Pictures at an Inhibition

By ROBERT HUGHES

Jasper Johns' New York retrospective

Jasper Johns, considered by many people the greatest artist at work in America, has been in the public eye for not quite 20 years. It seems longer. No art career pupated more quickly. Johns appeared in 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, a reclusive young Southerner from Augusta, Ga., who had been surviving in virtual isolation in Manhattan since 1952. With his paintings of targets and of the American flag, he landed on point, in the spot, at centerstage: the Museum of Modern Art bought three paintings from that first show, an unheard-of gesture to an unknown painter, and the acquisitive frenzy and the search for bankable geniuses that would characterize the American art world in the '60s began in earnest.

From that moment, Johns' work, slowly done and irregularly seen, served as a still, enigmatic center to the turmoil it had helped provoke. In Johns, the '50s artist--imagined as "hot," expressive and tragic--was displaced by the didactic painter-hero of the '60s; a man of distances, margins and blocks, detachedly rendering the nuances of ambiguity through the most commonplace objects. But his work has not been seen whole. Now it can be: last week a retrospective of 201 paintings, drawings, multiples and prints by Jasper Johns opened at New York's Whitney Museum. Curator David Whitney, a former assistant to Johns, put the retrospective together; the West Coast science-fiction writer Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain) supplied a catalogue text. It is, of course, a fascinating show; but the painter who rises from it is not the Leonardesque genius we have all been conditioned to expect.

Between 1955 and '61, Jasper Johns invented most of his principal motifs: the targets, the stenciled words and numbers, the rulers, the fragments of human anatomy, the American map, the American flag. No period in his later work would equal this one for vitality and daring. A work like White Flag, 1955, has lost the aura of scandal that clung to it when it was first seen. Instead it has moved into the company of, say, Pollock's Lavender Mist as one of the classics of American modernism: a work of such authority, intelligence and opulent technical skill that one can hardly believe its pale, dense encaustic skin was made by a 25-year-old.

"Using the design of the American flag," Johns once remarked, "took care of a great deal for me because I didn't have to design it. So I went on to similar things like targets--things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels." The most complex of these levels--and Johns' work on it constitutes a great part of his historical importance--was exploring differences between knowing and seeing. A target is a sign. Anyone who has shot on a range knows that looking at a target is an extreme case of hierarchical perception --score 10 for the bull's-eye, 9 for the inner, and so on. Once a target is seen aesthetically, as a unified design, its use is lost; it stops being a sign and becomes an image. We do not "know" it so clearly.

In Target with Plaster Casts, 1955, the target's five rings present themselves as painting alone: an even, edible, lovely skin of wax encaustic, no part of it more visually "important" than the next. The idea of putting a bullet through it becomes absurd. What is there to aim at? A sign, which can only be stared at, becomes a painterly image, which must be scanned. But the reverse transformation happens to the plaster casts of parts of the human body in their boxes above the target: anonymous, dipped in paint, they are like fossils or--more exactly--words, denoting "ear," "hand" or "penis." Two systems are locked in paradox: for paradox is Johns' method of seeing clearly.

So with the maps, whose descriptive use is abolished by the storms and flurries of brush marks, and with the lettering, when the word RED turns out to be rendered in blue or yellow paint. Such works do more to force the viewer to think about representation and what it entails than almost any painting since cubism. Johns' art has had episodes of deadpan comedy; Painting with Two Balls, 1960, is among other things a hilariously literal satire on the much-vaunted machismo of abstract expressionism. But his art's main strength lay in the subtlety of its linguistic disputes, embodied as they were in memorable, iconic images.

Yet there have not been very many of these images. Lithography enabled Johns to run scores of variations on his standard themes. And since by the mid-'60s it was assumed that he was incapable of triviality --having become, so to speak, a myth of dandyism: the intelligent person's Andy Warhol--this string of refusals and paradoxes inherited the mantle of his strategic mentor, Marcel Duchamp. He was the artist-critic par excellence. As a result, Johns remains the most intimidating artist alive today.

His tour de main, a proven success, is to make his viewers feel dumb, usually dumber than they really are. This is partly --but only partly--due to the mass of exegesis that has piled up around his work over the past dozen years. As a living conundrum through the '60s, as the one non-formalist artist whose mastery of painted surface was so self-evident that formalist criticism could not dispose of him by its usual methods, Johns became the focus of a critical debate so intense in its narcissism that it managed to pre-empt most visual reactions to what is, among other things, a particularly knotty kind of conceptual art.

The fundamental writing on Johns was done by Critics Barbara Rose and Max Kozloff. After them, was there much left to say? Plainly not, if one is to judge from Michael Crichton's catalogue. Meanwhile Johns (unlike Robert Rauschenberg, who cared less about such matters) proved to be a brilliant curator of his own reputation. A standard posture toward his work emerged. One went to it like Oedipus to the Sphinx. Ask it the wrong question and it would bite one's beak off. Almost any question was the wrong question. This is the most inspired snow job any American artist has ever pulled on his public. Perhaps no paintings in the history of modernism have been so protected by their obliqueness as Johns'.

And so one finds in Johns' work two characters interrogating the eye: the Good Cop and the Bad Cop. The Good Cop is a seducer. Not a great colorist, but a tonal painter without peer, he makes the most beautiful surfaces in America: glaze to paste to crust, never a false step or an unintentionally gauche touch. He is no kind of formal draftsman, but his ability to soothe the eye with exquisite scribbles, with clumps and fields of accumulated line, is breathtaking. He cannot make a banal mark with the crayon, partly because his drawing is not descriptive. And as a printmaker, he is the supreme technician of our time in lithography and silkscreen.

The Bad Cop, by contrast, is an intimidator. In works like According to What, 1964, or Untitled, 1972, he puts wax casts of the parts of a friend's body --hands, a split chunk of face, a buttock, or a pair of legs in a chair. Any Johns reminds one of art history, and this precedent is in Marcel Duchamp's work: the cast human fragments, a vagina or his own cheek, exhibited as sculpture. But the violence of Johns' image, its sense of indifferent dismemberment, is alien to anyting in Duchamp.

It is pure hostility, and the spectrum of hostility in his work is wide. At the other end from sadism, it is nearly volatilized. All the same, its trace remains. One thinks of The Barber's Tree, 1975--a mute, all-over design of rose and gray hatchings in encaustic, on a ground of collaged newspaper. The title is incomprehensible and refers to nothing that the painting discloses. To get the point you have to know about a photo Johns saw in a National Geographic: a Mexican barber painting a live tree like a barber's pole. As Crichton suggests, "It was probably the underlying idea of painting over reality that interested Johns." But who, without the catalogue essay, could possibly be expected to read that into the painting? Its origin is so disconnected from the picture as to have no meaning as subject. Without the photo, one is left with a nice abstract design of hatch marks, beautifully rendered and otherwise unremarkable.

The fact that such paintings are by Johns provides the only reason for imagining they are something more than pattern. "Beat me," begs the masochist. "No," says the sadist. This ancient two-liner has much to say about the relationship Johns' recent work has to its viewers. It is based on frustration.

Frustration has often been a component of Johns' work in the past--the drawers and hatches that cannot open, the mirrors with nothing visible to reflect, the dead flashlights, the rulers with nothing to measure. But in the new paintings and their attendant prints, like Corpse and Mirror, 1976, it becomes particularly troublesome. The organization is fanatically strict, but it is never clear why Johns finds this motif of the hatch mark as interesting as he does.

The "corpse" of Corpse and Mirror alludes to a surrealist game like "consequences," in which a piece of folded paper was passed around, with each player adding a section of drawing to the unseen one before. The game produced weird and poetic monsters on paper. Johns' interest is only in the folds: the hatchings repeat, mirror and reverse one another. It is only a formal device and, compared with what one has learned to expect from the earlier Johns, it is a weak raison d'etre for the art.

There is an arbitrary quality to Johns' recent motifs--the hatching and the painted flagstones. They seem hermetic and trivial, both at once. They lack the iconic force of the flags, maps, numbers and targets. No painter ever marked time more elegantly. But there can be no summing-up of a 47-year-old in midcareer. Johns is, at present, the Picasso of en-.ropy. But even that strange position commands respect, if not always allegiance or pleasure. -Robert Hughes

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