Figuring Jasper Johns

ArtForum, Summer, 1995 by Richard Shiff

The keys to Orton's work are the word "figure" and a corresponding bit of punctuation that marks a significant difference. The punctuation in question is the quotation mark, in particular what some call scare quotes, used to indicate that the writer is distancing himself from the regular or accepted use of the word. This is not a matter of citation, except perhaps in the rarefied sense associated with Jacques Derrida. Indeed Orton's work is informed by Derrida, who is famous for arguing that a specific reader's interpretation of a text, or a viewer's interpretation of a picture, must be prefigured in all previous uses of verbal and visual signs, as well as linked to innumerable other interpretations by an uncontrollable drift in the representational system. These conditions of the use of representational signs - conditions that for Derrida are hardly rarefied but entirely normal - entail a disconcerting result: no particular interpretation ever belongs definitively to a particular person, place, or time. Even Jasper Johns' own sense of who "Jasper Johns" is and what he means when he makes a work of art must suffer from this indeterminacy.

Here Orton would insist on using the scare quotes, even though they're all the more problematic when the word they distance is a proper name - for what's questionable about a name, an identity? Orton's punctuation divides the living person who is Jasper Johns from the "Jasper Johns" we know through his art and through all the things we think can justifiably be said about it and him (or must it be "him"?). It's the latter figure ("Johns") who becomes the more real for Orton, since that figure is the only one with whom the critic actually makes contact: "Because he [Johns] is unknowable, I saw no reason to go out of my way to make the acquaintance of Jasper Johns. I saw little point in questioning him about the work of 'Jasper Johns.' This puts a distance between this book and those books devoted to the study of 'Jasper Johns.'" This book, Orton is saying, will not be informed by interviewing, biographical data-mongering, or the usual artworld comeuppance, "I know him better than you do."

Well, maybe just a bit it will be. Orton's interest lies at the intersection of an artist's life with an associated body of art that the critic finds worthy of study; he concerns himself with things people normally think bind a life and its art together. Johns becomes a particularly interesting case not only because his art is so packed with trails of meaning but because those meanings do not seem readily linked to the life - in a certain sense, Johns' art has never been about him, even when he produces the seemingly autobiographical series he calls "The Seasons," 1985-86. These works refigure the old artistic conceit of a set of "the four seasons"; they also reinstitute images previously painted (but not necessarily created) by Johns: flags, George Ohr pottery designs, famous optical conundrums, a character from the Isenheim Altarpiece. Such self-referential paintings are typical of Johns. They are about - they figure - "Jasper Johns" the figure, not Jasper Johns the person. Hence Orton's title: Figuring Jasper Johns. Like many lines in Orton's text, it can be read five or six different ways.

If Orton engages you with the play of words and concepts, he is equally adept at drawing you close into Johns' paint. In Painted Bronze (1960) - a cast-and-painted imitation of a Savarin coffee can with 17 cast-and-painted brushes, and a work that the artist seems to use as a surrogate for his bodily image in posters and catalogues - Orton notices a typical Johnsian contradiction: "The [painted] fingerprints on the brushes make the illusion, but the ostentatious orange thumb-print on the can . . . unmakes it." What Orton sees is this: Johns caused certain paint-laden fingerprints to lie upon the cast brushes, looking just as they would upon functioning wooden brushes; whereas a fingerprint on the bronze can presses into or bonds materially with the painted logo beneath it. That particular finger mark denies any existential difference between the fixed design of the Savarin trademark and casual incidents of handling associated with the painter's actions - both are nothing but paint, yet what one type of fingerprint gives as illusion, the other type takes away. This leads Orton to conclude that a work created by Johns can be "neither a painting [figured illusion] nor a sculpture [actual object], but both a painting and a sculpture." Johns' critics have said this kind of thing before, but on far less visual and conceptual authority. Orion has earned his right to say it.

With equal authority, Orton analyzes the crucial distinction, as articulated by Johns himself, between the actual and the figured. The context is an interview of 1973 in which the artist explains how he distanced himself from the Abstract Expressionist standard of assertive personality: "I found I couldn't do anything that would be identical with my feelings. So I worked in such a way that I could say that it's not me." Orton's favored critical concepts - metonymy and allegory - are easily related to Johns' remark, and Orton the critic is nearly as much the master at examining such concepts in relation to art as Johns the artist is at producing meanings that stretch these same flexible figures beyond familiar limits. Orton follows Johns' metonymies (his associations, exchanges, and substitutions) as if he were tracking a fugitive destined to evade him. We might say, in the spirit of Orton, that Johns renders self-evident how metonymy and allegory rule over our lives, or at least over our interpretations.