Jasper Johns’ P ain ted B ronze
59
These critics were not alone in focusing on formal properties to discuss
the art as an object. Referring to his paintings, Johns celebrated the abstract nature
of his work:
1think one is ready to accept the illusionistic painting as object
and it is of no great interest that an illusion has been made. 1
think the object itself is perhaps in greater doubt than the illusion
of the object, (qtd. in Kozloff 3)
The above criticism discussing art and object during the seventies
minimized the popular elements and emphasized the physical properties of the
work. With this shift in focus the discussion moved away from social commentary,
and subject matter, when addressed at all, was increasingly interpreted as
autobiographical.
The self-referential reading of Johns’ art has been so pervasive in the
later assessment that even the ale cans were personalized. In 1976 the art historian
Leo Steinberg equated the Ballantine ale cans with the North and South: ‘‘When
Johns made bronze sculptures out of two cans of ale, one of them weighing less
and pierced at top, was designated as empty, the other as full; one (with the Ballantine
sign at the top) was Confederate; the other Yankee” (Steinberg 35). The identification
with North and South is based on the fact that the open, slightly smaller can has its
top marked with the three-ring sign and the word Florida; while the top of the
closed can is blank (Bernstein 54).
Contemporary critics continue to view Johns’ art as an expression of his
personal and creative life. Johns’ reuse of imagery over the course of many decades
implied for the critic Charles Stuckey, writing in 1997, that “nostalgia and memory,
as manifestations of self-identity are indeed ongoing topics in his work” (Stuckey,
“Johns: Hidden and Revealed” 34). According to this reading, certain motifs such
as the flags and ale cans are a fonn of recycling and reworking the popular imagery
in earlier work.
Similarly, subject matter from the history of art has been interpreted as
pait of Johns’ personal symbolism. The depiction of a fallen standard among the
soldiers sleeping during Christ’s Resurrection from the Isenheim altarpiece
represented in Johns’ painting Perilous Night (1982) (figure 3) has been assessed
in light of the artist’s long established interest in flag imageiy The formal resonance
of the flag in Perilous Night would inspire the art critic Christopher Knight in
1996, for example, to employ poetic terms to proclaim, “The flag was a radical
representation of social experience spoken in art’s language of idiosyncratic private
pleasure” (Knight 82).