The Color of Ambiguity

Rondeau, James and Douglas W. Druick
Jasper Johns: Gray
Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2007.

How often, as we gaze at a work of art, do we ask ourselves “What does this work of art mean?” Sometimes we break that question into two parts: “What does the artist mean?” and “What does this work of art mean to me?” I admit that in my encounters with Jasper Johns’s work I am sometimes provoked to ask one or both of those questions. His elegant painting presents an ambiguous surface which obscures as much as it reveals. Samuel Beckett, with whom he collaborated on a project, said after looking through some of Johns’s etchings, “No matter where you go, you come up against a wall” (160). Of course, these etchings were of flagstone motifs which first appeared in Johns’s work in the 1980s and which he has recently taken up again. But I have the same reaction when I look at much of Johns’s art, with or without flagstones. That impenetrable quality compels me to find a way to look behind the wall, as if the painting’s real significance were hiding there. Johns seems to be speaking to that very impulse in a quote from the introduction to Gray, the catalog of a recent Jasper Johns exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He says, “I personally would like to keep painting in a state of ‘shunning statement’: so that one is left with the fact that one can experience individually as one pleases; that is, not to focus the attention in one way, but to leave the situation as a kind of actual thing, so that the experience of it is variable” (10). Is the artist telling me to squash that need to look behind the wall and find his one true meaning? I think so. And further, I believe that he is saying that each time I view the painting I may approach it differently, bring new ideas and information to it and find yet another meaning of my own.

The focus of Gray, the exhibition and its catalog, is Johns’s pursuit of the ambiguity which allows the variable experience of his work. The eponymous color (or lack of color, depending on your personal definition) is chosen as the organizing element for the show and the writing in the catalog. There is a handsome set of full-page color plates of the artwork, all photographed specifically for the exhibit. This is accompanied by a group of erudite essays on Johns’s work as seen through historical, biographical, and critical lenses. Two curators from The Art Institute, James Rondeau and Douglas Druick, provide a wealth of contextual information, including fascinating quotes from Johns and other artists. There is also a recent interview with Johns by Nan Rosenthal, the curator of contemporary art at the Met.

Throughout the book, the contributing authors consider the variety of applications of the color gray in the history of art and more specifically in Johns’s oeuvre. Gray, in Johns’s work, is regarded as a deliberate choice on many levels. First, it was a choice early in his career as he defined himself as a painter. He used gray as a color of emotional distance as he separated himself from the dramatic, self revelatory work of his peers, the New York Abstract Expressionists. He maintained this cool, impersonal quality throughout his career.

Rondeau considers gray not only as a statement of dispassion but of individuation. In his essay, he says, “[Johns] always reacts against readily available formal models, maintaining that exposure to certain precedents forces him to work in contrary ways” (38). In this context he chooses gray in opposition to the formal extremes of black and white, the prevailing absence of color, in the work of many his fellow painters of the fifties and sixties.

His choice of gray has a relationship to color as well. It is pointed out that Johns is not a great colorist and prefers to work with primary colors for their simplicity, but Rondeau also observes that Johns’s gray canvases provide painterly subtleties of palette. In these works the nuances of warm and cool modifications in the gray scale are contrasted with hints or dashes of color. We see this in Celine (cat. 110), in which the smudged green and orange handprints warmly glow against the stark grays of the fieldstone motif. Here gray facilitates the achievement of certain sensual qualities of color.

Color is more often for Johns a conceptual tool. As a fine example of the use of color to enable the presentation of an idea, two paintings, False Start (cat.1) and Jubilee (cat. 2) are compared in Rondeau’s opening essay. In False Start, bursts of primary color are stenciled with their corresponding names as well as with color names that don’t correspond. Here Johns is playing with the concept of arbitrary designation and the complexity of affirmation and contradiction that comes with it. In Jubilee he goes a step further, using shades of gray instead of primary colors, yet keeping the stenciled labels to underscore the suggestion of paradoxical meaning.

While gray may have a specific conceptual purposes, e.g. the opposite of color, it also serves Johns in his constant process of altering his own work. One of Johns’s most famous statements is “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it” (28). These “objects” he refers to are the surfaces that are his paintings. Gray can be the “something else,” as in Jubilee, or it may have a broader application. Sometimes it is used as a medium which simplifies the work and allows the viewer to see the “something else.” In much of his painting, gray is the clarifying agent which allows the possibility of “the something else” to become apparent to Johns himself. For Johns this is a dynamic process, the continual search for the infinitely changeable. During his 2007 interview with Nan Shapiro, when asked to describe the qualities he was seeking in this process, he said, “I think one dislikes describing what one ‘does.’ It may be what one has done, but one may hope that one will do something different in the future” (157). He looks forward here to discovery of new ideas or perhaps rediscovery of ideas which can be approached in a new way. This is in keeping with his earlier quote. As Jasper Johns continues to find the meaning in his own work “variable,” I believe, with new insight from this catalog, and inspired by Johns’s own words, that I will do the same.

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