8/16/2023 0 Comments Jasper johns facts![]() “There may also be a deeply personal meaning to these works, which relates to Johns identity as a closeted gay man from the American South living in the persecutory, anti-communist and homophobic era of Senator Joseph McCarthy” she writes. “Entitled Target with Four Faces and Target with Plaster Casts they gave rise to several additional pieces in various media, all of them linked via the provocative imagery of the bull’s eye. “In 1955, Johns completed two works that stand alongside Flag as his most important early paintings,” writes Professor Isabelle Loring Wallace in our Jasper Johns Phaidon Focus book. Johns was really interested in trying to imagine a new set of possibilities for painting, and did so by playing with the subject matter, by creating paintings that at first glance, don’t look any different than the actual objects that they represent. So if you think of it in that kind of context, Johns is pointing in a totally new direction, both in terms of the subject but also in terms of technique. And they made work that could capture the individual essence of the artist through the gestures he or she makes in paint on the canvas. These artists shared the conviction that art is inextricably tied to the artist’s subjective experience. This is a time when Abstract Expressionism was the dominant force in the art world. The colors of the flag are fixed in the target, they need only be contrasting. A flag is bound to one nations a target is universal. An American flag is always the same while a target can be any number of things – all that unites targets is a common format of concentric circles. Johns’ targets ideas suggested by the early flags, but more abstractly. ![]() But the optical nature of the concentric bands can also be understood to figure distraction rather than focus, something that is also suggested by the mechanical action of a rotating compass by which the image of a target is produced. Targets imply, or are instruments of, seeing across space (and seeing as an act of potential violence). This makes the target susceptible to other ambiguities. Yet unlike the flag or the number, which are also familiar images from this period of the artist’s career, the flat target is simultaneously representational and abstract (a number or a flag can never be divorced from its status as a familiar sign). Each of these Target paintings by Johns features a depiction of an actual target that is, for all practical purposes, utterly interchangeable with the real thing. Target with Four Faces is one of the serie paintings and drawings of the target image from 1958 to 1961. The image of the target emerges in Johns work in 1955, in paintings that incorporate frieze like arrangements of plaster casts taken from parts of the body.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |