Words and visuals by Josephine Choe.
The Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (September 29, 2021—February 13, 2022) exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art features some of the most iconic works of Jasper Johns. Consisting of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints created over the span of his 65-year-long career, these projects, which comprise an oeuvre of work in various mediums, count him securely among America’s most important living artists, and one of the most important artists in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror
Sep 29 2021 – Feb 13 2022
This review intends to focus on the ways the Whitney has transformed a whole floor of its gallery spaces in order to create an intellectually-ambitious reflection of this challenging artist, whose complex works the museum has long championed.
Johns is all about mining other works—from art history, from popular culture, and from his own works—over and over, and to varying degrees of complexity. Salon-hung prints and works on paper on a single long wall first greet the viewer and establish the themes of his work. These works also serve to demonstrate Johns’s prowess as a technically accomplished printmaker, and an artist very interested in the techniques and possibilities of printmaking, regardless of the medium in which he works.
From there, the show’s opening wall gives way to a series of rooms, arranged in a loose chronology and sections divided by theme. For example, one such theme, Disappearance and Negation, includes a piece titled Alley Oop (1958). This early painting was once owned by Robert Rauschenberg, who had a tremendous influence on his works and a close personal relationship with Johns. With bold color choices, and a unique composition—an orange ground with another abstract painting within itself—this small painting lacks a discernible subject matter. Johns demonstrates, with adroit talent, a remarkably frustrating ability to at once disrupt and celebrate the conventions of painting, leaving the messy business of meaning and intention for the viewer to tackle on their own.
Elsewhere, paintings in the show are often placed in conversation with one another, together in groups in the corners of rooms. These conversations on the walls also invite viewers to contemplate Johns’s sculptures, which, throughout the show, have been placed on plinths in simple vitrines at each gallery’s center.
One notable exception to this curatorial choice comes at the show’s conclusion, when the interior-facing galleries open up into an expansive, windowed space overlooking the Hudson River. There, as if to signal to the viewer of the majesty and power of Johns as an artist, stands a series of Johns’s more recent sculptures—metal casts of his iconic 0-9 series that are stood in place atop a row of plinths, like metallic, high art dominos.
Overall, the specific curation of Johns’s work at the show at the Whitney invites one to explore the artist’s approach to the creation of that work. More specifically, Johns was interested in conceptual ideas like symbolism, duality, and perception, and his works pose various challenges to viewers, frequently forcing them to approach works of art with different modes of thinking, almost as if they were puzzles. In this way, Johns is able to emphasize the plurality of interpretations that exist for a work of art, and posits that no one idea or way of thinking is superior to another.
To that end, the Whitney show does not lay claim to a comprehensive retrospective of Johns’s work. Indeed, half of the show is being simultaneously displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as if to reflect the artist’s pervasive obsession with doubling. That is, the curators pay homage to Johns’s own fascination by following it to its logical extreme, rendering the show as a kind of mirror which is itself reflected across two major institutions, simultaneously.
At the Whitney, there are (at-times frustrating) textual references to corresponding works at the other show in Philadelphia. Including images of the works and the spaces of the show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art would have been a helpful way for viewers who are not easily able to travel between both to get a better sense of the show’s overall curatorial vision and intention.
To the curators’ credit, however, Johns’s works within the Whitney’s “half” of the show are presented compellingly. The show’s visitors are immediately invited into an immersive experience—almost as if one is walking through the walls of a pop-up story book. The walls in one gallery bisect to form a diagonal ‘X’ shape whose intersection has been cut away, creating a series of smaller spaces that are connected at the center, arranged to form a series of sight lines that radiate outward. Thin mirrors placed on the inner faces of the cutaway walls, however, interrupt and complicate these lines. As one stands in the middle of the room, it is a bit jarring and illusory: looking straight ahead, there is one “door” leading into a large room in sight, but the mirrors provide slight glimpses into the other rooms formed by this ‘X’. The show’s installation shows how the gallery spaces interrupt one another while also opening up to one another.
Closing thoughts
Therefore, one can interpret the physical spaces created and arranged by the Whitney to complement the curators’ own understanding of the artist’s work. The museum spaces and the works that inhabit them work together to reveal and obscure iterations of themselves over time, highlighting a significant artist whose primary thesis has been, over the course of his own storied career, to do the same.
Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror
September 29, 2021 – FEbruary 13, 2022
Whitney Museum of American Art