BEHIND THE SACRED AURA

By ROBERT HUGHES

Is there, or has there ever been, a modern American artist with a more peculiarly sacrosanct reputation than Jasper Johns? If so, none spring to mind. Johns' current retrospective of 225 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures at New York City's Museum of Modern Art has all the air of a cult event. This is not the fault of the curator, Kirk Varnedoe, who has done an exemplary job of hanging the show and, without resorting to the usual pseudo-philosophical guff that attends critical discussion of Johns, describing and analyzing his work in the catalog. Rather, it seems immovably built into the penumbra--glowing, and yet after all these years possessing the consistency of solid concrete--that surrounds the work.

We are so used by now to being told that Johns is an artist of the utmost profundity and difficulty that we assume, on peering into the well of his talent, that the fault for not recognizing masterpieces in it lies with ourselves. It's like the familiar Barnett Newman problem: having for so long been told that the famous "Zip" in Newman's canvases contains the unnameable name of God or the tragic condition of humankind, one must make an almost perverse effort of will to look past all the midrash and see a vertical stripe.

Varnedoe's show does an immense service to Johns by trying to see him whole, as a painter with a continuous 40-year oeuvre, rather than as a hinge figure between movements--Abstract Expressionism and Pop, Minimalism and process art, or whatever. Johns has been thrust rather too easily into this role by his great influence on other artists. The deadpan stripes of his Flag, 1954-55, become the pinstripes of Frank Stella's black paintings in 1959, and his deliberateness, making the picture up in advance instead of discovering it in the act of painting, lies behind much process art. As Bruce Nauman put it, "Johns was the first artist"--well, in New York in the 1950s, anyway--"to put some intellectual distance between himself and his physical activity of making paintings." His work has always spoken of planning, not spontaneity; of the recycled image (his own included), not the unwilled apparition.

And yet the picture that launched his career came to this then unknown, 24-year-old Southerner in a dream. One night in 1954, by his own account, Johns dreamed of painting a large American flag, and the next morning he got up and began to do so. He would play with the flag motif for several decades more, rendering the Stars and Stripes in wax encaustic paint on newspaper collage, in oil on canvas, in bronze, pencil and lithography. His fascination with it came, in part, from his very nuanced and ironic feelings about the function of art, particularly in America and especially after Abstract Expressionism.

AbEx, in its transcendentalist ambitions, shunned the specifics of contemporary American culture; its followers created a veritable academy of "authenticity," sign of the hot, tragic and inventive sensibility. Johns wanted to work with something not invented, something so well known, as he put it, that it was not well seen. Hence the flag. In real life, after Johns, it continued to be the common property of all Americans, the climax of their stock of public symbols. But in the art world, it became Johns' own sign. Other artists would use the Stars and Stripes in a spirit of provocation. Not Johns; his flags had a beautiful and troubling muteness. They were cooler than the culture wanted them to be, in the midst of the cold war.

Was Johns' Flag, 1955, a flag or a painting? The American flag is the best-known abstraction in the world; is a painting of an abstraction a representation? The questions twist back to Rene Magritte's famous brainteaser, the painting of a pipe with "This is not a pipe" written above it (of course not, dummy; it's a painting). Flag is designed like a flag, but it's made of paint, not cloth, and it cannot "fly"; it is static, stretched, rigid. You are meant to pay attention to its surface, which never happens with a real flag. This surface is discreetly sumptuous and full of energy, with marks and dribbles of wax encaustic over a ground of glued-on newspaper. On one hand, Johns seemed devoted to the flag--but his devotion was esthetic, not patriotic. On the other, by treating its sacred form as mutable, he undermined it as a conventional symbol. And since he did so without any visible aggression or skepticism, you couldn't tell where he stood in the American frame of the '50s.

Something akin to this game of hide-and-seek with public symbols happened with his target paintings. Everyone "knows" what a target is--a test of a marksman's skill. But beneath its muteness a target is supercharged with an imagery of aggression: every target implies a weapon and someone aiming. This had an inescapable point in the mid-'50s, when politicians and all the American media were pounding into the collective imagination, like a 10-in. spike, the message that the whole nation was a target for Russian thermonuclear weapons.

This is part of the background to Johns' targets, and a little further back is another form of "targeting"--the virulent hatred and distrust of homosexuals as deviants and possible spies that the right encouraged. Johns was a reserved, closeted gay, and a work like Target with Four Faces, 1955, is all about threat and concealment. Its impassive, identical plaster casts of faces are contained in a box with a hinged door, a "closet" above the ominous target. Your gaze, in looking at them, is assimilated to the eye of the inquisitor, hunting out what is concealed. It is a pessimistic and, above all, defensive image.

From then on, almost the whole of Johns' work would be cast in terms of an increasing indirection--an oeuvre of blockages, shifts and frustrations: the drawer that won't open, the map of America whose descriptive use is more or less annulled by the flurries of brush marks, the word red rendered in blue or yellow paint, the dead flashlight that can't light because it's solid metal. Now and again he would come up with an enduring joke of a Duchampian sort. It's practically impossible now to think of the fabled existential machismo of AbEx without remembering Johns' 1960 satire on it: a horizontally split canvas covered with ardent AbEx strokes with two small spheres jammed in the crack, titled Painting with Two Balls. And then there was his standing warning to those who write about him, or any other artist: The Critic Sees II, 1964, a metal brick with spectacles, behind whose (absent) lenses are two open mouths, jabbering away, instantly metabolizing sight into opinion, seeing nothing.

As the critic Brian O'Doherty remarked, Johns' work, with its cool, cerebral language games, contained everything desired by the higher New York criticism in the 1960s and '70s to requite its own narcissism. Such a tall hedge of exegesis sprang up that it seemed impertinent to dare to look at a Johns if you hadn't read Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The work could offer intense visual pleasures; that was undeniable. The accumulations of silvery marks in his drawings could be almost as beautiful as Seurat, and as a lithographer (particularly when working with Tatyana Grosman) he was the supreme technician of his time. The pelt of parallel creamy gray hatchmarks in a painting like Usuyuki, 1977-78, is about as gorgeous as abstract art gets.

Yet at the same time there was something costive about Johns, in sharp contrast to the effusive generosity of Robert Rauschenberg's vision. He didn't want to give anything away. His later work is suffused with traces of violence (the dismembered casts of body parts, for instance, in According to What, 1964), but it never lets you in on why they're there, what emotions are fossilized in them. Moreover, Johns' continuous recycling of his own imagery without much indication of why it should matter so much to him, or why we should care about it, becomes claustrophobic in the end.

You can't traverse this show without getting a sense of decline, of gradual burnout. It begins with the Seasons series, started in 1985, vastly overpraised by Johns' fans as a turning point in his work, in which he let his guard down a little and painted something more or less autobiographical. A repeated, faceless shadow-silhouette (the artist's own) falls across a clutter of objects and images familiar from his earlier work--flags, crosshatches, perceptual puzzles--with, weaving through them, allusions to a famous Picasso of a minotaur moving out of house with a ladder on his back (suggesting the artist carting his own stock of imagery around). But what we see isn't at all commanding as painting. Given those inert surfaces, the jumbled palimpsest of composition, the general dullness of color, the fact that Johns lets an extra inch of himself show--as though appearing briefly on the balcony of his own reputation, with an enigmatic wave--is of small interest.

Time and again, after the late '80s, one comes up against Johnses that seem to have no raison d'etre, and are valued merely because Johns did them. What is the point of those tracings done from a reproduction of Cezanne's Bathers? As homages they're trivial; as formal studies they're as uninteresting as his tracings done from a motif of his old idol Marcel Duchamp. Perhaps it is true that, as his admirers believe, a sublimely arcane and complex intentionality lies behind the fragmented and mingily internalized imagery of late Johns, tying all its scattered hints together. But one does not have to be altogether a philistine to doubt it.