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Speak, Painting: Word and Device in Early Johns*

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Speak, Painting: Word and Device in Early Johns* Speak, Painting: Word and Device in Early Johns* HARRY COOPER It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend, so somber is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow: ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES. —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter This Is a Device The pun is hard to resist: Device Circle (1959) is pivotal. A slat of wood . is fixed with a screw at the center of the square can- vas, free to rotate; its action is revealed by the trace it has been deployed to leave behind: a perfect circle etched into the paint surface by means of a stylus (a nail?) once fitted through a small hole at the other end of the device, pressed into the paint, and made to pivot. But what turns on it? Or (to begin more modestly) what shift does the painting mark in the work? On the one hand, it looks back to the Targets, for Johns must have used a similar device, probably an anchored string, to draw the five circles of each target, except that Device Circle preserves the device in the fin- ished work, makes it part of the object. The device thickens, surfaces. On the other hand, the painting looks forward, as Jeffrey Weiss has written, to “two simultaneous sequences of work: a group of paintings and drawings . that bear the stenciled words RED, YELLOW, and BLUE; and works that deploy or * My thanks to Jeffrey Weiss for inviting me to speak at a symposium on the occasion of his exhibition Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965, at the National Gallery of Art, and to Nan Rosenthal, who extended a similar invitation when the exhibition Jasper Johns: Gray was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two parts of this paper emerged from those two talks. My thanks also for the com- ments of the art history graduate students and faculty at Johns Hopkins University, where I presented a version of the second part, and to Sarah Boxer and Yve-Alain Bois, for their criticism and support. OCTOBER 127, Winter 2009, pp. 49–76. © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2009.127.1.49 by guest on 02 October 2021 50 OCTOBER image the device.”1 Device Circle does not include color names, but it was the first painting with both primary colors and stenciled lettering, so all that was left for Johns was to put these together, which he famously failed to do properly. (In False Start, “red” is blue, “blue” is yellow, etc.) As for the facture of Device Circle, it looks backward and forward at once. Johns still employs the encaustic-over-newspaper tech- nique that he had relied on until then (and would gradually abandon in the next few years), but the encaustic lacks its wonted thickness and the newspaper bits are employed sparingly. The paint is applied more thinly and quickly than before, in “broad, spiky bundles of strokes,” as Weiss puts it, which, a little more codified, would become Johns’s signature for the next five years. There is one aspect of the work that Weiss does not attend to: the words. The dictionary tells us that a device is something made for a particular purpose, such as an invention, tool, or contrivance. But why use “device” in particular rather than one of its synonyms? The word was certainly current in 1959, when the plastic IUD (intrauterine device) was invented and the U.S. deployed the first ICBM to deliver a thermonuclear device. Johns might well have encountered other military usages dur- ing his 1951–53 service. Instances of the word in artistic or literary discourse are more difficult to find, apart from standard examples in English-lit classes: narrative device, rhetorical device.2 Of the authors we know Johns was reading, Beckett, Nabokov, and Cage do not favor the word, but what of Duchamp? In mid-1957, Johns went to the Philadelphia Museum to discover what Robert Rosenblum meant by call- ing his work “neo-Dada,” and there he encountered the greatest, craziest device of modern art, Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23). There, too, on the opening page of the Green Box (1934), which contains Duchamp’s notes for the work, he could have found the words “machine,” “apparatus,” and “instru- ment,” but not (surprisingly) “device.”3 Perhaps in choosing the word Johns inoculated himself against the artist with whom he was becoming fascinated. Another speculation: in choosing “device,” Johns was nodding to Russian 1. Jeffrey Weiss, “Painting Bitten by a Man,” in Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2007), p. 8. 2. In 1950, a Harvard College senior wrote a thesis entitled Characterization as a Formal Device in the Novels of Charles Dickens, and in 1960 a Harvard Ph.D. was awarded for The Catalogue as a Device of Composition in the Iliad. 3. In his review of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Wittenborn, 1960), Johns uses the words “machine” and “invention” but not “device.” See Jasper Johns, “Duchamp,” Scrap 2 (December 1960), reprinted in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (New York: MoMA, 1996), pp. 20–21. Johns bought a copy of the 1934 edition of the Green Box in late 1960 from Duchamp, who inscribed it to him. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: MoMA, 1996), p. 169. Nabokov was a member of the Berlin writers’ club where Shklovsky spoke in 1923, and he embraced Shklovsky’s ideas about defamiliarization in particular. See Thomas Karshan, “December 1925: Nabokov Between Work and Play,” Nabokov Studies 10 (2006), pp. 4, 19. At the end of his 1956 essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” which includes an amusing account of the formal devices of pornog- raphy, Nabokov uses the word “apparatus” but not “device.” He does use “device” in his lectures on lit- erature, which were not published until the 1980s. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2009.127.1.49 by guest on 02 October 2021 Jasper Johns. Device Circle. 1959. All art by Jasper Johns is © Jasper Johns/licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2009.127.1.49 by guest on 02 October 2021 52 OCTOBER Formalism, the school of literary analysis developed around 1915 by Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson. The extent to which Johns shares the Formalists’ passions (word play, irony, defamiliarization, perceptual delay) as well as their dis- likes (communication, intentionality, expression) is striking. Shklovsky’s battle cry “lay bare the device” (which has an intriguing resonance with Duchamp’s “bride stripped bare,” given that Shklovsky’s chosen verb indeed denotes nakedness, obnazenie) was not yet famous, but it featured in the one readily available English discussion of the movement, the history published in 1955 by Victor Erlich, one of Jakobson’s students.4 The slogan reminds us that while mechanical devices are prized for straightforwardness, artistic devices carry the suspicion of manipula- tion, even deceit. Johns’s device has both. Finally, perhaps Johns knew of an entirely different semantic realm conjured by “device,” that of heraldry and knights errant, in which the word denotes the graphic emblem, often employing stripes and stars, used to distinguish one group from another. (See the epigraph above for a renowned instance of this usage, the ultimate sentence of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.)5 If so, then Johns was already thinking “device” in making his emblematic flags and targets. And since “device” can also refer to the caption or so-called motto of an emblem as well as to the emblem itself, the word would have provided him with a single concept encom- passing image and text, picture and caption, the visual and the verbal—the two uneasy halves of his art. Let us move from “device” to “device circle.” What does it mean? One can read the two words as separate items, joined only by proximity, not syntax, their separation enforced by the device that, when allowed to hang straight down, becomes a fulcrum around which the two words balance, equally weighted, six let- ters each. If, on the other hand, we let the words form a phrase, then their order suggests that “device” is an adjective modifying, somewhat awkwardly, the noun “circle.” (What kind of circle? A device circle, a device-made circle.) And yet, there is a contradictory clue on the back of the painting, where the phrase appears again but with “circle” in parentheses. This eliminates the awkwardness by revers- ing the relationship: “device” is the noun and “circle” is the adjective, as one might find in an index. (What kind of device? A circle device, a circle-making device.) But Johns did not preserve the parentheses on the face of the painting— or did he? The blue stroke that closely cradles the back of the first “c” in “circle” and the straighter blue stroke between the “e” in “circle” and the edge of the can- vas suggest parentheses, and indeed in a drawing made from the painting the following year, these two strokes are emphasized and extended. This ghostly 4. Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).
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