Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

The original personal images developed by Jasper Johns (born 1930)had an equally revolutionary effect on the art world beginning in the mid-1950s. However, Johns’ works are difficult to explain briefly, partly becausethey deal with the vocabulary of modernist artmaking, criticizing, subverting,and commenting upon the discipline itself. He complicates matters byworking with a repeated set of subjects over up to four decades, shifting hismeaning and interactions within a medium on each occasion. Like wordsin a private language, each object or motif carries for him complex, privatemeanings, secret codes, and unconscious attitudes about the world. Theviewer is challenged to interpret these densely layered creations full ofnuance and mystery. Ultimately, his works show how an emphasis on thekind of lively, “modernist” surface emphasized by abstract expressionismcan also carry vivid subject matter—while pretending not to do so.Primarily a self-taught artist, Johns was also strongly influenced byJohn Cage. His first original, repeated theme came to him in a dream: theAmerican flag. In Flag, of 1954–55, he used the ancient wax-based mediumof encaustic to create a beautiful, translucent surface whose calm, controlledstructure contrasted dramatically with the emotional expressionism of theNew York School. However, a flag shared most of the typical qualities ofabstract expressionist art; it was flat, a unified allover image with no hierarchyof forms. But it also was a mundane, mass-produced, popular imagethat would never have appeared in an abstract expressionist painting. Theflag image fills the entire canvas with no “background” around it. Accordingto the critical thought of the time, the development of modern art hadsucceeded through a victory of emphasis on flat surface over illusionisticsubject matter. But a flag was both a subject matter image and a flat surface.Johns’ seemingly simple flag was paradoxical: it was neither a real flag noran artist’s representation of a flag. It simultaneously represented its subjectand was the subject represented. Like all of his work since, it posed a questionabout the relationship between art and reality and how we differentiatebetween the two. Once it was realized that the question, “Is it a flag or is it apainting?” had no answer and didn’t matter, the way was open to pop art,that is, for any popular image to enter painting.The use of the ready-made flag image also allowed Johns to makean artistic statement while avoiding personal self-expression. “I didn’t wantmy work to be an exposure of my feelings, “ he said in a famous statement.As with Rauschenberg, this sentiment was not just shyness but a sophisticatedreappearance of the characteristically American allegiance to a simultaneouslyconceptual and material reality of the object. “I’m interested in137