10 The New York Reviewinventory of Racing Thoughts (1983,
Whitney) includes an avalanche
warning with skull and crossbones, a
jigsaw- puzzle portrait of Leo Castelli,
a Barnett Newman lithograph, a Mona
Lisa repro held up with trompe l’oeil
tape, a trompe l’oeil nail holding noth-
ing. A tub faucet and handles rise from
the lower edge, suggesting a bathroom,
but what to make of the quirky, puck-
ered pot, the white ceramic in the form
of a Rubin face- or- vase illusion, or the
tightly scripted interlocking shapes
that cover the left side of the canvas?
If viewers once wondered what Johns
meant by the images he chose, at least
they had known where they came from.
That was understood to be the point of
“things the mind already knows.” Now
it seemed they required footnotes. The
odd pot, we learned, was the creation
of George Ohr, the self- styled Mad
Potter of Biloxi, whose work Johns col-
lects. (“There is something interesting
about such a primitive way of making
forms, something touching in its fra-
gility. It is all about labor and skill.”)
Even more eccentric, the interlocking
design was revealed as a tracing of
the bloated, scabrous wretch in Mat-
thias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece
(1512–1516), cropped and inverted.
These developments were greeted
with bafflement and a bit of the pique
provoked by inside jokes. People who
had venerated Johns as the champion
of the impersonal and epistemic were
agg r ieved. T he word “her metic” ga i ned
currency. The four “Seasons” paintings
brought further autobiographical ele-
ments, including the painted shadow of
the artist himself. Mirror’s Edge (1992)
added a pinwheel galaxy and the floor
plan of his grandfather’s house, recre-
ated from memory and pictured as a
curling blueprint. There was a sense,
Carroll Dunham writes in one of the
best essays in the catalog for “Mind/
Mirror,” that Johns’s “‘things the mind
already knows’ had evolved into things
his mind already knows.”
At the same time, however, Johns
was inventing some entirely new, com-
pletely accessible conceits. A folded,
hanging cloth might call up thoughts
of Veronica’s veil or Raphaelle Peale’s
marvelous Ve nu s Rising from the
Sea—A Deception (circa 1822), but it
can also be understood simply as a pic-
tured cloth. In Montez Singing (1989,
Whitney) the features of a face have
wandered off to eccentric locations: the
eyes stick like limpets to the margins,
one in an upper corner, one lower on
the opposite side; the lips lounge along
the bottom, while a slight squiggle of a
nose floats free. Where the brow would
be is a small picture of a boat with red
sails, suspended from a faux nail. It is
a painter’s painting, taking things that
everyone has played with and arrang-
ing them in a way that is unprecedented
yet coherent. There is a footnote here
as well: Montez Bramlett Johns was
Johns’s step- grandmother and “Red
Sails in the Sunset” was a song she
sang, though as Dunham points out,
the information may deepen empathy,
but it explains nothing.
Two decades on, it is easier to see all
these pictures not as perverse rebuses
but as further adventures in painting
and seeing. “The task of art,” the phi-
losopher Emmanuel Alloa writes in
another fine catalog essay, “is that of un-
doing recognition, so as to rivet the gaze
to what is far too well known.” So, like
the Montez face, we need to point oureyes in different directions, ask them to
do different things, while holding onto
a sense of connection. The Isenheim
tracings (Johns has done many) can be
seen as an extension of the crosshatches :
How attenuated can a structure be and
still register as ordered in the mind?
And while it may feel like a game of
“I Spy” played out in someone else’s
attic (albeit a beautifully arranged
one), this mode also hints at the uncon-
strained connectedness of the world—
the sense, as William James put it a
century ago, thatno one point of view or attitude
commands everything at once ina synthetic scheme.... Things are
“with” one another in many ways,
but nothing includes everything,
or dominates everything. The
word “and” trails along after every
sentence.One of the things that becomes clear
in “Mind/Mirror” is that Johns’s art
has never been one with the moment
of its making. There was always a back-
ward glance, even in that first flag, with
its underlayment of cast- off newspa-
pers, its fresh paint made to look like
it had been around the block. He did
not paint his first fifty- star flag until
1965, six years after Hawaii joined
the Union. In 1960, when he decided
to make a sculpture of a flashlight, he
found it difficult to locate the right
model: “I looked for a week for what I
thought looked like an ordinary flash-
light, and I found all kinds of flashlights
with red plastic shields, wings on the
sides, all kinds of things.” Finally, he
found one that looked like the ordinary
object he had in mind, the kind he had
used as a kid.
“Everything I do is attached to my
childhood,” he has acknowledged.
Beyond floor plans and flashlights, it
is tempting to see in his attraction tomodest objects and unstable mean-
ings the shadow of a child passed from
house to house. (This is not particu-
larly fanciful: the 1986 painting Spring
and its many related works feature the
shadow of a child and a ladder bor-
rowed from Picasso’s Minotaur Moving
His House.) His early subjects were
the stuff of the schoolroom: numbers,
alphabets, flags, maps, color names,
rulers. The vertical hand that erupts
through Land’s End may mark the sig-
nal of a drowning man, but it is also the
urgent gesture of a child who thinks he
knows the answer.
Mastery of these symbols is dangled
before children as equivalent to mas-tery of the world, but there are moments
when the conventions of the adult world
are suddenly revealed as such—when
you realize that the border on a map is
not drawn on the ground, or when some-
one tells you that base ten’s zero through
nine is just one of a potentially infinite
number of ways to represent quantities.
Those moments may be terrifying or
elating or both, but their message is sim-
ple: there is another way to see things.
This is the delight of ambiguous im-
ages that pop up so often in Johns, like
the face- vase or the duck- rabbit (which
drew the attention of Wittgenstein, and
which Johns has paired with the child’s
shadow). Here instability is limited to
two positions, which you can control:
changing your mind about what’s im-
portant turns one subject into another.
As far back as the 1960s Johns had
made flags in inverted colors (green,
black, and orange rather than red,
white, and blue) to invite retinal after-
effects: if you stare at the image for sev-
eral seconds and then move your eyes,
you see a color- corrected phantom, a
picture that exists only in your mind
and only for a moment. Contrary to the
deflating adult adage, you can have it
both ways.
Johns has spent much of the past de-
cade tampering with tracings of twophotographs of grief—the series titled
Regrets is built on a tattered picture
of Lucian Freud, posed by Francis
Bacon in a state of theatrical despair,
while Farley Breaks Down and related
works use a Life magazine photograph
shot by Larry Burrows in 1965 of a dis-
traught young marine after the death
of a comrade in Vietnam. In both bod-
ies of work, the initial photographs are
mirrored and doubled, deprived of the
expected color values, so the picture
initially presents itself as an intricate
all- over mosaic of shapes. Let your eye
roam, however, and identifiable ele-
ments gradually rise to the surface—an
elbow first, then a boot, then a head
buried in a hand.
In one poised and lovely monotype
in Philadelphia, Johns has reflected the
central action along two vertical axes,
creating unexpected contours: a trap-
ezoidal space between arm and crate
blooms into something like a heart,
while crumpled fatigues and a boot
heel frame an intricate urn- like shape,
a face- vase without a face. In the staged
Freud/Bacon photo, mirrored negative
space conveniently outlines a skull, a
stagey Halloween metonym, death at
arm’s length. In the Farley/Burrows
picture of real and visceral mourning,
the mirror produced nothing that can
be recognized, just a particular and at-
tentive absence.What has Johns done for us lately?
Pretty much what he did for us in the
first place: he continually disrupts the
mental shorthand that converts com-
plex visual experience into simple men-
tal categories, with all their buttressing
opinions, received wisdom, and per-
sonal preferences. In a world (includ-
ing the art world) where “visuals” are
used to simplify arguments and kindle
beliefs, Johns reminds us that dou-
bling, bifurcation, and uncertainty are
the terms of vision itself. Writing about
the fraught confrontation between ab-
straction and figuration in the 1950s,
Roberta Bernstein notes that Johns
“bridged the divide by refuting polar-
ization.” It hardly seems necessary to
emphasize the relevance to our own
moment.
Five hundred objects is a lot to take
in, but two works in “Mind/Mirror” in
particular remain lodged in my brain.
One is the tiny Gray Numbers men-
tioned above. The other is one of a
body of works made around the turn of
the millennium, all featuring a length
of white string draped across the can-
vas, dropping and rising in a catenary
curve (most familiar from suspension
bridges). In Untitled (1998, Whitney)
the string crosses a slender canvas that
is half covered with the design of a
“Chinese” Halloween costume Johns
remembered from childhood, half with
harlequin diamonds in the colors of
midcentury linoleum. The string de-
scends from the top of a wooden slat
almost to the picture’s bottom edge
before staging a small recovery (see
illustration on page 9). As usual with
Johns, it is hard to say why this is so af-
fecting—sad, sweet, yet robust—other
than to note that the point of a paradox
is not to resolve it, but to find insight in
being strung between two points.
“Not knowing exactly is something
that I find fascinating,” Johns has ob-
served. “Whatever the basis, it probably
moves one to see life in an ambiguous
way.” It’s a lesson that never gets old. QJasper Johns: Untitled, 2017John Lund /Low Road Studio/Forman Family CollectionTallman 08 10 .indd 10 12 / 16 / 21 5 : 44 PM