Jasper Johns

The distinguishing feature of both Johns' and Rauschenberg's work is their universality within the field of tension between the totality of things and nothingness, between the whole world and the part, between the banal and the philosophical. Johns and Rauschenberg were studio neighbors in Pearl Street, downtown New York, from 1955 to 1958 during a crucial stage of their development. Johns' compositions reduced his pictures to essentials, while Rauschenberg expressed the full range of his sweeping ideas with the help of dislocation, stratification and combination. A connecting link - especially as far as Johns' philosophical side is concerned - was their friendship with the composer John Cage. Johns had met Cage through Rauschenberg in 1954. Cage has described Johns' ability to give almost magical effect to precise perceptions while placing these within the context of lived, everyday meanings. The thing about the "target", according to Cage, was its need of something else. Indeed, there was nothing which could not function as its opposite. Not even the rectangular space in whose center the target was placed. And it was precisely this undivided, and apparently residual, zone of the painting which engendered - miraculously, as it seemed - its own organization. Into "faces", as Cage put it.