Pablo Picasso: Woman in a Straw
Hat [Straw Hat
with Blue Leaf]
Johns, Tantric
Detail I, 1980.
Johns, Untitled,
1990.
Johns, Untitled,
1992-95. Photo
Dorothy Zeidman.
Robert
Rauschenberg
(behind) and Jasper
Johns (front) in the
Hamptons, Long
Island, New York,
c.1958.
Photo John Gruen.
Jill Johnston.
Photo Winifred
B. Lanham.
As Jasper Johns said to Jill Johnston about
Picasso's Straw Hat with Blue Leaf, he
liked it for "being more than one thing."
I can say the same about Johnston's just-
published study of the artist's work,
Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (New
York, Thames and Hudson, 1996). I admire
her guts--not so much for sticking to the
job of detective work, since this is what
I'd expect of a study of iconography ("one
thing" that this book is)--but for another
thing: writing herself and her politics
into her pursuit of the sources of Johns'
images.
The iconography of Johns' work is
complicated. Johnston narrates her
discovery of it as part of her voyage into
the "secret" life of Jasper Johns as it is
told (or hidden) in the arrangements and
alterings of the personal artifacts and
appropriations in his paintings, drawings
and prints. She sees this bricolage as "a
boundary, as buffer, between its
foundation--the biography--and the rest of
the world," noting that critics have
collaborated in maintaining the basic
inviolability of this shield. As Johnston
demonstrates, "outing" Johns (which others
like Calvin Tomkins did years ago) is
actually invited by a close reading of his
work. This she gives in the context of a
(very) detailed record of her art-
historical sleuthing. The payoffs that have
rewarded her attention to the cues Johns
has strewn in his wake provide good reason
to think the artist has "an equal desire to
be hidden and to be found out."
But as Johnston's endnotes bountifully
demonstrate, many others have noted the
personal stories behind these artfully
hidden, or artfully revealing images: the
flag, for instance. As Johnston notes,
Charles Stuckey wondered in print in 1976
if Johns knew that a Sergeant William
Jasper, a revolutionary war hero of the
south, had twice recovered the fallen flag;
Michael Crichton, Barbara Rose and David
Shapiro, informed at different points by
Johns, revealed at length and in different
places that indeed Johns did know, and in
fact was that same William Jasper's
namesake. Johnston's contribution is to
reveal the various parts in Johns's
heavily-cathected Flags played by his own
mostly-absent father, and then to pursue
the fruitful theme of fatherhood through
connections with Castelli, Cage, Cage's
Perilous Night(1943-44) and Johns's
painting of the same name in 1982 to
speculations about "the code of
biographical irrelevance in art."
She does similarly labor-intensive work
with the targets; the faucets; references
to Duchamp, Picasso, Cezanne, Munch and,
notably for Johnston, Matthias Grunewald.
In 1987, Johnston identified Johns's use of
a plague-afflicted figure with webbed feet
and skin boils in Grunewald's 16th-century
Isenheim Altarpiece. The next year the
artist used the same figure as a background
pattern in a drawing he did for an AIDS
benefit auction. Roberta Bernstein, in her
essay in the new Johns catalogue for the
Museum of Modern Art, notes that Johnston
was the first to identify the plague
figure, in her 1987 article in Art in
America, "Tracking the Shadow," but that it
was Nan Rosenthal who linked the images to
the AIDS epidemic, in her essay for the
catalogue of Johns's drawings for the
National Gallery of Art in 1990.
Johnston's book is full of step-by-step
accounts of her "discoveries" about Johns--
discoveries that came, for the most part,
without the artist's cooperation. I am
impatient with the breathlessness of her
style and some of her assumptions (Duchamp
as straight? Johns as perhaps the only
American artist with paternal relatives who
were professional artists? How about the
Peales, the Calders?). But her achievement--
to make the first coherent account of what
seems to me to be a life and work, a
biography of this difficult subject, to do
this in an autobiographical voice, and to
mesh it with an analysis of her subject's
resistance to just this kind of project--is
remarkable. As she notes, quoting Richard
Shiff on Johns, "One wants to know where
things come from."
The book is not primarily about Johns'
sexuality, but about the way elements of
his private life inform his work, and at a
deeper level than that, about
autobiographical projects themselves--both
Johnston's and Johns'. Johnston resolutely
and convincingly totes up significant
connections between Johns' art and his
father, his step-grandmother Montez and his
involvements with men--not only and most
famously Rauschenberg, but also dancer Jim
Self. But why are his romances with women
off limits? Even "the names themselves
seemed unimportant," Johnston tells us,
mentioning only Emmy Fukazawa. And while
there are very few perfect books around, I
would have liked to see more of the
"objectivity effect" that we art historians
are very big on. Though the book is full of
footnotes and references, one wonders
about observations for which she doesn't
give credit to other scholars (where are
Ken Silver's observations on Johns and Hart
Crane, for instance)? This is a touchy area
that would take a devoted Johns scholar
(which I am not) to sort out.
What makes this book different from the
prior accounts of Johns' history that I've
read--but problematic, too--is Johnston's
up-front (and at times dismaying) personal
investment in discovering and presenting
the artist's identity as "a core, the
biggest mystery of all." While she rings
Johns's changes from focusing on Duchamp to
Picasso, and from men to women to men to
women as romantic interests, she seems to
think that inside he really remains the
same old (young) Jasper who adapted so
thoughtfully to a less-than-perfect family
situation. She is quite aware that the
process of filling his referents with
personal meaning and then hiding them is
itself of interest. But she claims,
amazingly, that "the elegant concealment of
embarrassingly expressive bodies [is] an
unprecedented move in the canons of
contemporary realism," because it
deconstructs both abstraction and realism
and thus "constitut[es] a brand new way of
looking at them." This is hard to concede,
given the work on just this problem in
Abstract Expressionism--a movement not
exactly terra incognita for Johns--
regarding figures like Arshile Gorky by
Harry Rand, Mark Rothko by Anna Chave, and
Charles Stuckey and Kirstein Powell on
Willem de Kooning. It seem an even harder
claim to grant given Johnston's own
analysis earlier in the book of Picasso's
Straw Hat with Blue Leaf as an image that
does pretty much the same thing.
As I dived into the introduction, I must
say I almost bottomed out. It was too
painful--that old story about being
rebuffed, turned out: The book begins with
Johnston's recollection of a dinner with
the rich and famous, who now honor Johns as
one of themselves, at the home of his
patron Si Newhouse. She is an outsider.
They don't get her jokes; she thinks they
don't like her attire (pants). Johns's
success (especially financial) has mounted
while Johnston's has not, particularly. Her
attempts to buddy up with him have grown
increasingly importune ... "maybe lunch?"
she asks Johns. A perfunctory nod, no date
suggested. It reminded me of a story told
by French critic Michel Seuphor (in Modern
Artists in America) concerning the painter
Charmion von Wiegand, an articulate writer
and surely one of the most knowledgeable
persons on the topic of abstract art in the
US who moreover had served as translator
for Mondrian during his time in the U.S.
Following a MoMA symposium in 1951 entitled
"What does abstract art mean to me?" von
Wiegand and Seuphor, deep in conversation
about Mondrian, boarded the elevator for
invitees only that was ascending to a
gathering in the MoMA penthouse. Midway,
their conversation was interrupted and von
Wiegand, who was not invited, was asked to
leave.
It's no surprise that people and
institutions that validate art bought for
high prices are especially inhospitable to
those who wish to differ with major players
and their collectors. Johnston is at pains
to suggest that one of the reasons that
Johns has been so well served by his
critics and collectors and she has not is
that he has become so much like them. I
would like to hear more--a lot more--about
Johns and his collectors, as well as more
thinking about if, why, and how artists
should be rich. But what bothers me about
Johnston's story--larded into chapters
chronicling her determined search for
Johns's tropes of fragmentation and reuse--
is my feeling, to redirect one of her own
phrases, that the reason she is willing to
work so hard "to see what the picture is
about, to get into it [is] to share the
feelings of the artist and his projected
actors." She wants to be one of the boys
and they won't let her play!
Poor Jill. I'm not being sarcastic; I'm
embarrassed that it upsets me that she's so
vulnerable. Especially because I think she
is really onto something here: modernism's
inverse connection between autobiography
and power. Remember that writers from
William Empson and Clement Greenberg to
Paul de Man and Hilton Kramer believe that
to be radical is to be objective, self-
reflexive. To them the personal is the
weak, the self-centered, the limited, the
femininized. Yet how can you have the self-
reflexiveness of modernist criticism if you
don't have a self? This insight fires the
recent work of art writers like Leo
Bersani, Eunice Lipton, Kobena Mercer, bell
hooks, Griselda Pollock, Michele Wallace,
Rosalind Krauss and Hilton Als, and Barbara
Johnson, Jane Tomkins, Nancy K. Miller and
Susan Rubin Suleiman in literature. These
people have developed a style of talking
about how things--like wresting power from
authorities who buttress their claims by
impersonalism--makes them feel. It's a
strategy of acting it out and saying it at
the same time. Well handled (and who
decides that is a good question) it's very
effective but it can backfire. That
question aside, though, Johns's cat-and-
mousing with image and abstraction and
Johnston's autobiographical insistence on
her need to find him out are a good pair.
Each seems (in Barbara Johnson's words) "in
reality haunted by the ghost of the other."
ANN GIBSON is at art historian at SUNY
Stony Brook and author of the forthcoming
Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics
(Yale, 1997).
