Jasper Johns: Privileged Information. - book reviews

Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.

- Jasper Johns, 1964(1)

In 1962, Frank Stella started a painting called Jasper's Dilemma. Finished in 1963, it has the format of a "mitered maze" (as Stella called it) with two unequal halves. The left side is painted in saturated color, its squared spiral moving out from the center in an organized and exuberant progression through a spectrum of alkyd hues. The right side bears the same pattern, but in grisaille. Truth to tell, this monochromatic half seems more unified, elegant, tasteful - in a word, successful. As William Rubin, then head of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, commented, "This design was complicated enough in its light-dark form; with color added, it became almost impossible to decipher."(2)

Stella's title, of course, referred to an artist he had admired for years, Jasper Johns. Specifically, Jasper's Dilemma pointed to the challenges of Johns's method, in which a given format is explored sequentially in both color and monochrome. Stella referred to the purely formal problems Johns faced in balancing the seductions of the spectrum against the rigors of the gray scale (a problematic confronted directly in Johns's Diver of 1962, a painting to which Stella may well have been referring in his own homage to Johns). But given the probing nature of recent scholarship on this major American artist, Stella's title is fortuitous. In Jill Johnston's book and Kirk Varnedoe's retrospective catalogue, Jasper's Dilemma can be seen to signal another difficulty altogether. As Johns's art becomes more openly autobiographical, how much longer can the artist maintain the cool gray silence that has always seemed so crucial to his success? How long will it be before the presumably more colorful half of his life, "almost impossible to decipher," becomes even more impossible to omit from readings of the work?

The tensions between the authorized and unauthorized approaches to Johns are made palpable in these two major and indispensable publications. Johnston's Jasper Johns: Privileged Information represents the unauthorized version, a book so unappealing to the artist that he withheld permission for any illustrations of his work between its covers. The Museum of Modern Art's catalogue, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, not surprisingly, presents the authorized view. Lavishly illustrated, it is a crucial tool for any future art historian or collector of Johns. Even the Museum's customarily exhaustive documentation has been extended with a disk and website (http://www.moma.org/johns.biblio.html) providing a complete bibliography and exhibition history, as well as a companion volume, Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews. With all this prose, and all these reproductions, it is surprising that the results remain oddly partial. The body of Johns's work, and the sense it makes in the broadest social context, remain as fragmented as the body casts scattered across his assemblage canvases. The definitive "Jasper Johns" has yet to be written.

Particularly in the case of MoMA's authorized narrative, the essayists seem to be playing a game of limbo, bending over backwards to navigate a barrier that the reader intuits but cannot see. In "A Sense of Life," Varnedoe's feisty introduction to the retrospective, the author constantly twists to avoid this "limbo bar" without ever identifying exactly what constitutes it. Phrases from throughout Varnedoe's introduction give the sense of his intense and elliptical prose: "[Johns's is] an art so densely armored and internally complex," "we sense . . . intimacy and implacable chilliness" (15), "a dislocated expressive power," "muzzling . . . the usual indices of spontaneously released energy," "this craft often seems repressed and ironic in its refusals" (16), "this felt need for emotional disengagement," "fueled by an intense, self-conscious will channeled through a draconian self-policing" (18), "dark struggles within imprisoning voids" (24), "the stern valence of . . . repressions and negations" "born from self-denials and throttlings of will" (30). Following in the rich formalist tradition of Rubin, Varnedoe only hints in passing at readings of the work that rely on biography, or illuminations drawn from the concrete context of an actual life (rather than the "sense" of one evoked in his title, borrowed from Johns).

Varnedoe explicitly denies "interpretations that read [Johns's] pictures as exactly realized expressions of carefully plotted (though concealed) programs concerning formalist issues, commentaries on art-historical traditions, sexual identity, and more" (21). In the acerbic footnote following this declaration, he brackets off scholars such as Kenneth Silver, whom he describes as reading Johns's "ostensible" use of motifs taken from the homosexual-identified artist Charles Demuth "as having to do with homosexual identity." It is exactly such a claim that Johnston's more novelistic account wants to interrogate.