Off-stage
Bryan Robertson
Jasper Johns Michael Crichton (Thames & Hudson £15.00) At forty-eight, Johns is one of the most compulsively watchable of American artists. Back in the mid-Fifties Johns appeared to lift painting over and beyond the hurdle, the established impasse, of abstract expressionism by painting targets, numbers and flags not as extensions of the more satirical vocabulary of pop art but as unremarkable vehicles — over-familiar as objects and therefore not comprehensively 'seen' — through which to explore all over again the possibilities of painting, colour and abstract structure. Consider the formation of the figure seven as an abstract character with a sharp angle and single diagonal, and then the figure five with its different angles surmounting a broken circle, and you'll get some sense of this pursuit. Through their alert deployment of paint, texture and colour, these paintings were clearly the product of a sharply sophisticated sensibility which even then was partly commenting, like a voice off-stage, on the issues involved in making art and the games to be played in the slide area between
illusion and reality. As we were all coming out of what had sometimes seemed an assault and battery course of abstract expressionism in which the imaginative response, through marks on canvas, to an individual sounding of the subconscious could be, to put it mildly, more interesting in some cases than in others, Johns's cool intelligence and objectivity were refreshing. The way in which the problem of what to paint and how to paint it became the very theme of his paintings seemed encouraging for the future, and disarming in its candour. We should have known better. Johns 's intelligence is so sceptical and his sense of paradox so endless that before we could sit back and enjoy the ride the very seats we were hoping to sit on were flung out of the window. For Johns as for Duchamp, though in slightly different ways, the subject becomes an object which in turn is selfconsciously held up for scrutiny as a device; and other devices are used and italicised, as it were, in the act of presenting that subject. The ruler or compass arms used for dragging a circle or a line through paint are left embedded in the paint as a kind of terminal reminder of reality, as well as a comment on the process of painting. But all this was only the beginning: Johns has moved on a lung way since the Sixties and what finally justifies the difficulty of grappling with what his work refers to is the same as always — Its beauty. Johns makes beautiful paintings and drawings in a dandified but peculiarlY robust and forthright way. One of the factors behind the allure of recent work IS that hardly anybody has been able to see It: Johns is one of the most successful artists of recent times and last year's retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York was the first chance for over a decade to see anYthing more than prints and drawings. Michael Crichton's book was published to coincide with the New York show. It's a good book on an exceedingly difficult subject by an unusually intelligent writer. Crichton is the author of The Andromeda Strain (and director of the film Westworld), and he writes well. But with commendable restraint, bearing in mind how easy it is to write sensitive panegyrics on Johns and how hard to follow through all the continuouslY disruptive trails with logic and insight, Crichton has mostly refused to take off and soar around in the stratospheres of specn.,lation but stays on the ground. He isn't do" but he stays inside the boundaries of Practical possibilities as well as facts, and quotes
from the artist whenever possible. ,
This isn't always particularly helpfT, because Johns has shown a consistent disinclination to be verbally trapped or even resolved aesthetically in any conclusive way, so that much of the text, if not contradictory, is finally more open-ended than we expect a long art text to be and bristles with paradox, like Johns's work. But the paradoxes are clearly spelled out by an aler,t and well-educated mind, and Crichton s elaborately illustrated book provides a scrupulous introduction to Johns.
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