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Jasper Johns’s first solo exhibition, in New York in 1958, did the modernist

thing of claiming its space by qualifying the art that directly preceded it – Abstract Expressionism – as outdated in its means and inadaquate to the conditions of the present. But it also went further, making this process double as a model for a new relation between art and its subject matter, by which art supersedes its own image. Johns located his process outside his painting’s image, looking in. There were paintings that reduced the Stars and Stripes, or a concentric target design, to monochrome, as if their signs were so second-hand and immutable that their translator had to make himself blind to their colours in order to expose his process, arbitrarily mulling back and forth on the surface, trapped within the sign’s fixed divisions with no way to qualify it and yet nothing to do but try. That he was using gestural strokes familiar from Abstract Expressionism – the idiom of the generation he was ousting – to qualify static designs was typical of his trenchant irony.

This is painting which occurs despite its image. The flag ghosts the process that creates it, as the newspaper clippings, adhered to some of the canvases, ghost the flag with their nagging chatter. Passive-aggressively, Flag, 1954-55, submits to its design only to then surreptitiously prevail over it, because what we end up with is a painting only functional as a flag in a nominal sense: both a confirmation of formalist essentialism – the assertion that what happens on the canvas is determined by its support, its materials, its medium – and a submission to a value beyond it; both nothing but form and nothing but subject matter; both an abstraction (stripes and rectangles, lines and right angles) and an image ‘the mind already knows’, in Johns’s words; both projective process, forging forward into a future it cannot envision, and retrospective allusion.

The contemporary critical response to the exhibition was hostile, and no wonder, given that Johns was repudiating not only the self-satisfied subjectivism of recent abstract painting but also the terms which underpinned formalist criticism – the dominant dogma of the moment, and one whose credibility had been hard-won by

WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT WHAT YOU SEE ARGUES MARK PRINCEArtists as different as Jasper Johns and Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman and Pilvi Takala have all adopted various guises to challenge assumptions about reality and image, original and copy, truth and fiction.

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of authorial proxies, such as Philip Roth’s spectrum of fictional alter-egos. To pursue the analogy, what is Flag ‘saying’? It says that this is ‘American painting’ at the same time as saying that this was ‘American painting’: the gestural vigour of Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s reduced to being beholden to a sign for its own established value. Modernism’s gung-ho self-assertion had turned sardonically on itself. There were two voices: the unnamed one of Johns’s disaffected gestures, and his appropriated signs for Modernism’s ‘voice’.

A decade after she began to rephotograph modernist photography, Sherrie Levine commented: ‘The reproduced [photograph] is in some sense two photographs – a photograph on top of another photograph. For me it’s a way to create a metaphor by layering two images, instead of putting them side by side.’ The space between these images is both imperceptible and incontestable: the fact that we know it is there conditions how we see a difference we cannot see. Levine’s photographs are only causally linked to their motifs at the invisible remove of representation. That the remove effaces itself is a sign of the deceptiveness of the photographic image, but also of what Anne Carson calls the ‘amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labour’. Photography realises a transparency between the authorships of Walker Evans and Sherrie Levine, which the elusive, physical difference between photograph and rephotograph belies. The authorial congruence is a ‘fantasy’, which Levine uses this physical difference to highlight. When Howard Singerman writes that, ‘in Levine’s images we look at something veiled, as though a palpable skin covered the original’, it sounds like wishful thinking, a conceptual distinction made perceptual to frustrate the deceptiveness of the appearance of transparency. It is as if Singerman were seeing things in order to corroborate what he knows to be the case, as wishfully as he seeks to solidify the difference between Evans and Levine by assigning it to gender difference, reducing the image to a function of its maker. But unlike painting, photography is technological: in a vital sense, it refuses either to claim its author or to be claimed by him or her.

Singerman also suggests that Levine’s rephotographs ‘reopen finished and founded origins’, but her rephotographs hinge on their inability to lift an image out of its specific past – its modernist palimpsest of photographer, medium and image – or to speak in its author’s voice or see through his eyes. Her rephotographs are stranded in a no-man’s-land between two authorships, predicated on a distance from their originals which disowns itself, or projects itself as sited within our reception of the image rather than in the image itself, in an equivocal space between sign and particular, between signifying Levine’s distance from its statement and being her statement. To generate the

combat jacket and fedora, strides towards the viewer: a man with a mission.

Compare Cindy Sherman’s ‘Untitled Film Stills’ to a 1988 Sturtevant screenprint: her re-enactment of Joseph Beuys’s poster La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi, 1972, in which Beuys, in his art-world uniform of

its exponents. For Leo Steinberg, the show signalled ‘the end of illusion’, while Harold Rosenberg scored a point for the formalist orthodoxy: ‘Instead of concentrating on art, its problems and its needs, the artist speaks to the audience about itself.’ Steinberg’s ‘loss of illusion’ suggests the reduction of image to flat sign, but also the blindfolding of painting, the handing over of its vantage to someone else, through whose eyes Johns couldn’t see. What had been art’s ‘interior’ becomes a ‘surface’ it qualifies. The quotes are from Bruce Hainley, in conversation with Sturtevant, referring to the shift that took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s – which she meditated upon in her ‘versions’ of paintings by Johns, Andy Warhol and Frank Stella – from subjectivity as synonymous with the viewpoint made visible by a painting’s image, to its function as an external force mediating a received quantity. This objectification of received subject matter casts process as a marginalised excess poring over material to which it has only partial access. Rosenberg dismissed Johns’s subject matter per se; but what is game-changing is his alienation from it. Johns was a friend of Marcel Duchamp’s, and the givenness of his subject matter derives from the readymade, but given another turn. Flag might have seemed an idiosyncratic application of Duchampian aesthetics to painting, the medium which Duchamp had rejected. But the readymades were literal presences: they give us a found object largely unmediated, except by context and mischievous marginalia, such as the signature, ‘R Mutt’, painted onto the urinal’s rim. Johns takes Duchamp’s appropriation and makes it the object of his mediation of an absent presence, which cannot be categorically associated with that of the artwork which reveals it.

This disjunction now seems even more entrenched, an ironic remove on which art’s authority is contingent. Contemporary artists animate their exclusion from their motifs in performative terms, as an occasion for staging a clash between persona and process, as if challenging what the medium they are using makes of them. This is a form of retroactive art-historical criticism, coming from artists in the form of artworks, which is often the most acute sort, which supplants the standard, post-Pop narrative, which dictates that the issue is with the newness – or lowness or foundness – of subject matter (building on the Cubist collaging of found bric-à-brac into made paintings), with a narrative which dramatises the disjunction between subject matter and the viewpoint which processes it. Johns introduced an anti-modernist schism between what an artwork is expressing and the agency of the artist.

The formalist critics who denounced Johns’s early work were fond of speaking of the ‘voice’ of a painter as a measure of his authentic vision. Johns throws ‘voice’ beyond its speaker, a displacement that corresponds to the post-1960s novelistic use

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greatest dynamism in this state of betweenness, Levine gravitates towards images – Evans’s spartan cabins and careworn sharecroppers, Weston’s son as a pure, as if sculpted, classical nude – that are most explicitly assured of their own settledness, of the certainty of their relation to a referent. The self-assured modernist artist meets the self-concealing translator, who can only offer a forensically curatorial retrospection to meet his vision of the present.

When Rosalind Krauss claims that Cindy Sherman, in her ‘Untitled Film Stills’, ‘becomes a sign among the signs she has arranged as her setting’, she does not account for the degree to which Sherman fails to conform to the stereotypes she imitates by not being the actresses she so deftly casts herself to recall, and by being the artist as well. The pseudo-filmic setting isolates Sherman against the rigid foil of a non-existent or fictionalised space, which assimilates her persona at the same time as offering it no narrative extension to expand into. She is stranded in the present tense of a translation divorced from its original, paradoxically within a medium (photography) and an idiom (its documentation of performance) designed to confirm the past. Untitled Film Still #54, 1980, invokes Dennis Stock’s famous 1955 Magnum photograph of James Dean striding towards the camera along a rainswept street, hunching into the collar of his overcoat, a cigarette clamped between his teeth. Not only not Dean and not male, Sherman inserts a new sign into the mix: a Marilyn Monroe-esque blond bombshell. It is as if two images from the same period were overlapping by osmosis, along with their genders.

Or compare Sherman’s ‘Untitled Film Stills’ to a 1988 Sturtevant screenprint: her re-enactment of Joseph Beuys’s poster La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi, 1972, in which Beuys, in his art-world uniform of combat jacket and fedora, strides towards the viewer: a man with a mission. Sturtevant effects a similar gender reversal to Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #54. Her femaleness polarises absurdly with what is otherwise a recognisable sign for a famous artist and artwork. The reconstruction emphasises Beuys’s macho self-assertion, his poster’s function as an advert for his persona, over that of the self-concealment effected by the costume of his identity. Correspondingly, Sturtevant’s presence is more drastically evident than in the submerged relation between original and reconstruction that characterises her paintings

Jasper Johns ‘Something Resembling Truth’, installation view, Royal Academy, London

Sherrie Levine After Russell Lee 2016 detail

Peter Wächtler Far Out 2016

after Johns or Frank Stella. Sturtevant ghosts Beuys’s self-assertion by casting herself as the non-assimilatable element in an otherwise consistent matrix of received signs. What you see is not what you see.

For the artist to cast herself as unassimilated by her role is one antithesis of the presentness of performance art, the congruence it seeks to clinch between artist and performance. Pilvi Takala’s adopted personas are equivocal in intent, both passive and provocative, striving to assimilate to contexts while exposing those contexts’ rejection of her (Interview AM397). In the film of her 2009 performance Real Snow White, ‘real’ only applies – by inference, analogy or irony – to the artist via the fairy-tale character. Snow White is anything but real, her artifice at degrees of remove: the black-haired Snow White played by the blond Takala in a setting – Parc Disneyland in Paris – in which ‘Snow White’ refers to the protagonist of the Brothers Grimm story as translated into a cartoon icon by the animators of the 1937 Disney film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Takala’s sumptuous costume is modelled on that animation. She assumes the role of a pop-cultural commodity on the borders of the franchised site of its owners.

Takala’s performance takes place outside the park itself, on neutral ground, because she is refused permission to enter because of the challenge she will pose to the ‘real Snow White’, employed to pose as the character under Disney’s auspices. The reiteration of ‘real’ – as a qualifier applied by visitors and staff to a figure who is anything but ‘real’ – suggests both Takala’s ironic reification of an image (when informed that ‘only the real Snow White may dress like this’, she pertinently replies ‘I thought the real Snow White is a drawing’) as well as the distance between the Finnish artist, the only ‘real’ element in the figure she presents, and that image.

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Although Takala is the centre of attention, she is the negative of the performance’s focus. Real Snow White is about the slippery relation between a received sign, the guise the artist assumes to manifest it, and the artist herself. Her Snow White is a sign looking for its setting and failing to find it because she –

the artist with her ambiguous agenda – is ‘real’, a distinction illustrated by the dynamic between immediate excitement and ultimate rejection (‘She’s no Snow White, let’s go’) which her presence evokes. She casts herself as a foil to expose a context primed to see her image as either a threat or an object of desire. Notably, the threat is located by Disney staff in her costume, in what the costume might enable her to do: manipulate the desire it inspires to denigrate or exploit the Disney label, or take advantage of children who idealise it.

There is a theme of innocence or virtue running through Takala’s repertoire of guises. Snow White is the virtuous young princess the evil Queen seeks to eliminate. Takala has also played a schoolgirl in uniform and an intern with her head in the clouds, too idealistic to conform to the pragmatic flux of a corporate accountancy firm. In 2008, she posed as a shop assistant in a high-street department store, her only actions being small gestures of kindness or charity unbeknown to their recipients: the returning of a scarf to the handbag out of which it had fallen, the zipping-up of a rucksack left open, the gentle pulling of a skirt’s hem down to a level of decency. The persona jars with its environment because it is ‘too good for this world’. When she infiltrates the male-only teahouses of Istanbul with three young Turkish women, or wanders aimlessly around a Berlin mall carrying a transparent carrier bag full of cash, she pitches herself as presuming the world is a safer, more tolerant, less bigoted place than it proves to be. But the cameras which capture her intervention are placed there by her, in the knowledge that she is a minnow among piranhas; that the assumptions on which her character is based are naive. Distinguishing between Takala the overseeing artist and Takala the fall guy for her own pranks, she objectifies herself. Making herself unexceptionable, she dodges her exceptional position – the artist in a non-artistic context – as if making of herself a sign reflecting the assumptions of that context, and thereby seeking

to blend into it; an emblem for the plebeian reputation of art as a tool of social betterment.

Discussing his serial use of a single male narrator, the novelist Richard Ford distinguishes between his ‘impersonation’ of a character and the assumption that he ‘inhabits’ him: ‘I’ve got my hand in his back and I’m making him say these things and making his head move and making him respond, but never fully getting inside.’ This imaginative arm’s length contradicts the unwillingness of modernist art to extend the viewpoint it realises beyond the first person, to sever the authentic synonymity between the vision invested in an artwork and the subjectivity it serves to express. Anything beyond the circle of this congruence was considered unwarranted appropriation. Takala’s alter-egos are puppets she dangles like bait into the swim of hostile environments on a line that might be equivalent to Ford’s puppeteer’s arm. Her use of implausible proxies expels the ‘real’ artist to a critical remove, while the fact that she plays her roles herself morally implicates her in their fantasies. Peter Wächtler’s visual surrogates are literally fantasies: cartoons which he puts through a perfunctory series of animated motions to signify the agency of a protagonist, only to use them as a foil for what he pitches, in contrast, to be signs for his own subjectivity, in the knowledge that they are too limited and absurd to accommodate it. He exploits his lack of moral implication in the image he takes as a costume. If one cannot come on stage as oneself, because filmic artifice requires an image, one may as well wear a funny mask as a serious one, because either way it is an illusion. The disposability of Wächtler’s proxies is a sign for the ineluctability of the dissociation between yourself and the first-person voice which narrative makes of you. He uses his supercession of an image to interpret his medium as committed to a structure of supercession. Excluded from the image, because it is designed to be incapable of representing him, he does not appear in his films, except through his voice, as a recorded soundtrack or subtitle track for the animated avatars he creates, their cartoon anthropomorphism exposing the relatively unassimiliated voice of his unsublimated subjectivity.

Wächtler capitalises on the reflexive connection we intuit between a film’s sound and image, our automatic need to suture the breach he inserts between visuals and voice. The

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song’s theme of shucking the confines of everyday existence corresponds to the liberation of the subtitles from the trap of the image’s loop, and the limited verse form of the lyric, in order to veer into the vaguenesses and uncertainties of contemporary life: ‘Me, I cannot be angry with people / for very long / and mostly it’s me saying: “Look, I’m sorry.”’ The

discrepancy between generic lyric and confessional subtitle is fictionalised, with the subtitles cast as a rogue contingency, a voice sidelined as an echo heard from a space somewhere outside the song. The subtitles represent the unformalised drift of thought and feeling against the soundtrack’s propulsive metre. A failure to ad-lib over a musical ground doubles as experience’s evasion of the film’s grasp, ironically figured in the form typically used to elucidate footage onto which it is superimposed. The rigid artifice of the Gothic landscape – the figure sashaying from side to side, the lights in the castle windows hauntingly pulsing, the flock of gulls flickering into silhouette over the full moon – reverses the conventional function of an image as a release from form. The landscape ‘out there’ turns out to be emphatically ‘in here’, leaving the subtitles to grope after an alternative, unvisualised

identity for the artist’s voice, just as Johns’s brush strains against the flag’s stripes as if it were a cage, a moribund stricture, which he is only able to translate for us instead of creating – in the modernist vein – in the image of himself.

There is a short Super 8 film which Daniel Buren made of Watch the Doors Please!, an installation of his trademark stripes on the doors of tube trains passing by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1980. Buren filmed the passing carriages from the museum windows, registering the odd thrill of displacement at finding his signs for artistic formalism exiled outside the museum’s frame, within which he and his camera remain stranded. His anti-image painting – like bars, resisting egress – has become the object of the museum’s picture window, and painted onto opening and closing doors, another traditional sign for the access of imagery. The doors constitute a secondary vantage from which a disembarking passenger could look back into the space Buren’s art has vacated and recognise its relative enclosure, as if the art were qualifying its artist, and the institution that enables it, as restricting and passé. Buren repeatedly zooms out to take in the broad skylines of the city, as if he can’t quite get over the fact that his stripes are out where they are, while he is still stuck between the museum’s walls. ❚

Jasper Johns’s ‘Something Resembling Truth’ is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London to 10 December, 2017. Sherrie Levine’s ‘Pie Town’ was at David Zwirner, London 4 October to 18 November. A forthcoming exhibition of Sturtevant opens 18 January at Thaddeus Ropac, London.

MARK PRINCE is an artist and writer based in Berlin.

Pilvi Takala Real Snow White 2009 video

briefest of looped imagery exposes the impression of narrative continuity that is generated by the loop. Far Out, 2014, is a four-minute cartoon of a stereotypical Gothic, fairy-tale landscape: a moonlit ravine cloaked in fog, with an animated figure in the foreground, in top hat and tails, his back to us. Wächtler’s voice, singing over a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack, is subtitled: ‘Few things ever / taste so sweet / than stepping out / into the street / hit it, keep movin’ / and clear it out / that’s what it’s all / all about / a good road / for a better day / I no longer want to stay’, the last line repeated as a refrain. In conjunction with the music, the cartoon figure appears to be jiving as much as running through the landscape.

When the subtitles begin to stray from Wächtler’s lyrics, it is as if he were wearying of the artifice of the lyric form, and resolving instead to speak more directly, but only able to do so in the relative silence and autonomy of the unsung text. The

knowledge that she is a minnow among piranhas;

that the assumptions on which her character is

Pilvi Takala pitches herself as presuming the world

is a safer, more tolerant, less bigoted place than

it proves to be. But the cameras which capture

her intervention are placed there by her, in the

based are naive.