The Brooklyn Rail

Jean-Jacques Rousseau opens his Confessions with a blast of self-glorification: “I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mold in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.” A preposterous declaration, but applying it to Jasper Johns (b. 1930) makes perfect sense, as it enables us to comprehend the various metamorphoses that mark his long career. Multiple phases that could be construed as multiple identities—flags, targets, numbers, collage, printmaking, object-making, and crosshatch works—are presented at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery. Johns is many artists in one human being.

Between the Clock and the Bed is a commemorative show: it both honors the fiftieth anniversary of Johns’s exhibit of crosshatch paintings at the Castelli Gallery in 1976 and also marks the closing of Gagosian’s space on Madison Avenue, which opened in 1989 with the artist’s “Map” paintings. Though the show may imply elegy—Johns is, after all, ninety-five years old—the works on view are merely one facet of a career that seems to take place in an eternal present. There is no loss.

The exhibition’s title derives from a late-career 1940–43 painting of the same name by Edvard Munch, a portrait of the artist as an old man posed between two symbols of mortality, a grandfather clock and a bed. The bright stripes on the bedspread are one possible source for Johns’s crosshatching, but there are others. Johns says he saw the pattern on a car speeding past him: “I only saw it for a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me—literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of complete lack of meaning.” The cryptic Johns does not identify the vehicle or the design he saw: was it some fancifully painted hot rod or a Checker cab? Neither. What Johns saw was his own aesthetic whizzing by: the features he describes reappear across his work. He sees the things most of us overlook, focuses on them, and in doing so makes them strange and new.

The thirty-one wall pieces and one artist’s book (the 1975–76 Foirades/Fizzles, made in collaboration with Samuel Beckett) cover three periods of Johns’s career, twelve from the 1970s, sixteen from the 1980s, one from 1990, and three from the current century. There is some overlap, with at least two works begun in the seventies and finished in the eighties. The earliest painting is Corpse and Mirror, an oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas from 1974. There are two panels, the corpse on the left and the mirror on the right, but the mirror panel is incomplete, with blank spaces and what looks like a burn mark from an iron left too long on a shirt, so it neither replicates nor inverts the corpse. Johns seems to be saying that the finished (dead) body, the completed panel, is a reality that cannot be caught in the mirror, that the painting is a unique reality. The mirror panel may also “reflect” the viewer’s version of the original, never precise, always incomplete: our gaze is not Johns’s gaze. This idea of the viewer’s flawed vision is picked up in a watercolor—Sketch for The Barber’s Tree (ca. 1975)—of a detail derived from a photograph in a then-recent issue of National Geographic. A Mexican barber, perhaps lacking a barber pole, painted his own version of one on a living tree. The barber copies but modifies; Johns modifies the modification.

The series of works Johns collectively titled “Between the Clock and the Bed” finds its maximum expression in a large 1981 encaustic on canvas. If the bedspread in Munch’s self-portrait is Johns’s point of departure, then here he has extracted a detail from Munch and transformed it, creating what looks like a California highway system where no one road connects to another. The bright orange at the center creates an illusional focal point; except in the geometry of the canvas, there is no center—or rather, the center is everywhere.

Among the sixteen superb works from the eighties is an untitled modest ink and graphite pencil on plastic piece from 1980. It is black and white, but in its chromatic simplicity it reenacts Johns’s summary of his reaction to design on the speeding car—“literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning.” It’s as if Johns had begun the drawing from the center, worked his way up and down and to the right, and then simply stopped in the upper left. The work’s dense crosshatching gropes its way into entropy, creating an impossible open-ended totality. The narrator of Beckett’s “Fizzle 4” speaks both for Beckett and Johns, saying, “It’s impossible I should have a voice, impossible I should have thoughts, and I speak and think, I do the impossible, it is not possible otherwise.” May Jasper Johns go on forever.