I found myself last night having difficulty sleeping, so I went downstairs to read for a while. I was interested to come across a review of the current major retrospective exhibition of the work of Jasper Johns, in the USA. Johns is not an artist whose work has made an impression on me in the past, and reading this review* I began to understand why that might be so.
Johns appears to have been one of those painters whose primary concern is not to enable us to look, through the means of their art, at the world, but rather to stay things of a philosophical nature about art itself. It did not come as a great surprise to me to discover that Johns had been influenced deeply by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of “language games”. In fact, the author suggests that it might be helpful to understand Johns as a “crypto-philosopher” rather than as an artist.
Even given that proviso I do wonder about the interest of some of Johns’ reflections. If you add yellow to red, just how much yellow do you need to add before it qualifies as orange? I suppose that if you look at painting as a branch of semiotics it might make sense to ask when changing a sign turns it into another sign, but quite frankly I have better things to do.
I think that I’ll stick to art.
*By Hal Foster, in the London Review of Books, 2 December 2021.