In this emphasis on the gaze, the audience cannot help but admire the process, the act of art making. In the act of looking, the viewer notices small, intimate details like the rough, impasto texture and the little bits of newspaper infused in the surface. Interestingly, as the flag paintings are some of the artist’s most recognizable works, they are also the first to be presented in the exhibition in an effort to break down the viewer’s assumptions about this artist and his work. In making these paintings, he hopes that the audience will take the time to simply look at these pieces without preconceptions.įlag On Orange Field, 1957. Johns has never confirmed his own beliefs on the political meaning behind the image, but has urged viewers to come to their own conclusions as he believes that the audience completes the work themselves through their varied interpretations. However, the artist has also been known to be somewhat elusive about the meanings behind his work. Reflecting on the autobiographical meaning of the flag in his work, Johns has admitted that “the flag could just as well be a stand-in for father as for me.” Interestingly, with similar national debates surrounding the meaning of the flag, immigration, and nationalism thrust into the public consciousness recently, we are reminded just how much and how little has changed over the past sixty years.Īdditionally, the flag has personal significance for Johns as both he and his father were named after American Revolutionary War hero Sergeant William Jasper (1750-1779), who rescued the flag in two significant battles, and even died raising the American flag over a fort. Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NYĬreated in the era of Cold War and McCarthyism, these flag images have the internal ambiguity of connoting both patriotism and subversion. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, partial gift of Apollo Plastics Corporation, courtesy of Stefan T. Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Jasper Johns, In Memory of My Feelings, Frank O’Hara, 1961. Much like art itself, everyone sees something different in the flag. Nearly everyone has deep-seated opinions about this symbolic object. The American flag is an object that most people have seen countless times in their daily lives. Here we see the artist breakdown assumptions and prejudgements about this ubiquitous and complex icon. In a Descartian manner, he strips his knowledge back to the elementary school basics of letters, numbers, maps, and flags in order to question what he knows and gain a fresh, truthful perspective on the world.Īptly titled Things the Mind Already Knows, the first room in this show is dedicated to Johns’s celebrated flag paintings. Like a Zen koan, this paradoxical stance running throughout Something Resembling Truth allows Johns to break down preconceptions to get to the very heart of language, image, and communication. Undoubtedly a master of paradox, Jasper Johns seems to exist in a world of betweens, between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, between painting and sculpture, between chaos and structure, between public and private, between emotion and fact, and also between the familiar and the unexpected. Untitled, 1991 Painting Bitten By A Man, 1961 Montez Singing, 1989-90 This curatorial choice allows the viewer to see works of different eras on the same wall and make unexpected, eye-opening connections. Consisting of over 120 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints, including many that have never displayed in the city before, this extensive and historically significant collaboration between the Broad and London’s Royal Academy explores Johns’s oeuvre thematically rather than chronologically. Now sixty-four years later, the Broad Museum, the mecca for all things modern art in Los Angeles, is looking back on this celebrated artist’s momentous collection of flag paintings in concert with his later number, target, and map works. Little did Johns know at the time that he was creating an image that would elevate him to the upper echelons of artistic fame and forever alter the course of art history. Not having the money for a new canvas, he simply used some old bedsheets instead. The then-emerging New York-based multimedia artist knew immediately that he had to paint it. In a sudden moment of creative clarity and focus, Jasper Johns awoke from a dream in 1954 with a vision of the American flag dancing around in his head. Preconceptions which are sort of “knowing” may be placed in doubt or may be affirmed by seeing. My work is largely concerned with relations between seeing and knowing, seeing and saying, seeing and believing. At the Broad, Los Angeles (through March 13, 2018)
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