maxileft.blogg.se - Jasper johns for kids

The seemingly frozen drips and gestures embodied Johns's interest in semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols. As the molten, pigmented wax cooled, it fixed the scraps of newspaper in visually distinct marks that evoked the gestural brushwork of much of Abstract Expressionism. Additionally, instead of using oil paint applied to the canvas with a brush, Johns built the flag from a dynamic surface made up of shreds of newspaper dipped in encaustic, allowing snippets of text to remain visible through the wax. Johns's first major work broke from the Abstract Expressionist precedent of non-objective painting with his representation of a recognizable everyday object - the American flag.

Over the decades, Johns has honed an open-ended attitude toward meaning-making that proved to be consequential for postmodern experiments, like Conceptual and Appropriation Art. Like his predecessor, Marcel Duchamp, Johns initiated an artistic dialogue between the work and the viewer that was meant to be resolved within the mind of the viewer. In many ways, Johns learned from and adapted earlier Dadaist attitudes of subverting the artistic status quo.

Instead, he essentially quotes the gesturally evocative brushstroke, using the idea of the artist's mark as merely another symbol, or device, that enhanced the multiplicity of meanings and interpretations in his paintings.

In Johns's paintings, one can see the gestural application of paint that is reminiscent of much of Abstract Expressionism, but he does not imbue it with the psychological or existential depth that his predecessors did.

The flag can be the depiction of something or the thing itself - an exploration of the boundries between art and object. Both flags and targets are inherently flat, and thus as the subject for advanced painting, they call attention to the flatness of the picture pane, a key tenet for Modernist proponents like Clement Greenberg, but because they also point to popular culture, Johns's use of them runs against and subverts ideas of Modernist abstraction.

By employing everyday motifs like flags and targets, Johns engaged simultaneously both abstraction and representation.

This shifted modern art toward the consumer landscape of mid-20 th century America, inspiring a host of Pop artists throughout the 1960s.

Through his use of shreds of newspaper, found objects, and even mass-produced goods, like beer and coffee cans, Johns erased the division between fine art and mass culture.

Additionally, Johns's exploration of semiotics and perception also set the stage for both Conceptual Art and more postmodern interventions in the 1980s, while his multimedia collaborations with John Cage and Merce Cunningham ushered in the dominance of Performance Art in the 1960s and 1970s.

Breaking down the boundaries traditionally separating fine art and everyday life, he effectively laid the foundation for Pop Art's embrace of commodity culture. The reverberations of the work of Jasper Johns affected nearly every artistic movement from the 1950s through the present day. Riffing on the divergent examples of Dada and Abstract Expressionism, Johns, along with his Neo-Dada collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, created a nuanced art that spoke to notions of autobiography, irreverence, and philosophical engagement. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Johns deliberately avoided art cut off from everyday life and made common signs, such as flags and targets, the subject of his work. Jasper Johns's playful, enigmatic paintings interrogate the very ways in which we see and interpret the world.