His Heart Belongs to Dada

Jasper Johns, 29, is the brand-new darling of the art world's bright, brittle avantgarde. A year ago he was practically unknown; since then he has had a sellout show in Manhattan, has exhibited in Paris and Milan, was the only American to win a painting prize at the Carnegie International, and has seen three of his paintings bought for Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art by Director of Collections Alfred Barr Jr. Almost despite himself, greying, unassuming Alfred Barr, 57, has become the most powerful tastemaker in modern art, since he largely makes the taste for the museum, and the museum, in turn, sets the taste of those who think that in art, as in clothes, it is smart to be fashionable.

Johns paints the American flag in various colors, including the conventional ones. Or he paints targets, or numbers arranged in little squares. Or, tiring of that, he will put a frame around an opened book and paint the whole thing red. Or he will attach a music box to the back of a blue collage, with the key sticking through the front. "The music box played Silent Night," he remarks. "I fixed it to go 'ping, ting, click' instead." Prize exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art's "Recent Acquisitions" show last week was a Johns target, messily painted in red, blue and yellow atop a layer of old newspapers pasted to canvas. Attached to the upper edge of the canvas was a boxlike arrangement containing the lower parts of four faces, done in tinted plaster.

The critics have dutifully produced a jargon suitable for such works. Sample (Nicolas Calas in Art News): "Jasper Johns extinguishes the emblematic character of a given sign . . . The target of blue and yellow circles holds the implication that from the marksman's stand it would be seen as a sphere of green . . . From a national emblem the flag becomes a symbol of ambiguity; from the insignia it is converted into poetry ... If a flashlight instead of a gun is aimed at the target of displaced colors the silence grows louder."

A bachelor and onetime commercial artist, Johns works in a neat, spacious loft over a sandwich shop in lower Manhattan, explains his own work more lucidly than the critics have. "It all began," he says, "with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn't have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets--things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I've always thought of a painting as a surface; painting it in one color made this very clear. Then I decided that looking at a painting should not require a special kind of focus like going to church. A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator."

It all added up to Dada, the great antiart movement of 40 years ago. Like Johns, the Dadaists deliberately tried to strip art of all sentiment and all significance. They would exhibit a urinal as sculpture, for example, to get across the idea that a statue is no better and no worse than a urinal. Thus degraded, Dada soon grew the snaky locks of surrealism. Next year's fair-haired boy may well have his pockets full of limp watches, and may also be hailed as a pioneer.

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