Speak, Painting: Word and Device in Early Johns*

Home , Jasper Johns (book), Monochrome painting

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 canvas, 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.

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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 calling 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 “instrument,” 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.

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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 letters 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 reversing 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 canvas 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). 5. The heraldic sense of “device” broadens to include visual emblems and ornaments in general. A notable example of this usage occurs in Moby Dick, in a passage that trades on the ambiguity of “device” as tool and as decorative element. The narrator observes that the owners of the Pequod, by using whales’ teeth for cleats and a whale’s jaw for the tiller, had “built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851; repr., New York: Modern Library, 1951), pp. 68–69.

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bracketing creates an ambiguity about the grammatical status of the two words, giving them equal billing. Neither gets to be the noun all the time. Next question: what is the function of the phrase? Clearly, it is the title. Johns wrote it on the back of the canvas, following customary practice for titling paintings.6 What is odd is that he also wrote it on the front, within the image, which is not the place to name a painting. (Johns was aware of the taboo against front-titling, as his Souvenir 2 of 1964 demonstrates. In order to get the title on the front of that work, he took a small canvas, wrote “souvenir” on the back, then turned it back to front and stuck it on the front of the larger canvas, sealing the act with a pun: “souvenir” is literally “to come from beneath.”) If the phrase on the back is the primary title inscription, perhaps the one on the front functions as a caption for the image above it.7 In that case, a more comprehensive title for the painting would be Device Circle with Caption or even Device Circle with “Device Circle.” But this title, in declaring the words on the front a caption, would turn the circle above them into a picture, for pictures are what captions render into words, whereas Johns, however quixotically, was after something different, not a picture of something or even a picture of a picture of something, but just something.8 With Flag (1954–55), he accomplished this reification by choosing to repre- sent something already flat and rectangular, i.e., whose shape and form could be that of an ordinary canvas. But in Device Circle, as in the Targets, the principal image, being a circle, does not coincide with the rectangle of the canvas. We are in a more traditional pictorial space, in which a figure is presented on a field.9 So a title like Device Circle with “Device Circle” might be appropriate after all, and there are even hints along the edges (given by the placement of brushstrokes and collage elements) of a frame within a frame, suggesting a similarly abyssal structure. But if the captioned circle threatens to turn the painting into a picture of a picture, the device returns it to the realm of objects, reminding us that the painting includes an object and was partly made by that object. The painting, one could say,

6. In the drawing based on the painting, Johns wrote the phrase along with signature and date in the margin between image and edge, which is common for titling works on paper. 7. When Braque in 1911–12 took the momentous step of stenciling a word (“Bal”) into a painting, having imitated stenciled letters in previous works before gathering his nerve, he did not make it the title of the work (which is Le Portugais), even though the large size of the word and its placement in a clearing at the top give it a titular feeling. For a tentative history of the “irruption of the name into the very painting itself,” i.e., its change in status from legisign to sinign (in C. S. Peirce’s terminology), see Stephen Bann, “The Mythical Conception Is the Name: Titles and Names in Modern and Post-modern Painting,” Word & Image I:2 (April–June 1985), p. 177. For a fuller history of titling in modernism, see John C. Welchman, Invisible Colors: A Visual History of Titles (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997). Neither text treats Johns in any detail. 8. “Make something, a kind of object,” begins one of his first published sketchbook notes, from around 1960. “A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator,” he tells an interviewer in 1959. See Jasper Johns: Writing, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, pp. 50, 82. 9. This remains true despite the suggestion that the circle is incised or set into its field rather than floating on it in more typical figure-ground fashion.

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partly made itself.10 (This reduction of authorial agency is reflected by Weiss’s use of the passive voice in the description above: “A slat of wood . . . is fixed with a screw . . . and made to pivot.”) And couldn’t we expect such a painting to include its own name as well, to name itself? Perhaps we can conclude from this back-and- forth that the phrase “device circle” is both title and caption (and the circle itself both object and picture), just as the individual words “device” and “circle” are both adjectives and nouns. It is with the Targets that the crucial issue of the caption first arises, however implicitly, in Johns’s work. There are no words in the two Target paintings with casts, but there is the space for words, the space opened up when Johns stopped fusing the shape of the image to that of the support as he had done in many of the Flags. Cage commented on this change in the brilliant essay he wrote for his friend’s 1964 show at the Jewish Museum: The flag is nothing but The Stars and Stripes Forever. The stars are placed in the upper left hand corner of the field of stripes. But even though the whole thing is all off center it gives us the impression symmetry does, that nothing is in the wrong place. The flag is a paradox in broad daylight: proof that asymmetry is symmetry . . . . A target is not a paradox. Ergo: when he painted it he did not use a circular canvas.11 In other words, in deciding to “let his work have the American flag as its structure,” as Cage puts it, Johns laid out the flag and directed our entire pictorial attention to it, at which point we were forced for the first time to recognize, given our habit of analyzing pictures (but not familiar flags) for things like symmetry, that the flag felt at once terribly unbalanced and yet, thanks to its familiarity, inevitable or correct. This demonstration was needless with the Targets, concludes Cage, given their symmetry. What Cage does not add is that, in seizing on the target, Johns went to the other extreme from the Flags, choosing the regular geometric shape (a circle) that would pose the greatest possible structural conflict with the conventional rectangle of painting.12 In Target with Plaster Casts (1955) and then Target with Four Faces (1955), Johns seems to have relished the conflict, going for maximum contrast between the blue and yellow target and the red square background, and adding the extra register of

10. We could say the same thing if Johns had included a paintbrush, as he did later in Zone (1972), but since the included object here is a simple machine, a pivoting slat which the artist just had to turn rather than wield, the painting is self-making in a stronger sense: it was partly made by itself rather than by the painter. Perhaps the painting is also partly self-titling in a stronger sense, for the letters were made with the help of a stencil. 11. John Cage, “Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas,” in Jasper Johns, exh. cat. (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1964), p. 23. (Note: In the original text two paragraphs intervene between the sentences about the Flags and those about the Targets.) 12. Using a round canvas for the targets would have meant almost duplicating the famous 1912 tondo by Robert Delaunay, and we know from his notes that Johns was determined to be original.

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Johns. Target with Four Faces. 1955.

wooden boxes at the top to dislodge figure from field further by wrecking the con- centricity of the target and its support.13 Given this placement of the casts across and above the central image, and given their segmented, linear progression, it is possible to think of them, especially from the perspective of Device Circle, as language, as titles or headings. Indeed, in a drawing after Target with Four Faces, Johns simply wrote “head” four times instead of depicting the casts, and another drawing shows that he was thinking about language to the extent that he changed his mind and wrote “face.” As soon as Johns made these two seminal Target paintings, he changed course, apparently regretting their separation of target and ground, figure and field. Most other Targets are painted so as to obscure this distinction, sometimes to the point of threatening legibility altogether. (Leo Castelli reportedly did not see the target at all when he had his epiphany of Johns’s greatness in front of Green Target [1955].) Clearly Johns was missing the no-space he had achieved in the Flags by virtue of

13. This dislodging of the central image from the center of the ﬁeld is also true in Device Circle, where the words elbow the image upward in the ﬁeld. In fact, it is even truer, since that painting is a single canvas, while in the two-part Target paintings with casts, the targets can still be centered in their canvases (as they roughly are) without being centered in the whole work.

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their figure-field collapse, and he proceeded to attack his targets with strokes of a single color until they almost disappeared into an all-over monochrome texture. He also eliminated the upper register present in the two target-and-cast works, instead making everything tightly concentric, circle in the square. (The major exception to this is a bizarre drawing, Target Sketch of 1959, which depicts Target with Four Faces soaring at a wild angle and enclosed in a hideous frame. This drawing can be under- stood as a retrospective critique, a caricature even, of the essential instability of the target motif, which despite its symmetry always carries the disturbing potential of a spin—and/or as a bad visual pun on what Johns’s mercurial work had presented from the beginning, a moving target.) This camouflaging, albeit in a polychrome mode, continues in Device Circle, where the various parts of the image, including the words, are almost lost at first glance in a storm of red, yellow, blue, white, gray, orange, and greenish strokes.14 As a result, Johns seems almost timid about presenting his new invention, the attached device, but this timidity has a purpose: it allows him to retrieve the image-caption structure that had intrigued him since the two seminal Targets (although he only dared employ actual words in sketches related to one of them, as we have seen) while maintaining something of the anti-pictorial fusion of figure and field that had been the strength of the Flags. This was no easy task, for a caption is doubly pictorializing: it frames an image literally, making a space for itself above or below it, and figura- tively, capturing it with language.15 In the balancing act of Device Circle, Johns makes a place for words without turning the painting into a picture.

14. “In Device Circle, the central image of the circle is embedded in a painterly context so thoroughly that it resembles a camouflaged object that is distinct from but nevertheless apparently contiguous with its surroundings.” Barbara Rose, “Decoys and Doubles: Jasper Johns and the Modernist Mind,” Arts Magazine, vol. 50, no. 9 (May 1976), p. 70. The camouflaging encourages us to play a game. That the face of the stick is painted with the same strokes and colors as the circle it inscribed suggests that the stick belongs in a certain place within the circle, the place it must have been when Johns, in painting the circle, let his brushstrokes drag over the stick as well. Dutiful to this theory, we mentally turn the stick until we discover that its pattern does not lock into the background, that one placement is just as good or bad as another. This inconse- quentiality is aesthetic as well, for one place also looks just as good or bad as another. Johns gives us a relatively constrained and inconsequential game to play with his painting ( just as he would do later in outlining a target and giving us a watercolor set to fill it in), and in playing the game we realize that it recalls the game Johns played in making the painting, for our mental rotation of the stick duplicates the physical rotation Johns performed to inscribe the circle. Thus, Johns opens his painting to chance at the level of both production and reception: there are the accidents that happened when this imper- fect machine scored its circle and those that continue to happen when the stick gets moved one way or another (in shipping, for example, if the nut on the pivot is not tight, or by curatorial whim). The figure behind this introduction of chance, of course, is Cage, John’s mentor and sometime collaborator. Device Circle plays out Johns’s fascination with and ambivalence about Cage’s example. 15. “Caption” derives from the Latin capere, “to take.” Barthes proposed two main functions for the textual framing of images, which he saw as a defining factor of literate societies: anchorage (in which words attempt to control and narrow the essential polysemy of images) and relay (in which words sup- plement images to advance a narrative more efficiently, as in comic strips or films). See Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), in Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), esp. pp. 37–41. Johns’s work, while acknowledging the omnipresence of captions that Barthes observed, offers a more balanced image-text relationship by employing captions (like device circle) that equal or exceed the image in polysemy and ambiguity.

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Device Circle is haunted by another painting about words and (their) pictures, Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929), just as the preceding remarks have been haunted by a famous essay on that painting, Michel Foucault’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1968). Foucault understands Magritte’s painting in relation to the tradition of the calligram, a poem arranged in the shape of the thing described or evoked. For Foucault, the calligram epitomizes the desire lurking at the base of “classical” painting (from the Renaissance on) for a fusion of word and image. That desire was the secret ground that allowed painting to banish words and deal in pure resemblances while believing those resemblances still affirmed things about the world, made discursive statements. But what, if anything, is calligramic about Magritte’s painting? Nothing, it would seem, given its flat contra- diction of word and image. But Foucault notices that the script itself bears a resemblance to the pipe, that the “p”s in particular are pipe-like, so he dubs the painting an “unraveled calligram,” for what comes unraveled when words are released from the confines of the image-shape and only its visual traces remain are all the ties René Magritte. The Treachery of Images. 1929. between an image and its caption. Does the ceci (“this”) in ceci n’est pas une pipe refer to the words themselves, to the picture of the pipe, or even to the whole painting? All could be true, since none of them is a pipe, although the painting of the pipe arguably comes closest to being one. Foucault locates this multiplication and weakening of deixis in the inevitable space between an image and its caption: Image and text fall each to its own side, of their own weight. No longer do they have a common ground or a place where they can meet, where words are capable of taking shape and images of entering into lexical order. The slender, colorless, neutral strip, which in Magritte’s painting separates the text and the figure, must be seen as a crevasse—an uncertain, foggy region now dividing the pipe floating in its imagistic heaven from the mundane tramp of words marching in their successive line.16

Given how much all this has to do with Device Circle, it is surprising that Foucault chose Warhol rather than Johns as his one reference to contemporary art. Device

16. Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 28.

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Johns. False Start. 1959.

Circle, like Treachery of Images (which Johns had seen in person),17 not only has the image-and-caption structure so unusual for a painting, but the image and the caption resemble one another: both the inscribed circle and the stenciled words “device circle” evince the mechanical nature of their creation; both are subject to the same color storm in the way they are painted; and several of the letters—the “C”s, the “D,” and the “R”—seem infected by the rotundity of the shape above them ( just as Magritte’s “p”s derive from the shape of his pipe). Of course, Device Circle differs from Treachery of Images in its affirmative rather than negative relation between word and image: [this is a] device circle, not this is not a pipe. While the affirmation is implicit, it is enforced by the style of the letters themselves, which have all the authority of the Roman imperium—quite unlike the utilitarian, packing-room stencils that Johns would often use from that point on. Appropriate to this affirmation, Johns eliminates as far as possible the space between word and image that Foucault waxed poetical about in Magritte’s painting.18 The incised circle almost touches the first “c” of

17. Johns saw the exhibition Magritte: Word vs. Image in March of 1954 at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York and subsequently collected works by Magritte, including a 1965 drawing Ceci n’est pas une pipe. See Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, pp. 55, 123. The Janis exhibition included Treachery of Images as #17. In addition to a checklist, the small brochure contains eighteen illustrated dicta by Magritte. Two that relate closely to our discussion are #11 (“In a painting the words are of the same substance as the images”) and #12 (“One sees differently the images and the words in painting”). 18. Another related difference is that Johns uses the caption for the title while Magritte does not. Foucault seems unaware of this aspect of the Magritte, calling the painting by its caption not its title (and misdating it 1926), which allows him to play more easily with the possibility that the ceci might refer to the

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Johns. Painting with Ruler and “Gray.” 1960.

“circle” and the second “e” of “device,” and the board itself, which extends beyond the circle, would overlap those letters if turned. This brings both of the words into the magic circle, assuring us that they refer to the thing above them, or are trying to: it is the inevitable failure of captions that constitutes the post-calligram condition.19 This is what makes False Start (1959), the painting that comes almost immedi- ately after Device Circle, so explosive. It is not just that the bundles of strokes have become supercharged, demolishing all possible compositional structures, but the quasi-calligram of Device Circle has been fractured. In False Start, each of the color names rendered in color is a kind of calligram, a fusion of word and image (albeit one based on color rather than, as with traditional calligrams, on shape), but these fusions declare the divorce rather than the marriage of word and image since in only a few cases is a word rendered in its own color, few enough to suggest happenstance. They are anti-calligrams. The device of Device Circle, the spinning stick, has (at ﬁrst) a similar fate. In Painting with Ruler and “Gray” (1960), Johns mounts the stick on a

whole painting. Michel Butor, writing a year later, did not make the same mistake: “le texte peint est bien pre- senté comme n’étant que le premier degré du titre, car il en éxiste un second, en dehors du cadre, qui désigne de la façon la plus claire ce qui est dénoncé dans l'oeuvre: ‘La Trahison des images.’ ” Michel Butor, Les mots dans la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), p. 66. Butor also makes interesting observations on the modern habit of inscribing titles on the verso of canvases and the retort to this in Klee and Miró: pp. 20–28. 19. “In the different ‘Device’ paintings . . . the written signs relate to things (namely to the corpo- real ‘devices,’ the wooden sticks or the two balls) that are themselves present. It is as though the sig- niﬁer, the signiﬁed and the referent have reacquired their unity.” Esther Levinger, “Jasper Johns’ Painted Words,” Visible Language, vol. 23, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 1989), p. 284 (emphasis added).

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board so that it spins free of the canvas surface, becoming a useless device or anti- device.20 But although the ruler does not do anything but spin, it does exactly span the canvas, which is 32 by 32 inches, and so it could hypothetically inscribe a circle that touches all four edges. This reminds us that Johns had never brought the circle (of Device Circle or of any of the Targets) quite to the edge. That he can now bring himself to do so only virtually testiﬁes to his commitment to preserving the margin, especially a lower margin, which Johns often leaves incompletely painted. Painting with Ruler and “Gray” offers an additional reflection on Device Circle, for it has just the sort of comprehensive title I proposed somewhat tongue-in-cheek for the earlier work: the title does not simply reiterate the word in the painting (“gray”) but cites it, quotes it. This presents a complete and objective description, for there are three elements in the work: the painted canvas, the ruler, and the board stenciled with the word “gray” (a word which, via synecdoche and placement, represents the whole board, names it). As the “with” of the title indicates, board and ruler are appended to the painting; they are not integral to it but just attributes. Indeed, they are largely unpainted, though the few places where paint has migrated onto the board and ruler are important: they bring those objects back into the fold of painting, and conversely they save the painting from becoming just a pictorial backdrop, a diorama for the objects in front of it. The next ruler painting, Good Time Charley (1961), takes the device to the other extreme: rather than spinning above the painting uselessly, the ruler touches down and is used to strip or scrape the paint. (It is a laying-bare device.) The violent physicality of this is even more apparent in the sketch, where the support rather than the medium gets abraded. This scraping function is the one that Johns settles on for the next two paintings in the series, Device (1961–62) and Device (1962), which taken together constitute one of many monochrome- color pairings in Johns’s work (although such pairings are more common across media, from colored painting to monochrome drawing).21 In each of these paintings, instead of the unitary circle and two-word caption of Device Circle, the circle has been divided in two and the caption has become single—simply “device”—which is appropriate, since there is no more circle but rather two half- circles. And with that splitting of the circle comes a certain splitting between word and image. Now the caption hangs far below its referent and is no longer speciﬁc, for the second word, the adjective (if that is what it was), is gone. Device (1962) quotes Painting with Ruler and “Gray” (1960) both in its palette and its major feature, the attached board. Johns goes so far as to stencil

20. The device in Device Circle also ﬂoats above the paint surface (thanks to an undercut in the stick of wood) except very near the pivot, where the wood does touch the canvas and has visibly smeared the paint in a small circle. Still, the device is close enough to the surface to make its use as a compass easy, which is not true of Painting with Ruler and “Gray.” 21. Device (1962) and Device (1961–62) share such details as the way that a single stroke of paint comes up over the bottom of the left-hand semicircle and the way the right-hand semicircle oozes paint more obviously than the left.

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Johns. Device. 1962.

the word “gray” onto this board in imitation of the earlier board, which (he has recalled in a recent interview with Nan Rosenthal) he found that way, with the word already on it.22 Where Device departs from its precursor, and indeed from much of Johns’s work, is in the degree to which its two devices (and note that “device” is inscribed twice below them), together with the board lodged between them, comprise so much of the work, leaving no room for margins at top, left, or right. The way the scraped circles meet the board to span the surface creates a powerful closure, and this, together with the gun-metal color and the way that the two rulers rest, pointing straight down (thus creating a strong visual rhyme with the central board), makes for an image of great sobriety, recalling Rosalind Krauss’s description of Johns’s earlier handling of paint: “love lavished on the creation of a tombstone.”23 It also relates to the Skin drawings of the same year, especially those in which a central face and ﬂanking hands create a three-part symmetry that spans the surface, with the hands ﬁguring as wipers

22. The fact that the word in Painting with Ruler and “Gray” is stamped rather than stenciled sup- ports Johns’s recollection, since he was a stenciler, not a stamper. 23. Rosalind Krauss, “Jasper Johns: The Functions of Irony,” October 2 (Summer 1976), p. 92. The rulers appear pointing down in the reproductions I have seen; I do not know if, as with Device Circle, they can be easily ﬁxed in other positions.

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Johns. Diver. 1962–63.

in the same way the rulers do, attempting to clear the visual field but only obscuring it. From here it is a small step to Johns’s drawing Diver (1962–63) and all the works that follow, in which the ruler or slat gets removed after its work is done and is then absently depicted, with the addition of a handprint on its end, as if in memory of the body that had worked the device. This drawing preserves the structural core of the 1962 Device, the central board separating the two wipers, but that board itself is no more nor is the wiping action convincing since the trajectories of the hands indicated by the arrows are not the ones that those wipers would really follow. (In the painted version of Diver the trajectories are eliminated, as if to acknowledge their gratuitousness.) Thus, the movement from Device Circle to Diver is that of a double transition: no longer a real object, the board becomes an image, one among many; no longer part of a machine, it becomes part of a (depicted) body. But of course the body was already implicit in the device of Device Circle, since it took a hand to turn the board and press the stylus into the paint. Diver simply emphasizes another aspect or moment of that device, the human rather than the mechanical one, while at the same time

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admitting (since the depiction of the hand is not iconic but indexical, a mechanical print) that those two moments are always entwined. And the machine is still implicit in Diver, not in its depicted devices so much as in the work as a whole, which evokes a dance diagram or, more specifically, the sequence of abrupt, automatic practice movements that competitors make as they stand before a dive. Having charted the afterlife of Device Circle (pulled along perhaps too far by the irresistible logic of Johns’s work), we can now attempt a retrospective summary. The work declared that Johns’s painting would contain, in addition to the inevitable paint, two basic things: devices and words. At the same time, to be schematic, it incited a tug-of-war between them in which paint itself, or the brushstroke that delivers it, was at stake: the word as caption tugs the stroke toward the status of image while the device as body/machine tugs it toward the status of object. So much for the idea of these newly vigorous brushstrokes as liberating for Johns; they are constrained by the struggle over them. That the device can be pointed either to “device” or “circle” gauges this struggle insofar as “device” brings out the object quality of the image while “circle” brings out the image quality of the object. And the fact that the words and the device they name can almost touch, almost reconstitute the two halves of a sign, cements (or tries to) not just the relation of reference (this is a device circle) but the entire balance of the work. For it is just there, at the near-touch- ing, that two kinds of marks—the scoring that makes the circle and the brushmarking (Johns’s neologism) that surrounds the circle—are pinned together, echoing one another in a squeezed space. The brushmark under- scores the scoring. No such union could long endure.

Interlude (on scoring) “Such a procedure [inscribing a line through paint] makes a distinct sound, one that can now be imagined. It reminds us that the process of painting and drawing is not just visual and physical, but aural.”24 This mere aside in Weiss’s discussion of Device Circle opens up the whole realm of sound, real and imagined, in Johns’s art, and in that sonic realm the word is at least as important as the device. For example, the fact that “device” ends with the sound with which “circle” begins, and that Johns ordered the two words as he did and not the other way around, tempts us to elide them in a manner reminiscent of Duchamp’s rotary tongue-twisters (les ecchymoses des esquimaux . . . ), and in that split-second decision whether or not to make the lazy elision, all of our questions

24. Weiss, “Painting Bitten by a Man,” p. 8. One might pursue Weiss’s idea by attending to a whole category of scraping instruments in Johns’s works. I have not done so, partly because these works do not present strong aural suggestions to me, and partly because I only noticed this passage in Weiss’s essay on looking at it again after ﬁnishing the ﬁrst draft of my own, at which point it struck me with the force of unconscious recognition: his thought had been echoing in my mind all along.

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of cleavage, of adhesion/splitting between word and word, word and image, image and object, caption and title, ﬁgure and ﬁeld, device and surface, return. How to read the score? How to pronounce the device?

Of The I Sing In 1957, Johns made a painting that includes and is titled with the English definite article. This presents an immediate problem. In reading or naming this painting, do we use the long vowel sound or what is called the “schwa” sound— do we say thee or thuh? This is no idle question: it is something we are forced to decide every time we look at the painting, for we cannot look at it without resolving those three letters into a word, without reading them, which means we must decide how to read them. The dictionary tells us that “‘thee’ is employed for citation, that is, when we use the word simply to refer to itself, as in the sentence “I like the word ‘the’”—and also, sometimes, for emphasis: “That is the best painting in the room.” Apart from those two occasions, the choice is determined by the initial sound of the word that follows. If it is a vowel, we say “thee”; if a consonant, which is much more common, we say “thuh.” Thus the pronunciation of the English definite article is dependent on context, both semantic and phonetic, which is exactly what the painting deprives us of. The word is presented in splendid isolation, as it rarely is, as if to arrest our attention on a workhorse of the language, a monosyllable that we take for granted, a word that is always upstaged by the one that follows it.25 Not knowing how to pronounce something, we find circumlocutions: the painting that includes and is titled with the English definite article. But this careful phrase also suggests a way out of the embarrassment, for reading the work and naming it need not be, cannot be, identical acts. This disjunction is not something we are accustomed to since, as already noted, it is the rare painting that contains the words of its own title—except with Johns (e.g., Water Freezes, Liar, No, Device, 4 The News, Tennyson, Diver, and Voice). These words have one kind of status within the work—a mixed one partaking equally of title, caption, found object, and formal element—and quite another when they appear on the wall or the page next to it, where they unambiguously attain the dignity of proper names.26 With most words this would not affect pronunciation, but it seems to

25. Perhaps this very isolation means that Johns is citing the word rather than using it, treating it as an object rather than as a meaningful unit. He puts it on a pedestal, in Roman capitals, and so the use of the long vowel sound would be indicated: “thee.” And yet the word is part of a larger whole, be it the English language or the Johns idiolect. Of all words, this one does not want to be alone. It is tempting to mentally hang the picture next to other works by Johns whose titles seem to be in need of articles, producing such phrases as “the target,” “the map,” “the light bulb,” “the ﬂag”: thuh. 26. By using all capitals in The, which (unlike all lowercase) is an accepted way of writing, Johns escapes the decision whether or not to capitalize the ﬁrst letter, which would have provided a strong clue about whether the word in the painting was a proper name or not. This raises the question of whether we should properly refer to the work as “The” or “THE.”

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with the three-letter word we have been considering: the emphatic and resonant “thee” is more appropriate for naming the painting, the unstressed and pedes- trian “thuh” for reading it. Here one might object that even within the painting, the article acts as a title, or at least as a caption, but (unlike Device Circle) it does not sit low enough in the field to come across that way. Indeed, it makes the question of the caption moot, not just because it floats too high, but (also unlike Device Circle) because there is no image to caption—no image, that is, other than the word itself. And yet the word seems too low to be the image. It floats at just that height normally occupied by the space between caption and image, neither rising to the top nor sinking to the bottom of the painting, like an object whose density is very similar to that of the medium in which it is suspended. It is at once caption and image, language and shape, text and sound. Represented by an upside-down lowercase “e,” “schwa” denotes an unstressed, toneless vowel sound in any language. The term derives from the Hebrew sheva, meaning “nought” or “nothing,” an etymology that Johns would surely appreciate. Many languages have a variety of somewhat different schwa sounds, but American English has only one, and it can be produced by any of the vowels: the “a” in “about,” the “e” in “taken,” and so on. It is a sound, or a non-sound, that bedevils learners of English and calls into question the peda- gogy of phonics. How do you teach someone to pronounce “thuh”? It has no tone, none of the vowelly resonance that gives words their acoustic soul. And if the word “thuh,” with its combination of schwa sound and voiced dental frica- tive, lacks almost all tone, it also lacks meaning. What we find in the dictionary is not what it means but only what it does: “used, esp. before a noun, with a specifying or particularizing effect, as opposed to the indefinite or generalizing force of the indefinite article ‘a’ or ‘an.’” (This first “definition,” like the ones that follow, is presented in brackets, by way of admission that it is not a definition at all but rather a note on usage.) Read on and we find that the word also has the opposite function, to indicate that something is “one of many of a class or type, as of a manufactured item, as opposed to an individual one: Did you lis- ten to the radio last night?”27 (For a definite article, that is not very definite.) Thus, “thuh” has little tone, no meaning, and (since it can serve exactly opposite purposes) no clear function.28 It is a colorless void that riddles our language. It is, one might say, the grayest word in English. In the catalog for the exhibition Jasper Johns: Gray, Richard Shiff writes: “The content of The has little to do with the word and its potential meaning, much to do with the sensory aspects of its material.” He makes this point in the course of argu- ing convincingly that Johns is more tactile than visual, more interested in action

27. Dictionary entry for “the,” based on The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (2006), http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/the (accessed June 14, 2008). 28. This is why it is especially hard to teach deaf people how to use the in writing. Since the con- ventions for when to use the word are largely arbitrary, they are hard to learn if not internalized through hearing.

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and physical process than in vision or retinal effect.29 For Shiff, what counts about these three letters is not their meaning as a word but their appeal to our sense of touch: “The sharp, incised edges of the letters appear as if Johns had chiseled them into stone.”30 But in fact the particular word is singularly appropriate to the painting: its qualities of acoustic suppression, semantic emptiness, and functional ambiguity might just stand for the whole project of a gray painting proposed by that exhibition. And yet, Shiff is correct when stating that what counts is not the meaning of the word (since, as we have seen, it has no meaning) but its sensory aspect, if by sensory we do not just mean tactile, but also auditory. This is not simply a familiar modernist effort by Johns to promote matter over meaning, signifier over signified; it is an attack on traditional equations of genres with sensory modalities, equations that have acknowledged a connec- tion between the haptic and the optic but rarely between the optic and the acoustic. By putting a word into a painting whose pronunciation is something to fret over, Johns proposes, quite radically, that a painting can have a sound—a silent sound (unless we read aloud) but a sound nonetheless. Johns had met Cage and then Rauschenberg in the winter of 1953–54 and soon Cunningham joined the trio. “The four-way exchanges were quite mar- velous,” recalled Cage, the senior figure of the group.31 No doubt their discussions of music, or more broadly sound (for after all this is Cage), helped lead Johns to the idea of a sounding painting. His Construction with Toy Piano of 1954 seems capable of working, of producing sound, even if the order of the keys have been rearranged. The following year Johns produced Tango, a blue monochrome painting with encaustic, collage, and a working music box attached behind the canvas with the winding key sticking out invitingly in front of it. (“The music box played “Silent Night,” Johns remarked in 1959. “I fixed it to go ‘ping—ting—click’ instead.”32) If these two works are about music, they are equally about language as both code and sound. The collage elements in the first contain German, Spanish, and Italian texts, and each of the piano keys is numbered, triggering a kind of numerical solfège as one imagines playing it. Tango has the single word of its title at top left, probably the first appearance of a stenciled word in Johns’s art.33 The word not only suggests what kind of music

29. He quotes Johns correcting an interviewer who had asked him whether it would be interesting for the artist to see a particular ﬁgure upside down: “It would be interesting to do that, which is not the same thing,” Johns replied. 30. Richard Shiff, “Metanoid Johns, Johns Metanoid,” in Jasper Johns: Gray, exh. cat. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2007), p. 135. 31. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, p. 125. 32. Anonymous, “His Heart Belongs to Dada,” Time 73 (May 4, 1959), reprinted in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, p. 81. That the box originally played “Silent Night” might be just as much a nod to Cage (who wrote the silent 4'33'' in 1952) as to the fact that Johns then prepared it (in Cage’s terminology) to make various noises instead. 33. Charles Stuckey suggests that the painting might be a reference to Leroy Anderson’s 1951 hit- parade song “Blue Tango.” Stuckey, review of Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, and Interviews, in Art in America, vol. 85, no. 4 (April 1997), p. 39.

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Johns. Tango. 1955.

might play on the box, it also signifies its own first letter, “T,” for the word “tango” is one of the best-known units of the phonetic alphabet developed by NATO in 1947 and adopted for civil aviation use in 1951. Johns, who had recently served in the Army, would have been well aware of this spelling code, in which words are built not from letters but from other, often more exotic-sounding words so as not to mistake them in fuzzy radio transmissions. Thus, in Tango, as if to guarantee a strong sub-vocalization in front of his painting, Johns chose a word already chosen by the military for use out loud. (No doubt he was also intrigued by a linguistic code in which words lead to letters rather than vice versa.) The deﬁnite-article painting we have been discussing represents a third step in this series, further internalizing and abstracting the more obvious musi- cality of the two sound works that preceded it.34

34. Compared to Rauschenberg’s incorporation of sound in works like Music Box (Elemental Sculpture) (1953), in which stones hit nails when the box is handled, or Broadcast (1959) and Oracle (1962–65), which include working radios (or indeed Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making [1961], which plays an audio tape), Johns’s use of sound is largely implicit. He must have real- ized early on that his interactive pieces (from Tango and Device Circle to the recent Catenaries) would not be used by museums or even collectors as freely as they might have been by the artist and his friends, given the delicacy of the equipment. The simultaneous invitation and prohibition to touch suggests that Johns’s work may embody an aesthetics of frustration.

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Before we proceed, a partial retraction: it is too simple to suggest that the word “thuh,” in its lack of resonance, matches the gray color of the painting. After all, there are two possible pronunciations, “thuh” and “thee,” the first as dull and toneless as the second is sharp and resonant. There is a different but parallel sensory ambiguity in the painted field surrounding the word. This classi- cally all-over monochrome—which has no image, no figure, and no point of focus—is indeed all about touch, but how should one characterize the tactile suggestion of this particular brushwork: is it dry or wet, sharp or dull, feathery or waxy? It is hard to say because Johns has avoided loading the brush with too much encaustic. The paint exhibits a lean, dry, relatively drip-free application at odds with the inherent qualities of the material. (This is quite different from other works of the period, in which slabs of encaustic trail juicy drips that cooled and dried as they descended, as in Coat Hanger, for example, where the drips seem appropriate to the hanging or laundering theme of the work.) The result is a tactile uncertainty in the field of The equivalent to the auditory ambiguity of the word floating in it. To seal this parallelism of field and word, Johns makes them out of the same material, mostly vertical and horizontal marks arranged in a rhythm of lighter and darker strokes with the lighter gray ground periodically showing through. Even though the word maintains its integrity, it is easy to imagine ghostly traces of letters everywhere, as if they had dispersed themselves in a subtly gridded field. We are not so far from Gray Alphabets, painted the year before. The next painting to feature the definite article is made five years later: 4 The News (1962). Here at least there is no question about how to pronounce that word in the middle of the phrase. Rather, the ambiguity has migrated to the first word of the title, if it is a word. Once again we have a decision to make, this time one of sense rather than sound. Do we take the numeral as a punning stand-in for the word it sounds like, resulting in a prepositional phrase, For the News, or do we take it as the number it is, evoking something like an entry in a TV guide (4 The News) while also pointing to the fact that the painting consists of four horizontal panels? Reading further along the bottom of the picture, we encounter another prepositional phrase, “To Johns,” which suggests, via parallelism, that we read the “4” as a preposition as well. But this “to” is a misreading, for there are two ghostly letters balancing on the vertical axis of the painting, PE, and together with the TO they form the name Peto, the master of trompe l’oeil still life. With the bonus of a grammatical parallelism gone, we might prefer to read the 4 as a number, especially since there is another number at the end of the line, 62, the year Johns made the painting, and these numbers, 4 and 62, bracket the string of words to create a satisfying symmetry. But once we learn that Johns was inspired by Peto’s painting The Cup We All Race 4, where the 4 is clearly shorthand for the preposition, we might well revert to reading the 4 in

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Johns. 4 the News. 1962.

Johns’s painting as a word.35 In any case, by now we recognize this to-and-fro of suggestion and the resulting interpretive vibrato as a typical Johns stratagem. But what of the three-letter word, which has come back ﬁve years later for a curtain call, in fact, two of them? Here again it ﬂoats well above the bottom edge, but now Johns has stenciled it twice, once in smaller letters resembling the Roman type of the earlier painting and once in larger, block letters. It is tempting to equate these two typographical interpretations with the two possible pronunciations of the word, but that might be stretching the point. In any case, there is a more plausible acoustic suggestion, for what does this double stenciling signify, in all its kitschy, graphic punch (think of the way sound waves are shown leaving a radio tower), but a word and its echo? Johns uses this same device, if we may call it that, in two other paintings of the same year, Portrait—Viola Farber (1961–62) and Device. He had used a similar device in No of the previous year, where the title word, suspended in cut-out metal from a wire, casts its shadow on the paint surface, which also contains a stenciled version of the word, as if the cut-out had served as a template or left an imprint, one that never quite coincides with the

35. Johns was given a reproduction of Peto’s painting by a friend in the early 1960s and he made a print inspired by it. Roberta Bernstein, “Seeing a Thing Can Sometimes Trigger the Mind to Make Another Thing,” in Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, p. 56 (ﬁg. 12) and p. 87 (ﬁg. 61).

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actual shadow of the cut-out no matter the lighting. In No, Johns makes an equation between several kinds of indexical multiplication: stencil, imprint, shadow, and (the one that has received the least critical attention) echo.36 The echo in 4 The News is the larger word, paler and less sharply defined, expanding and dispersing into the field. Whether that larger word seems to be in front of or behind the smaller one is uncertain, for while Johns clearly painted the smaller one after and thus on top of the larger one, he aligned parts of the two words so as to render their spatial relationship ambiguous. This cap- tures something specific about the phenomenology of an echo, namely that it seems both to advance and recede, coming through space to meet us as it dwin- dles in volume. The echo here is also of the painting we started with, The. (As we say, the later painting echoes the earlier one.) Thus, Johns makes clear in retro- spect that the first painting with the definite article was also about sound. And yet Johns remains equally concerned, as Shiff would insist, with painting as texture. To the right of the double stencil is a darker area where the encaustic seems to have been vigorously rubbed over with a crayon, and next to it is a handprint. These two elements, taken together, reference the Skin drawings that Johns produced in the same year by covering parts of his body with oil, printing them on paper, and then rubbing charcoal over the stains and blowing off the excess.37 By importing two tokens of the Skin series into 4 The News and juxtaposing them with the image of an echo, Johns creates a rebus-like equation between touch and hearing, texture and sound. The definite article makes a third, almost undetectable curtain call in 4 The News: the newspaper lodged between the top two panels of the painting is rolled and placed so that the one visible word is “The.” This is the first word in almost all newspaper names, and as such it is enough, in its Gothic typeface, to signify newspaperness as such, to stand for the news. But if, as I have been argu- ing, the word “the” is the agent and emblem of Johns’s project of a sounding

36. Why this blind spot? Are we guilty of a bias that not only favors vision over touch but relegates the other senses further? Johns indeed seems intent on reversing the hierarchy of vision and touch: In Target with Plaster Casts of 1955, the eyes of the cast face have been cropped out, as if to under- score the obvious appeal to touch of the casts, which compete with the powerfully visual object below them. But color choice in this work is pointed as well: the body and its non-visual senses, Johns seems to say, have always been secondary (the casts are orange, purple, etc.) to the primary (red-yellow-blue) targeted act of seeing. And hearing has a place in this scheme: the ear is prominent in the array of casts, located near the center and directly between the two erogenous ones, penis and nip- ple. In Untitled of the previous year, a cast head with closed eyes rests beneath a collage whose clear- est element is an ear. One further note about Target with Plaster Casts: in being interviewed by Emile de Antonio in 1970 for the ﬁlm Painters Painting, Johns recalled: “I had this idea that I would have the target with these wooden blocks above . . . [that] could be moveable; they could be attached to something behind the target that would make noise. Each one would make a different sound. That was the way it started. Then I didn’t like the idea; I don’t know why. Maybe it was too difﬁcult.” Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), pp. 99–100. 37. These drawings constitute another manifesto of sensory hierarchy insofar as the hands and ears are prominent, the eyes all but absent. One could also argue that Johns’s self-restriction to gray in these and other works quiets the eye and allows other senses to come into play.

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Johns. Portrait–Viola Farber. 1961–62.

painting, here it has another related role as well: in prying open the painting, the word and its newspaper create an oriﬁce, a mouth or a slot, suggesting, as with Tango, that sound is what comes from the back of painting, and that one must pierce painting (with a newspaper or a windup key or what have you) in order to allow the sound to emerge. Here what emerges is not sound (no “Extra, extra!”) but a rolled-up newspaper wedged through a mail slot, a physical broadcast that corresponds to the electronic broadcast suggested by the title, 4 The News, and its echoes. At roughly the same time as 4 The News, Johns was making a painting in which the musical theme is explicit: Portrait—Viola Farber, named for a German- born friend who was a Cunningham dancer from 1953 to 1965.38 Once again there is an “echoing” word, a double stencil, with further echoes suggested by some prominent V-shaped brushstrokes in the rest of the canvas. Once again we cannot be sure how to pronounce the stenciled word—vee-OH-la when denoting the stringed instrument, vye-OH-la or VYE-ah-la when used as a female name.

38. James Rondeau, “Jasper Johns: Gray,” in Jasper Johns: Gray, p. 51. Rondeau emphasizes the playful and possibly self-mocking aspect of the work, pointing out that the suppressed last name in this gray painting is very close to Farbe, the German word for “color.” Ibid., p. 52.

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Johns. Gray Painting with Ball. 1958.

The fact that Johns included only the ﬁrst name in the painting facilitates the uncertainty. Our pronunciation of viola is suspended between the female name of the painting’s full title and the crude instrument (a rubber band stretched between a fork and a spoon) placed just above the word. Just above that instrument is the canvas-within-a-canvas, a juxtaposition that analogizes stretched band to stretched canvas, metonymically transferring the sound-producing ability of the band to the internal canvas and thence to the incomplete canvas of the whole. That a canvas is stretched across a wooden support, a stretcher, is a nat- ural fact of painting for Johns, one that he enjoys demystifying. Portrait is one of several works that incorporate a stretched canvas reversed so that the mecha- nism of stretching is visible: others are Canvas (1956), Fool’s House (1962), Souvenir 2 (1964), and According to What (1964). Then there are the paintings that open up the canvas, such as 4 The News or the earlier Gray Painting with Ball of 1958, constructions whose pried-apart internal edges read something like taut strings crossing the bridge of an instrument. While these insertions (whether ball or newspaper) add tension along the internal edges, they subtract it from the surface, making uniform tautness hard to achieve. Johns must have

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Johns. Tennyson. 1958.

built special stretchers to accommodate the insertions and then stretched the canvases as tightly as possible around these irregular shapes. Still, the ball in Gray Painting with Ball introduces a disturbance in the physics of stretching that is wittily reflected in Johns’s brushstrokes, which appear to register areas of pulling and gathering, as in a badly cut piece of clothing. The response of the brush to the intrusion is even more apparent in 4 The News, where a set of curv- ing strokes suspended from the top of the painting answers the upward curve of the bottom edge of that panel as it bends to accommodate the newspaper. These strokes, with their intimations of slackening, foreshadow Johns’s recent explorations of the catenary, the arc assumed by a string hung freely from two points. These arcs have been described as willfully slack, even morbid, devoid of the tension of Johns’s earlier art, but tension is never absent as long as the sus- pension points are at all separate, as long as there is some lateral force. The hinged wooden elements on each side of these works allow the viewer, in theory, to adjust the degree of tautness in the curve by changing the distance

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between the two hanging points as well as the length of the string. These are paintings that can be tuned.39 Another painting that plays with canvas tension is the 1958 work named for Alfred Lord Tennyson, the English poet Johns admired. James Rondeau sees the painting as a tender, poetic pendant to Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) and points out that Tennyson was a poet of love between men.40 While this is per- suasive, it does not prevent us from understanding the work more physically. Whereas in Gray Painting with Ball the two panels are pried apart, in Tennyson a division into two panels is healed by an elaborate but unconvincing patch. At the top center is a vertical line, the space between the two joined, stretched canvases that form the chassis of the work. Over them Johns placed another canvas, ﬁrst attaching it to the very bottom and then pulling it about four-ﬁfths of the way up, before folding it over a dowel and drawing it back down until it ended at the top of the letters. The puzzling thing about this construction is that the added canvas seems to get narrower as it climbs and then descends. One might conclude (as I did in front of the work) that Johns progressively trimmed this canvas at a slight angle all along its two edges, but, in fact, as con- servators Kelly Keegan and Kristin Lister point out, he achieved the narrowing by stretching the canvas less and less tightly as he proceeded, “taking the simple act of stretching a canvas,” they write, “and subverting it to make something different.”41 This suggests that the title of the work is pun as well as homage: Tennyson, tension. When Johns showed Farber how the plucked rubber band in the painting named for her could make music, she quipped, “But can it eat?”42 This inspired question skewers the heart of Johns’s project, his ambition to push painting beyond itself, to give it actual capacities—whether physical, verbal, or acoustic—that it never had before (and that we have been tracing here along parallel tracks starting with Device Circle and The). Perhaps Farber was thinking in particular of the bent spoon and fork between which the band is stretched, or of the work that Johns had tried to eat the previous year, Painting Bitten by a Man. In any case, Johns seems to have taken her comment to heart, for two years later, in his cryptic sketchbook notes for the painting Watchman, he wrote: “‘Looking’ is & is not ‘eating’ and also ‘being eaten.’”43 Let us consider a vari- ant: Looking is and is not hearing and being heard. If Portrait—Viola Farber

39. For a compelling account of the experience of being able to manipulate these works, see Scott Rothkopf, “Suspended Animation,” in Jasper Johns: Catenary, exh. cat. (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2005). 40. Rondeau, “Jasper Johns: Gray,” pp. 46–47. 41. Kelly Keegan and Kristin Lister, “A Shifting Focus: Process and Detail in Tennyson and Near the Lagoon,” in Jasper Johns: Gray, pp. 163–64. 42. Rondeau, “Jasper Johns: Gray,” p. 52. 43. Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, p. 59.

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analogizes the stretched canvas to a stringed instrument, Tennyson, with its play of differential canvas tension, suggests the analogy of a drum, in particular a West African talking drum, which gets continuously retuned as the musician’s arm squeezes cords running between the two heads. The drum analogy cap- tures an ambivalence of sending and receiving integral to paintings incorporating language. The problem goes back to medieval art, where inscriptions sometimes function as statements by characters in the scene and sometimes as prayers or invocations from the viewer to those characters.44 Does the painting address us or vice versa? The answer is fairly clear if we imagine turning the key of a music box or striking the key of a toy piano in a painting, for the sound would move from the surface toward us, less clear if a painting prompts us to say a word to ourselves, or out loud, as we face it. A drum works both ways: its skin receives a blow and sends it along. It may convert a physical blow into sound waves, or, as with an eardrum, it may convert the blow of sound waves into other impulses. An eardrum is a transformer at the threshold of the brain: so is a canvas by Johns.

44. Mieczyslaw Wallis, “Inscriptions in Paintings,” Semiotica 9 (1973), pp. 7–9. Wallis nicely refers to the spaces made by words in paintings as “semantic enclaves.”

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