Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality,” Johnselaborated. “I’m interested in things which suggest things, which are, ratherthan in judgments.” He found something artificial about deliberately tryingto suggest a particular psychological state, and he wanted his paintings tobe literal objects, “as a real thing in itself.” Johns’ systematic studies of thephilosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein around 1961 furthered his interest in theambiguous interactions of art objects and real objects and led to his conceptionsof painting as a kind of language or a model of reality. From thesereflections a new level of complexity of meanings emerged within his evermore elusive paintings, and he occasionally made more telling statementsabout his aspirations to render “the condition of presence,” of “being here.”“I personally would like to keep the painting in a state of ‘shunning statement,’”he commented in 1965, “ … that is, not to focus attention in one waybut to leave the situation as a kind of actual thing, so that experience of it isvariable.”As an example of the later work in which Johns carefully veils hiscomplex meanings, we can consider briefly In the Studio from 1982, an encausticpainting on canvas with attached objects (Figure 22). The paintingbegan when Johns saw an empty canvas propped against the wall in hisstudio, represented here by the tilted rectangle painted in the lower picture,which also implies perspective recession in space. However, this impressionis disrupted by the actual attached board, which projects outward from thecanvas at a reverse angle to the illusory recession. A three-dimensional waxcast of a child’s arm is painted in a multi-colored flagstone pattern, whichrefers to a similar pattern used in two paintings by French surrealist RenéMagritte, who also philosophically explored the differing meanings and realityof visual, verbal, and mental images as well as how a painter can createillusions of all three. The mysterious arm is repeated in a painted “drawing”illusorily “pinned“ to the canvas by painted nails casting shadows (which,in turn, refer to similar nails used in Georges Braque’s cubist still lifes). Also“pinned” to the studio wall is one of Johns’ cross-hatch “paintings,“ a multireferentialmotif he introduced in the early 1970s as part of a re-evaluation ofPicasso and Pollock. He derived the pattern by combining a regularizationof Pollock’s allover brush strokes and the colored decorative hatching usedby Picasso to organize and control his surfaces. The motif usually relates toJohns’ interest in concealment of meaning (especially concerning sexualityand death), his efforts to camouflage subject by surface. Below, another”pinned” cross-hatch “painting“ is seemingly melting away into the surfaceof the wall (and the picture). These three pairs of opposites depicted in In the138