Courtesy: The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York photograph: Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at (ARS), New York. Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955, encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, 76 × 66 cm. At the Whitney, Johns represents schism at the PMA, continuity. ![]() Beauty, it suggests in ironic tones, is a manufactured product, standardized and artificial. Its corresponding gallery, curated by Scott Rothkopf, focuses on the ‘Savarin’ series (1960–82): 17 ‘Usuyuki’ monotypes of a single composition anchored by a 1960 bronze cast of a coffee can meticulously painted to resemble the real thing. Meanwhile, given the Whitney’s purview of contemporary American art, Johns takes on the air of a radical. ![]() Curated by Carlos Basualdo, that museum’s presentation of Johns’s ‘Usuyuki’ prints (1977–79), inspired by Japanese kabuki, is a lovely meditation on fleeting beauty. At the PMA, an encyclopaedic museum whose collection spans continents and millennia, Johns’s material experimentation appears as an inevitable result of the American project, an invention of the country’s emergent, globally minded, mid-century intelligentsia. Seen this way, the two exhibitions take on different resonances through context and juxtaposition. Johns compels you to acknowledge your experience of the world as an experience of images, and conditions you to understand these signs as fungible in function and malleable in meaning. The museum notes Johns’s interest in how targets direct sight and limit attention, and cites his oft-quoted line that ‘a painting of a flag or target could be seen both as the depiction of something and as the thing itself’, which effectively relays both the exterior and interior functions of his work. The Whitney approaches Johns chronologically, beginning with his iconic series of flag paintings – including Three Flags (1958), usually anchoring a permanent display marking the end of abstract expressionism – as well as his targets and maps, all of which he continues to make today. The curatorial conceit mimics Johns’s work, which is rife with multiples: mirrors (literal and depicted), doubled or tripled motifs, stamps and casts and reproductions. One answer is the fallacy of imitative form. Courtesy: the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958, encaustic on canvas (three panels), 78 × 116 cm. Why, then, dedicate so much real estate at two world-class museums to an artist already known for his repetition and self-quotations? In a New York Times profile of Johns, published as a lead-up to the exhibition, the artist’s biographer, Deborah Solomon, stressed the conflict that arose from competing curatorial visions but, ultimately, the differences a general audience will perceive between both presentations are minor, and likely to be insignificant given the lapse they’ll experience between visiting both venues. A gallery at the Whitney focuses on dreams, while a corresponding gallery at the PMA focuses on nightmares the Whitney discusses the American South’s influence on Johns, the PMA Japan’s and so on. ![]() In ‘Jasper Johns: Mind / Mirror’, two major museums – the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) – decline to offer fully individual perspectives on the consecrated painter, opting instead to mirror their installations with variations riffing on themes in Johns’s work.
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