Jasper Johns

Subject - object - perception - painting - picture: Jasper Johns' intention is to reduce artistic logic of this far - reaching and comprehensive process to its most simple and concrete made of presentation. Johns defines the phases through which a painting passes as factual, conceptual processes of equal importance. The subject (painting) does not override the object (picture); perception is not colored by emotional or artistic prejudice, and the picture itself is not an illustration of any kind of idea. Painting simply exists in its won right. The modeling process proceeds from "perception" - a central concept in Johns' theory - via the act to the picture itself. In looking at a picture we perceive both its material and non - material layers of meaning. "One can say that the physique of the painting embodies the thought, allowing the mind to perceive both at once; or the two can split, allowing one to sense them at different times."

Jasper Johns' resolute clarity at every stage derives from self - reflection; that is to say, he is aware of himself both during the act of perception, and while observing the steps he takes to realize his idea. He investigates what he is doing and how he is doing it while he is doing it. "And the process of my working involves indirect unanchored way of looking at what I'm doing." His utterly plain explanation of his painting method is evidently also a product of self - questioning and artistic determination. In his notes, statements and interview responses, Jasper Johns locates the indissoluble planes of reference an stance of his work in what can only be described as a philosophical system. The subtlety and precision of his language equip him with the tools to undertake an exact dissection of his every step, of the stages through which his work passes and of the result itself, but they are also the tools of his "Socratically wise" irony: "It (the statement) has to be what you can't avoid saying, not what you set out to say." "I think that most art which begins to make a statement fails to make a statement because the methods used are too schematic or too artificial… The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be a deliberate statement but a helpless statement."

Perception is the central criterion in the genesis and effect of Jasper Johns' paintings. "…the perception of the object is through looking and through thinking." Meaning is a product of unmediated "looking" and should therefore not be distorted by expectations, prejudices, knowledge, feelings or ideas. What Jasper Johns calls recreation arises during the process of working, through visual and intellectual activity. "I have attempted to develop my thinking in such a way that the work I've done is not me - not to confuse my feelings with what I produced. I didn't want my work to be exposure of my feelings." By reducing the meaning of an object in a painting to the function of perception and purifying it of emotions, he liberates both the image and its representation from the interpretations which are not integral to the act of seeing, and from individualistic bias.

Jasper Johns started painting his first important objects and symbols with this method in 1954. They include his Flags, his Targets, and also numbers, letters, the "canvas" and words. Jasper Johns locates these, characteristically enough, at the outset of his artistic project, having destroyed - as far as was possible - everything which predated them. His perception of a thing proceeds from the "physical form of whatever I'm doing." In order to execute a painting, he prefers to adhere to what already exists (the tiles in later his work, for instance, with their anonymous ornamental quality), rather than inventing his won composition. He reverses the usual process: "Invent a function. Find a an object." Jasper Johns confessed that he was no longer interested in the image of the U.S. flag when the real thing received its additional stars (51 altogether). The pictorial variations of this theme show that, for Johns, perception is not static, but constantly changing. The flag is exposed to frequently "changing focus"; Johns paints it in different states: "But I was interested in the kind of nuance, modulation, play between thinking, seeing, staying and nothing."

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