![]() The spy designs himself to be overlooked. The spy must remember and must remember himself and his remembering. ![]() The watchman leaves his job & takes away no information. The spy must be ready to “move,” must be aware of his entrances and exits. “Looking” is and is not “eating” and “being eaten.” (Cézanne?-each object reflecting the other.) That is, there is continuity of some sort among the watchman, the space, the objects. The watchman falls “into” the “trap” of looking. Here he discloses two deeply and symbiotically entwined personifications-the “spy” and the “watchman.” ![]() The closest Johns comes to answering these questions is in sketchbook notes. WHO IS JASPER JOHNS? The first artist to transform the banal overlooked objects and national symbols of the American psyche into private icons? A reticent autodidact who slew the Goliath of Abstract Expressionism? A Clark Kent who deflected the course of Modernism? An art-world star whose reserved work will forever elude certain critics? An artists’ artist? A neodadaist? The most intellectual painter America has ever produced? A hermetic researcher of permutations? A magician able to unlock the spell embedded in commonplace objects? The unwitting father of Pop art and Minimalism? An extension of the self-trained native genius in the tradition of Hart Crane and George Ohr? Daedalus patiently constructing a labyrinth down whose paths we can wander, but whose center we will never find? ![]()
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