Sometime in the 1960’s, I recall looking at a small picture of one of the Jasper Johns Flag paintings, in Playboy magazine, that accompanied a quote from a review, of what a critic labeled Johns’ ‘Dada gimcrack’.
I was at that time - I thought that- I was enamored of idea of being an Artist … I had checked out a set a books from the Library, titled ‘Art USA Now’ that featured contemporary American Artists, of the time: short biographies about their education, experience etc. , with accompanying photos of the artists, their studios, and a selection of their work, in black and white photographs, that explored their artistic development, over time, and a color picture of one of their current contemporary works.
What appealed to my young self was the highfaluting quotes, of Nietzsche from the Mark Rothko and other entries. At the time I wasn’t much of a Reader.
What brought these memories to the fore was Jason Farago essay of January 16, 2022 about a Jasper John’s painting titled ‘How a Gray Painting Can Break Your Heart’, that relies heavily on photographs, contemporary Art History to make its case, with quotes from the poetry of Frank O’Hara. Mr. Farago, and the Times, tries to do what a Museum attempts, with a carefully narrated slide show introduction, to an important Retrospective.
What came to mind now, was James Wood’s 2012 review of the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.” with a small comment on boredom:
…
Above all, this is a kind of writing that accommodates variety—narrative and essay, the concrete and the theoretical, the general and the metaphorical (that image of our lives like boats in a lock, waiting for the sluice gates to open). As in Proust, we get surprising and vivid shifts when we move from reflection to example (that quick narrowing, from thinking about the sociology of death to an actual corpse, the author’s father). There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard’s book: even when I was bored, I was interested. This striking readability has something to do with the unconventionality of “My Struggle.” It looks, at first sight, familiar enough: one of those highly personal modern or postmodern works, narrated by a writer, usually having the form if not the veracity of memoir and thus plotted somewhat accidentally, concerned with the writing of a book that turns out to be the text we are reading. In addition to Proust’s “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” Rilke’s “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” may stand behind Knausgaard’s book: Malte is a Danish poet living in Paris, and he describes in detail, as Knausgaard does, the experience of viewing his father’s corpse, and his urge to write. Closer to home, in the same year that Knausgaard published “Min Kamp,” the Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal published “Against Art,” a complex, and clearly Rilkean, novel about the struggle to write, presented in the style of an author’s notebook or diary.
…
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/13/total-recall
What does Malte Laurids Brigge say of viewing his father’s corpse:
Even before my father's death everything had changed. Ulsgaard was no longer in our possession. My father died in town in an apartment that seemed to me hostile and disconcerting. At the time I was living abroad and I arrived too late.
He was laid out on a bier between two rows of high candles in a room that looked out onto a courtyard. The smell of the flowers was an unintelligible medley like a lot of different voices all at the same time. His handsome face with the eyes closed had the expression of someone obligingly trying to cast his mind back. He was in the uniform of the Master of the Hunt, but for some reason or other the white ribbon had been put on instead of the blue. His hands were not folded, they lay crosswise and looked meaningless, like copies of hands. I'd been hastily informed that he had suffered a great deal: none of that was evident. His features had been tidied like the furniture of a room that a guest has vacated. I felt as if I'd seen him dead rather often; I was so familiar with it all.
https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/malte-laurids-brigge.pdf
Further reading of this part of the narrative becomes a bit gruesome.
What I find is that Johns seems like the artistic shadow of Robert Rauschenberg’s seemingly inexhaustible Artistic Experimentalism: Monogram being its paradigmatic expression ! Like Knausgaard, whose first volume I found to be a self-serving tedious re-write of a life: at page 124 I lost patience!
Johns’ paintings do have a certain appeal, if the viewer looks past that Gray-ness, that Mr. Farago celebrates, to the whole of Johns’ artistic endeavors!
American Writer