Jasper Johns: Gray at the Met

There is an orgy of art happening at the Met these days and I encourage everyone to check out the Poussin show (which converted me to playing in the fields with nymphs), the Courbet show (wowsers) and last but not least, Jasper Johns.

There were several surprises for me in the Johns "Gray" show: first, the show is big. I was thinking a small gallery of a handful of paintings. No. It's pretty much a Johns retrospective in black and white, as if you've bought a cheap used copy of a '60s book on Johns -- only they're the real fucking paintings.

The second surprise for me was that I like Johns again.

I used to count him as a living giant, but after the exhaustion of his MoMA retrospective in 1997 and a few sightings of his current work, I'd forgotten how great his early work is. During this "Gray" show, I even came to like pieces that I never cared for, and it may be because I'm reading a book on David Hockney right now and I realize the two share a lot.

Hockney came to art school in the '50s at the height of abstraction's dominance in the art world. He liked to draw, and was attracted to modernism without being an acolyte.

Reading his story, it's easy to see where a young painter could be frustrated with this idea that you have to express yourself purely in abstraction in order to be current and deep.

But if you're young enough, or outside of the art world enough, how could you buy into thinking of abstraction as the only sincere way a painter could work? It's easy to see from the outside that these colors and lines on canvas are a style among many, but still they hold an expressive power. So how does one hold onto that expressive power but do the unthinkable--actually have a recognizable subject? Both Hockney and Johns figured out their own ambitious solutions.

The work that made me a reborn Johns fan in the current "Gray" show is the work called "Drawer." Johns basically takes a canvas and puts the front of a drawer on it, creating the illusion of having a drawer inside the painting. There are the remnants of abstract-expressionism in gray brushwork all over the painting, but you realize immediately that this isn't an abstract work at all. The color and texture are decorative. The subject of the painting is what happens in your mind when you think you can pull a drawer out of a painting--as if behind the canvas, there's a world the art observer doesn't have access to.

All of a sudden, it clicked. Jasper Johns is about surfaces. I don't know why I never thought about his approach, but I think his response to the dominance of abstraction-expressionism is to see it as a physical surface (albeit propped by lots of critical theory and beer).

If modernism did away with illusion and the idea of art mirroring reality, then what gives a work depth? I think Johns' solution was to see the power in suggestivity and the connections between surfaces. Take his work "Tennyson," which is really similar to "Drawer" except for instead of sticking the front of a drawer onto the surface of a gray expressionistic canvas, he writes the word "TENNYSON."

There is no clear reason for him to write that word there. It's about association. It's an evocation, and either it evokes or it doesn't. Could it be a juvenile joke about his gray canvas and Tennyson's "Edward Gray"? Could it be a connection with the poet's mood? The clever, elusive thing about Johns is he gets it both ways: making work that is detached but also expressive by sheer association. (It can also be boring or annoying, but let's leave that aside).

Included in "Gray" is one of my favorite Johns works. "Painting Bitten By a Man" is exactly what the title says: a book-sized canvas, coated with wax, that has had a big chunk bitten out of it. Again, it's Johns playing with the associations of a style. You might think by looking at the canvas that yo uhave direct access to the artist's feeling and emotions. You might think "Clearly, he was frustrated -- he took a bite out of his canvas!" But it could also be a joke -- or just another surface. To me it's hilarious and funny and mysterious, because even if it's a goof I imagine Johns spending time stretching the canvas, laying down the wax, contemplating where to bite, etc. Like the best humorists, Johns comes well prepared.

"Disappearance II" is another typical Johns piece in that it leads to questions about surface and what a painting "really" is. It features a large square-ish canvas, but place on top is another canvas with the four corners folded in, so you get a diamond shape. Looking at the canvas folded in, it's hard not to wonder what's on the surface of the canvas that has been turned and hidden from your view. It's like he's hiding something. But what do you call someone who announces he has a secret?

After the ab-ex house of cards collapsed, Johns' approach became extremely useful as a way of creating meaningful work that doesn't rely on advanced critical theory but uses natural associations and relationships built into people's perceptions. It's neither reactionary or amnesiac. It stokes questions that have no answer, because in the end you realize they're not questions at all. It's like a blind person feeling his way around a room. Feeling surfaces can yield amazing depth.

Joanne Mattera wrote about the show, and includes interview excerpts of Johns, and Two Coats rounds up the reviews.