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One
of the greatest challenges with abstract and non-figurative art is
uncovering meanings where at first glance there seem to be
none. In the current exhibit at MoMA, Focus: Jasper Johns,
signature motifs such as flags, targets, numbers, shades of
gray, and beautiful crosshatching patterns abound. The show
is large - eighty-seven paintings, drawings and prints - and we
were particularly taken by the layers of interpretation offered up
by the complex and fascinating Target with Four Faces (1955). The
painting, in encaustic, of a blue and yellow target set in a
blushing red background is topped by four orange plaster faces cut
off just below the eyes and encased in a hinged wooden box.
Perhaps an allusion to the time Jasper Johns spent in the military
in the early 1950s. There is nothing quite as militaristic
as a target; an elemental archetypal image, it also easily lends
itself to other poetic metaphors - Love, Cupid's arrow. Love
and War. The red, yellow, and blue pigments are the primary
basis of the color wheel, the building blocks of the painter's
vocabulary. The four faces recall Rushmore in their silent
(eyeless) gaze, but also symbolize Love's blindness. A
clever visual pun on sight and blindness - a target implies
precision and sight, and a man without eyes cannot, one presumes,
be an accurate archer. But perhaps he is an easy
target! The expressionless faces and flat unmarked target
emphasize a certain simplicity and superficiality: if this is
emotional depth then a second layer of interpretation - one that
implies loneliness and alienation - becomes apparent. Like
Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can paintings or Lichtenstein's overblown
cartoons, Jasper Johns's flags and numbers have become iconic -
simple, aesthetically-pleasing images that can be viewed on a
surface level, while interpretations of these images can be
complex and involve notions of modernism and high-low
distinctions. In Target With Four Faces, meaning
accrues as it is peeled away, layer after layer like an
interpretative pentimento, and right below the eyes of the
man on the far right, if one peers closely enough, one sees the
words 'History and Biography' peer out from the newsprint below
the layer of Blushing Red encaustic.
See:
In
Focus: Jasper Johns, MoMA
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