A new type of art that featured works in which painters covered their canvases with abstract forms and fields of color flourished in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States. The term "Abstract Expressionism" was widely adopted by a group of artists whose works and artistic philosophies reflected the New York-based movement's origins. The rise of American Pop Art, which tended to evolve and move away from Abstract Expressionism, came after that time. One of the known American artists of that time and who belonged to the American Port Art movement was Jasper Johns. The artist has known for his paintings of the flag in different versions including the White Flag (1955), Flag (1954-55) and Three Flags (1958). This essay, however, analyzes Johns painting According to What (1964).
Biography
Jasper Johns birthplace is Augusta, Georgia in 1930, but he was raised in South Carolina where he began drawing at a tender age and at five years old, Johns had his mind on becoming an artist. Johns attended the University of South Carolina at Columbia for three semesters but moved to New York in 1948 following the advice of his teachers. In New York, Johns went to the Parsons School of Design and saw many art exhibitions. Johns served in the army during the Korean War for two years and upon his return to New York, Johns became friends with composer John Cage and artist Robert Rauschenberg. Johns learned more about art by watching Rauschenberg who became his lover and housemate. The two artists had neighboring studio spaces and acted as the audience for each other's work.That close interaction caused them to influence each other's art through the exchange of techniques and ideas. In 1958, Johns had his first solo exhibition through a connection with Leo Castelli who was an influential gallery owner. That show featured the painting Flag (1955) and Johns' other unseen work s from the 1950s. The groundbreaking painting and the first solo exhibition propelled Johns into the public eye and also received positive critical attention. After the exhibition, the director of Museum Modern Art, Alfred Barr purchased three of Johns paintings.Due to the growing Pop Art movement in the United States at that time, Johns stopped creating colorful paintings with familiar images and gestures and turned to a darker palette. From 1960 onwards, John's pictures were mainly made up of white, gray and black colors. Rauschenberg, Johns and many other Abstract Expressionist painters such as Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock became the most prominent American painters of the 20th century. Johns ranks with Goya, Rembrandt, Munich, Picasso, and Rürér as one of the greatest painters of any era.Interpretation of According to What
Johns painted According to what in 1964. The painting is a bit different from the other works that he created from the 1960s onwards since it has almost an equal measure of brighter colors as it has the grays, blacks, and white. The painting also mixes the abstract and expressionism forms of art. This section analyzes the painting based on subject, medium, form, and context.Subject
A first look at According to What presents one with no meaning at all. The images appear as though Johns was just splashing different colors of paint on the canvass. It is difficult to tell what the artist wanted to express in the painting because it is neither a distorted version of a familiar object for one to conclude that it is a form of degenerate art. However, a closer examination of According to what reveals several things that the artist combined in one piece. From the background, one can see that Johns presented still-life by showing pieces of torn newspapers, a chair in the upside down position and spilling off paint, traffic colors and the names of colors (red, yellow and blue). The subject is not very clear, but a closer look brings out the familiar objects which place the type of work to fall under the American Pop Art. The American Pop Art was both a reaction to and a development of Abstract Expressionist painting. While Johns made more of Abstract Expressionist paintings in the mid-1950s, he developed his paintings in the 1960s to create Pop art. David Fenner discusses Active discovery as one of the five ways of describing the aesthetic experience of a piece of art, and in this category, the subject presents one with an active discovery through the exercise of constructive powers of the mind. The According to What painting presents a viewer with similar experience since it challenges the mind with different stimuli in the process of trying to make the objects coherent.Medium
According to What is painted on the canvass with some objects (primarily) cuttings placed on the painting. The Newspaper cuttings in particular present what Johns wanted to show to the viewer in its original form other than through painting. The newspaper cutting placed in the middle of the painting is in black and white only, and the colors of some sections appear to be washed out. The presence of the Newspaper in the middle of the painting in itself could be the artist way of presenting the question; what criteria was used to determine that newspaper colors be primarily black and white with small fonts. Based on the fact that Johns gives names of colors on the painting, one would assume that he has used the newspaper cutting to question the use of color alone. Furthermore, the central placement of the newspaper cutting attracts the viewer's attention to it and ignites the mind to figure out what the artist is communicating through the tiny black fonts and images on white paper.Form
The painting According to what falls under the category of America Pop Art whose main feature is the move away from the obscurity of abstraction and use the image as a structural device in painting. The tenets of American Pop Art include presenting art as an object with own reality as opposed to a representation of something else. The inclusion of objects in the painting indicates that the creation of the art was influenced by the Dada ideas which encompass the use of ready-mades as elements of art. For this case, the readymade material included in the piece is the newspaper. Other found images that are included in the painting are letters, common signs like that of the traffic lights and factual elements like the cutting of a chair placed facing down with paint pouring out.The According to What painting has the features of a Neo-Dada art which are expansiveness and inclusivity with the appropriation of non-art materials like the newspaper collage. The neo-Dada artists favored a more social kind of art which emphasized the environment and the community. For example, the inclusion of colors and shapes symbolizing traffic lights is a representation of something that affects the community in that pedestrians and motorists rely on the traffic lights for their safety on the roads. In the According to What painting, Johns does not control the sizes of the subjects to achieve a disproportion in the objects of the painting plus the other non-art readymade materials included. Some of the shapes overlap and present multiplicity of viewpoints. The mass shades of darker colors are used to create three-dimensionalities especially for the chair and the letters used in the painting.The colors that Johns uses on the painting are a mixture of colors explicitly defined in specific shapes like the red blue and yellow in triangle shapes while the rest of the colors fall in the category of expressionism which does not place each color on a specific form. However, all the colors and objects are set within six rectangular shapes four of which are almost of the same size, one which is larger and another smaller than the rest. The triangular shapes in the painting communicate a different message but all connected in the middle with the newspaper cutting.Furthermore, the intensity and the value of the colors used is partly a presentation of reality and a bit of distortion which is a characteristic of Abstract Expressionist works. On visual clarity, the artist makes some of the shapes immediately recognizable through the use of bright colors such as red, blue and yellow and at the same time mixes up colors in some sections of the painting which are not very clear. Apart from that, the artist includes a found image, of the newspaper cutting whose images are not clear. That drives a viewer to one conclusion that the painting is created in a manner that allows the artist to balance between abstraction and representation.Context
The painting According to Art can be interpreted in many ways. It could be a communication of the artists' personal life, events in the community during the time it was produced and mind challenging engagement of things people take for granted like the meaning of colors. Johns created the painting in 1964 almost five years after his relationship with his mentor in art and lover Rauschenberg broke and the works that Johns produced after 1959 were interpreted to represent the rocky relationship that preceded the break up.However, this particular 1964 painting goes beyond the message of a rocky relationship to communicate the happenings in the society at that time. The 1960s were marked with mass protests and police crackdown on drug users as well as distributors. The painting might have been influenced by the strained relationship between the police and members of minority groups in the society which often involved car chases. The traffic lights depicted in the painting could symbolize the pursuits and the role that different colors of traffic lights played in the process. The newspaper cutting placed across the painting with small images and unclear writings can be interpreted as a published list of wanted drug users or drug lords whose heads the police might have placed some ransom. The chair turned upside down can be a symbol of the searches that the police used to conduct in the premises of suspected drug dealers to find exhibits.Based on the characteristics of Dada art, the According to Art painting just like many of the artist's productions tends to continue the ideas of Dada. The Neo-Dada artists focused more on the community and used readymade materials that are not necessarily considered art. Therefore, the inclusion of a newspaper cutting could also be a fulfillment of the requirements of a Neo-Dada piece apart from presenting societal aspects.While Johns' intentions about his other paintings like the Flag, Three Flags, and White Flag are known, the artist has never indicated what he intended to achieve with the According to What painting. It is also hard to identify any specific audience targeted by the artist, but one can conclude that Johns' wanted the painting to be viewed by the general American population of the 1960s with a specific audience made up of fellow Neo-Dadaist artists.Apart from that, it is also possible that Johns work is a question on the reasons behind the use of colors to represent ideas thus the title "According to What." In other words, the painting is intended to challenge the thinking of an individual user over why some colors represent dullness, and others describe joy or why the three primary colors green, red and yellow are used for traffic lights and why other colors like black, purple and orange are not favorable as traffic colors.Work Cited
Fenner, David E. W. Introducing Aesthetics. Greenwood Publishing Group (2003) 5-90
“Jasper Johns Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.” The Art Story, 2017, http://www.theartstory.org/artist-johns-jasper.htm.
“Neo-Dada Art: History, Characteristics, Neo-Dadaists.” Visual-Arts-Cork.Com, 2017, http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/neo-dada.htm.
“NYSP History: 1960’S.” Troopers.Ny.Gov, 2017, https://www.troopers.ny.gov/Introduction/History/1960s/.
“Pop Art – The Art of Popular Culture.” Artyfactory.Com, 2017, https://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/pop_art.htm.
