ART ABOUT TOWN
MUSEUM VIEWS THE BROAD, LOS ANGELES Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth (February 10-May 13, 2018) Words Peter Frank
This is the Jasper Johns retrospective that everyone, no doubt Johns himself, has been waiting for—a survey that emphasizes not chronology or studio production or objects or subject matter, (although all these figure prominently) instead, focusing on iconography. When he emerged some 60 years ago Johns rocked the post-Abstract Expressionist art world by making works that did not simply portray things—instantly recognizable things—but works that became those things. Ever since, we have been puzzled and frustrated when his field of vision has opened up to incorporate such things (miraculously keeping their thingness intact) into an expansive but recondite, even hermetic, personal cosmology. Now, finally, that cosmology is presented motivically rather than just sequentially, and what emerges is the artist-as-poet-as-alchemist. The retrospective divides Johns’ oeuvre according to various conceptual, perhaps philosophical, approaches. It begins with rooms filled with flag paintings, target paintings and number paintings, the segregation of motifs allowing us to comprehend both Johns’ obsessiveness and his seemingly endless capacity for variation; he seems to find infinite ways of faceting the image, or at least the context, of a simple thing like a numeral. The exhibition groups this multi-monomania under the broader rubric, Things The Mind Already Knows (a Johns quote), grounding us at an epistemological null point. Painting As Object is a yet simpler concept, but addresses a more complex aspect of art, the facture of normal painting and that of painting that insists on invading the realm of sculpture—a reflexive condition based in Johns’ exposure to the work of Marcel Duchamp. Words and Voices traces Johns’ relationship with language, from an early fascination with the word itself—an entity at once visual, lingual, and emotional—to a surrender to poetry by the early 1980s. The New York arts scene of his salad days had exposed Johns to America’s literary avant garde, but it was only decades later that he came comfortably to embrace the literary in his own activity, activity he’d maintained as purely pictorial. 62
