Recently, I found myself approaching the work of Jasper Johns, lavishly presented in the new retrospective, through the grid of Roland Barthes, on whom I am now working, and here, most particularly, ...through Barthes’s 1953 essay “The World as Object.” What are we to make of Johns’s constant recourse to the material object—the maps, targets, flashlights, lightbulbs, ale cans, shoes, inanimate body parts, partial faces? Barthes’s “World as Object” addresses seventeenth-century Dutch painting, specifically, the still lifes. This world, he says, is reduced to an “empire of things,” amounting already to a “‘modern’ aesthetic of silence.” Johns exploits the matte, the opaque, the alkaline. His wax encaustic, charcoal, grease, paint stick all militate—it would seem—against sheen.
IN 1994, shortly after "Cy Twombly: A Retrospective" opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I had the honor of being conducted through the show by its curator, Kirk Varnedoe. Tracing the ...works' progression from the painterly abstraction of the early '50s to Twombly's signature style of aggressive graffiti etched into grounds of cream-colored gesso, we came to the 1957 canvas titled Olympia, the name of its dedicatee prominently scrawled in black.
