Art
Phenomena
John McEwen
Restrospectives are treacherous things. The most famous victim of one, as Saul Steinberg recently pointed out, being the wife of Lot. Every artist who allows himself to be monumentalised in this way risks being turned into a pillar of salt, if this has not happened already, and success is usually only a matter of survival. Now it has come to the turn of Jasper Johns (Hayward till 30 July), the painter who holds the world record for the highest price for a work of art by a living artist sold at public auction. Does he survive? In New York, where this show (with only five additional pieces) was launched last year, they certainly did their damndest to see he did not. The mood was best exemplified by the opening words of Michael Crichton's catalogue: 'lam waiting for an answer. Jasper Johns sits in an Eames chair in the room beneath his studio at Stony Point, New York. The walls are whitewashed and bare. He is a big, solidlooking man wearing faded jeans, a turtleneck sweater, and heavy boots. He stares out at the spring woods. His back is to the sunlight.'
'I think you can be more than one person,' he says finally. 'I think I am more than one person. Unfortunately.' And then he laughs. And so on, right through to a grand conclusion in which Johns is not only proclaimed the saviour of Art in our time but whose work is also interpreted as a metaphor of the most up-to-date theories of modern science. Not only that, he made the cover of Newsweek. When did an artist last achieve that distinction? Michelangelo did not. This is the American way of success, and Johns has been battling with it for twenty years. Spare a thought for him out there at Stony Point, having to clear his head of being Jasper Johns every morning before he sets off to transform a piece of simple canvas into an object worth many thousands of dollars just by coating it with paint. The anguish of that exercise seems to some degree the story of his progress as a painter.
Johns's first show was a sell-out, a smash hit. Alfred Barr bought three paintings for the Museum of Modern Art on the spot. This was the exhibition in which the flags and targets made their first, famous appearance, They still look as good as anything he has subsequently done. At the time there was a lot of slap and splash painting going on in New York. The wit of Johns's imagery, the tightness of the control, the references to everyday life in the use of collaged newspaper, junk wood, plaster cast fragments moulded from the bodies of himself and his friends, made these works an instantly successful and bracing counter. They retain that freshness, a concentration of experience that is perfectly expressed by the consideration of their detail. Even the sides of 'Target with Plaster Casts', done in 1955, are worth studying, the boxed wood pasted with scraps of cuttings and labels, some of them from the New York papers, some in Japanese, a jumble of city impressions and existential dreams, John Dos Passos and Kerouac. This is the humus of these paintings, their lumpy newsprint surfaces only partially obscured by his novel use of waxed. paint (encaustic). And the drawings of this time exhibit the same delicacy of touch, the same small scale and precise detail, even, as Bryan Robertson points out in the English catalogue to the show, a certain puritanism. Afterwards there is a transitional period in which encaustic gives way to the dense and harsh consistency of oil to provide some of his most texturally pleasing works, especially those incorporating alphabets and numbers, but slowly he increases the scale and loosens the handling, as if in impatience with his previous neatness. Barr was horrified by Johns's second show, and indeed most of the artist's painting in the Sixties seems to be striving for physical and emotional effects that are at odds with the character of the earlier work. Many of these works exhibit an anguished search for some sort of personal identity, and it is only in his prints that the sense of objective control of the early work is maintained. Some of these lithographic series are quite outstanding, and represent his most sustained achievement to date. The painting, after the selfquestioning of the Sixties, quietens in the Seventies into a more formal and decorative style of bunched lines free of any autobiographical content. It is like the calm after a storm, still troubled and ugly from time to time, though whether such thunder is the approach of something new or merely an echo of what has gone before is difficult to say. Johns survives his retrospective in that he still seems to have potential, though to date and judged by the historical stand ards to which he has been promoted, his early work can be said to have flattered to deceive except in the case of his prints. It makes him more of a phenomenon than a master.
With Johns around it would be impossible not to mention his contemporary Andy Warhol, who has a much more meagre show of new portraits at the ICA (till 22 July). Mixing print and paint has been one of Warhol's most novel and successful ploys, but on this occasion he has turned out some potboilers. The portraits are of athletes.
Whether these people are as boring as the polaroid photographs he has taken of them, or whether it is because he has printed the photographically derived image over the paint rather than painting over the image as on previous occasions, they are certainly not a patch on his last show of similarly presented dogs at the Mayor Gallery.
A word too about the ICA; it has smartened up. The floors are clean, the food is by Justin de Blank, you can get a drink any time of the afternoon, but they must improve their exhibition policy if they are really to justify that enormous grant.
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