The Human Absence

...Ever since the appearance of Mondrian's flat, non-objective canvases in the 1920s, it has been perfectly clear that painting does not have to be either representational or illusionistic—that is, it does not have to include a sense or depth— to be serious art...

...Johns' self-awareness of his historical position is projected through his application of abstract-expressionist brushwork to perfectly flat objects, like targets or flags...

...Ever since Picasso used a flat grid as a schema on which to hang the shifting facetplanes of his 1911-12 Cubist inventions, many modern artists have felt that the shape of their pictures must have an inner logic of their own, and that fussing with the placement of objects within the painting would smack of arbitrary window display, of letting the artist's private will obtrude as willful artiness...

...His dripped and smeared brushwork comes directly out of Willem de Kooning's work of the early '50s and, like de Kooning's, serves to juxtapose dark and light areas of paint, at once modeling the surface of the picture and giving it a sense of shifting depth without resorting to the convention of perspective recession...

...In this wasteland of coffee-table editions replete with deluxe reproductions and banal, uninformative texts, a book like Leo Steinberg's Jasper Johns, which seriously intends to explain a difficult oeuvre to the uninitiated public, appears with tempting lushness...

...while everything that usually serves the abstract or decorative—flatness, bare outlines, allover or symmetrical design—is put to the service of representation...

...But it is a special quality of Johns' own art that it acknowledges the intrinsic flatness of painting with imperturbable wit...

...This annecdote, recounted by Steinberg, shows in jest what Johns' pictures show in earnest: that he is caught up in the problem which all important modern painting must face, namely, the meaningful expression of that intrinsic two-dimensionality that painting possesses...

...This is apparent, for example, from his own report of the following conversation: "When I said to [Johns] recently that his early works seemed to me to be 'about human absence,' he replied that this would mean their failure for him...

...not as a painter, but as theorist...

...The paint surface itself...

...Steinberg begins by describing the general bewilderment caused by Johns' subject-matter, which during the late 1950s consisted of targets, American flags, maps of the United States, window blinds and large stenciled numbers...

...Everything that usually serves representation and illusion is left to serve nothing but itself, that is abstraction...

...Steinberg then continues to insist that the pictures "imply human absence from a man-made environment...

...This abdication of private whim in order to lay claim to objective necessity is not peculiar to Johns, but is also reflected in the work of many contemporary artists...

...This, however, is rather like a concert pianist standing up after running off the last cadenza and announcing: "You may criticize me for playing badly, but it won't count because I've said it first...

...Thus, he pointedly denies any possibility of depth to the viewer by presenting a datum which is known to be flat...

...Only man's objects remain, overgrown by paint as by indifferent vegetation...

...for it would imply 'that [the artist] has been there,' whereas he wants his pictures to be objects alone...

...This drive towards flatness, which began with Johns in the mid'50s, came as an effort to eliminate the remnants of Cubist space found in abstract-expressionist painting...

...Yet the reader is faced with a mirage, for Steinberg consistently refuses to place Johns' work in the postwar context that is the major concern of his art...

...Moreover, he thereby fuses the actual flatness of the canvas surface with the represented flatness of the subject...

...But unlike de Kooning, Johns is at pains to make his subject-matter contradict any sense of depth the brushwork might imply...

...Steinberg concludes his monograph "with a few suggestions for criticizing what I have written: . . . Nothing that [the author] has said has any bearing on Johns' painting qua painting...

...He then seeks to explicate the whole intention of Johns' work by merely finding the qualities common to all of these subjects—qualities, for instance, of being flat, being man-made, or possessing a "ritual shape...

...Clement Greenberg rightly describes this explicit contradiction in Johns' work in the following manner: "The original flatness of the canvas, with a few outlines stenciled on it is shown as sufficing to represent adequately all that a picture by Johns really does represent...

...In a work called Shade (1959), for example, Johns attaches a household window shade to the top of his canvas and pulls it down, jokingly closing off the view beyond the window opening of the frame that every picture since the Renaissance was supposed to have...

...Reviewed by ROSALIND KRAUSS Contributor, "Art International" Like Hollywood movie spectaculars, too many art books attempt to use lavish productions and catchy, if vacuous, texts to cover up a fundamental lack of either meaning or purpose...

...Steinberg's treatment of Johns—in an expository style of outline and sentence fragment which approximates a kind of illegible mental shorthand—is especially regrettable, for the monograph itself represents an attempt on the part of its publisher to reverse the current trend of art-book publishing and to give a serious presentation of a progressive artist in a richly illustrated, well-documented edition within the reach of even a student's pocketbook...

...Yet Steinberg has chosen to present Johns out of the context which would make it clear how deeply involved he is with the problems of art, rather than with the popular subject-matter he merely exploits...

...is shown, on the other hand, as being completely superfluous to this end...

...In fact, the very nature of Johns' art makes it impossible either to write a serious monograph about him without seeing him in context, or to consider the subject-matter of his painting without seeing the meaning given to it by his painting qua painting...

...Well then I think he fails...

...By thus refusing to recognize the theoretical potency of Johns' remark, Steinberg does not see that Johns is serious about wanting to negate the implication "that [the artist] has been there...

...When asked what he would be if he were not a painter, Johns answered playfully that he would run a rental service of paintings which would be flown around the country in an air-ship called "The Picture Plane...

...In generalizing about Johns' painting in this way, Steinberg not only misreads many of them in particular (giving them attributes which can objectively be shown not to be there), but finally misreads them in general...

...Just as the entire format of a work by Frank Stella or Barnett Newman is predicated on the shape of the canvas's framing edge, the irrefutable constant adopted by Johns is the unchangeable massproduced object: a target, a flag, a commercial stencil...

...He treats Jasper Johns in complete isolation, as if nobody else were painting at all...