另类准则

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  2014-08-03
  If a painting is truly an object—repeat: if that which is painted is truly an object—-then that which is painted cannot be a purely optic phenomenon. It must have a visible tangibility. And in that case any painting can be rehearsed with either its visual or its tactual modality played up or played down. A Johns painting may be flattened into a drawing, or relieved in sculpmetal and bronze. A drawing (which Johns usually makes after a painting) abstracts from the picture its visibility. Green targets, flags bleached or brazen, all effaced tricolour emblems reduced to texture alone, approach pure palpability.A surface observed during impregnation, observed as it receives a message or imprint from real space.
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  2014-08-03
  Johns’s subjects are non-hierarchic. Moral: Nothing in art is so true that is opposite cannot be made even truer.
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  2014-08-03
  Alberti compared the perspective diaphanes of the Renaissance to popen windows. John’s Shade compares the adiaphane of his canvas to a window whose shade is down.
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  2014-08-03
  His brushstrokes don’t blend; each dab is a short shape, distinct in tone from its neighbour. This is the way Cezanne used paint, in broken planes composed of adjacent values; imparting pictorial flatness to things which the mind knows to be atmospheric and spatial. Johns, with that same type of brushwork that hovers midway between opaque canvas and spatial illusion, does the reverse: allowing an atmospheric suggestion to things which the minds knows to be flat.
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  2014-08-03
  For some reason I imagine that one can still feel the pace of these simple performances; slow, somber gestures as of an unknown funereal rite. The dated sides of the sheet introduce the illusion of a tall upright stele. And then the fray brushwork overlays the entire field with an allover falling of trays and darker trays in the pressed density of the letters that spell Tennyson’s name.
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  2014-08-03
  You can’t smoke Magritte’s painted pipe, but you could throw a dart at a Johns target, or use his painted alphabets for texting myopia. If you don’t put his targets and letters to use, is it perhaps because you regard them as art? But that’s your decision. You are free to spare his targets, or anyone’s targets; for, as noted above, Johns renders visible the possibility of an alternative attitude. The point is however, that it is an alternative; that the posture of aiming at a Johns target is no less sane than was genuflection before an icon. Because the subject in John’s art has regained real presence.
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  2014-08-03
  The assumption of a realism of absolute impersonality always does fail—if taken literally. That assumption is itself a way of feeling; it is the ascetic passion which sustains the drive of a youthful Velazquez, or a Courbet, while they shake the emotional slop from themselves and their models.
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  2014-08-03
  His way of realising his subjects permits him to submit to an impersonal discipline of ruled lines, while still responding to every painterly impulse. And Johns succeeded in uniting these two disparate ways of art with yet a third, which is normally antithetical to them both; the most literal realism.In his home-grown morality, which makes it unethical to turn things away from themselves, a painting must be what it represents. Paint is paint, and numbers are numbers, and you can have painted number in which each term is only itself. You can also have objects with paint them. What you cannot have is a painted landsape, where the landscape is counterfeit and the paint is disguised.
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  2014-08-03
  When I said to him recently that his early works seemed to me to be “about human absence,” he replied that this would mean their failure for him; for it would imply that he had “been there,” whereas he wants his pictures to be objects alone.
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  2014-08-03
  commonplace as impartial, as classless and universal as the primary numbers art, or the alphabet. But in observing these standardised things we sense an unfamiliar deceleration of their normal rate of existence. The flat stiffens, is slowly hand-painted, and —as the end stage of a process that began with the arrest of its flutter-cast in bronze.What we see when we face a Johns commonplace is …the possibility of an object’s lone self-existence without any human attitude whatsoever surrounding it. What Johns loves in his objects is that they are nobody’s preference; not even his own. By a strange paradox, these handmade, uniquely made commonplace things are relieved of man’s shadow.If his works are disturbing at all, perhaps it is because they insinuate our absence, not from a scene of ro...
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  2014-08-03
  A crucial problem of twentieth-century art—how to make the painting a firsthand reality—resolves itself when the subject matter shifts from nature to culture.Johns doesn’t give us the commonplace in a painting (tansfigured by light, composition and style), but the commonplace as a painting.
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  2014-08-03
  the position of modern anti-illusionism finds here its logical resting place. the street and the sky—they can only be simulated on canvas, but flag, target, 5—these can be made, and the completed painting will represent no more than what it actually is. For no likeness or image of a 5 is paintable, only the thing itself.
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  2014-08-03
  Johns gives his two-dimensional signs greater substance, weight and texture than they had in reality; in other words, he turns them into objects.The means and the meaning, the visible and the known, are so much on eand the same, that a distinction between content and form is either not yet or no longer intelligible.
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  2014-08-03
  He regains that perpetual oscillation which characterised our looking at pre-abstract art. But whereas, in traditional art, the oscillation was between the painted surface and subject in depth, Johns succeeds in making the pendulum swing within the flatland of post-Abstract Expressionist art. Yet the habit of dissociating “pure painting” from content is so ingrained that almost no critic wanted to see oth together.
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  2014-08-03
  Contemporary art is constantly inviting us to applaud the destruction of values which we still cherish, while the positive cause, for the sake of which the sacrifices are made, is rarely made clear.
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  2014-08-03
  The heavy outlines that accost these figured nymphs prevent any materialization of bulk or density. They seem to drain energy away from the core of the figure, making it radiate into the space about them. Or perhaps it is our vision that is shunted away, so that a figure is no sooner recognized than we are forced to let it go to follow an expanding, rhvthmical system. It is somewhat like watching a stone drop into water; your eye follows the expanding circles, and it takes a deliberate, almost a perverse, effort of will to keep focusing on the point of first impact-perhaps because it is so unrewarding. And perhaps Matisse was trying to make his individual figures disappear for us like that swallowed stone, so that we should be forced into recognizing a different system.And I think Matisse...
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  2014-08-03
  a sacrifice upon the altar of those faculties which he sincerely believes to be nobler and more important