. The smallest detail in the painting, it establishes its own circuit of operations.

Literary critic Roland Barthes had the following perception concerning Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur. His words might here be applied to Johns:

The objects figure as a kind of zero-theme of the plot. The novel keeps within that narrow and difficult zone in which anecdote (the crime) begins to go bad, to "intentionalize" the splendid stubborness of objects in simply being there.16

It was, after all, the "splendid stubborness" of the objects in Johns' early emblematic paintings which first attracted critical attention. And the desire to "intentionalize" grew steadily more irresistible as the ambivalent flat diagrams of the '50s

gained dimension in the '60s, culminating in the large, provocative According to What. The painting is, possibly, Johns' most exhaustive venture into "that narrow and difficult zone."

For an analysis of Decoy's imagery see Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns, Decoy: the Print and the Painting, catalogue of The Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, New York. 1972. 2 It should be noted that Rauschenberg has recently collaborated with Robbe-Grillet, while Johns has been making etchings for a project with Samuel Beckett. For my purposes, this supports the contention that there are strong interconnections. 3 Published as "Sketchbook Notes," Art and Literature, Spring, 1965, p. 192. 4 Max Kozloff, "Johns and Duchamp," Art International, March, 1964, p. 42.

Fig. 4. Jasper Johns, Painting Bitten by a Man, encaustic on canvas, 9'/2 x 67/8", 1961.

5 John Coplans, "Fragments According to Johns," An interview with Jasper Johns, Print Collector's Newsletter, May-June, 1972, pp. 30-31. 6 This passage from the Green Box is cited in Johns' statement in Sixteen Americans, catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959, p. 22. 7 John Coplans, p. 29. 8 Vivien Raynor, "A Conversation with Jasper Johns," Art News, March, 1973, p. 20. 9 Barbara Rose elaborates on the passage in "The Graphic Work of Jasper Johns: Part II," Artforum, September, 1970, pp. 65-74. 10 Certainly, it is no coincidence that relating cryptic prose to hermetic visual imagery goes back to Duchamp. An early note from the Green Box, "perhaps make a hinge picture," probably inspired Johns to place the mentor behind a hinged flap. Johns' "note" reads similarly: "Profile? Duchamp? Distorted as a shadow. Perhaps-on falling hinged section. Something which can be erased or shifted." " Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, translated by Richard Howard, Grove Press, New York, 1958, p. 12. 12 Alain Robbe-Grillet, p. 67. '3 New York Times, January 16, 1966. 14 John Coplans, p. 31. This comment suggests the source of the title. 15 Quoted in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Wittenborn, Schultz, New York, 1951, p. 84. 16 Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, translated by Richard Howard, Evanston, Illinois, 1972, p. 54.

Patricia Kaplan is currently completing her dissertation at CUNY on geomet- ric abstraction in Paris during the 1930s. She also contributes often to Art News and Art in America.

ART JOURNAL, XXXV/3 250



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