I had problems with this show. Presumably because the whole thing was Jasper Johns pounding on one idea over and over, just like my neighbors playing Rock Band at four in the morning. I get it. Grey. It’s fantastic you’re trying to purge color from your work. Good going Johns, this is about as grey as it gets. Could you maybe do it on a hundred more canvases and a couple drawers? Perfect. Done.
What I’m really trying to get at though is this. If I had a friend working on a novel and he, we’ll say is on his tenth draft, and feels it’s time to show it around to people. So, he comes to me and tosses down a tall stack of paper, classic triple at Wendy’s thick. And I’m like hey buddy, what’re all these? And he’s like, they’re my ten drafts, I want you to understand my process. Now, being a good friend I decide to play along and I read the first draft and I bite, it’s fantastic. I’m amazed, how’d you think of this? So, excited, I get to the second draft and realized that nothing is really that different. The grammar and spelling are a little better, a character has a different name. As the good friend I previously specified myself, I read the rest of the drafts. And they’re all the same thing... small grammar changes, word choice things, chapter titles are now just numbers. And after a lot of reading I, finally, put down the tenth draft which is largely unchanged from the first that I loved so much. But, this time when I put down the draft I hate it, I don’t want to read it again. In fact I don’t even like the first draft anymore.
The Jasper Johns Grey show is reading the same novel ten times in a row, expecting a great revelation with each new beginning. Just like my friend’s novel there are great moments within it, but they feel like a series of paintings that was not meant to be shown like... that. Were I to look at them on an individual level though...
Separating color from his methods allows Johns to lean heavily on the text he is using within his paintings, they become representations of objects that exist theoretically somewhere else. Of course it being Jasper Johns they probably do exist somewhere else. What’s particularly amusing about this though is that a grey painting thought of in terms of color wouldn’t be interpreted as the existing color version. Take “False Start” and “Jubilee”, in “False Start” words describe colors but are themselves painted in a color that they are not (blue is orange for example), but the type in “Jubilee” is greyscale. We imagine the colors that are being described without the confusion present in the original painting.
Violence in Cai Guo-Qiang (Guggenheim)
Despite the large percentage of the surfaces within the Guggenheim that were pierced by arrows I found Cai Guo-Qiang works non-violent. I didn’t even find them psuedo-violent or Tom and Jerry violent. They were Disney theatrical, Disney ice capades theatrical executed in such a way that I would be as likely to be startled by the unused toilet paper under my bathroom sink. Even the “exploding” car rocketing up the middle of the museum starts and finishes with a car sitting safely on the ground. More so, the wires that support the cars look so rock steady that the whole thing looks like less of a series of frozen moments and more like changing snow tires at Les Schwabb.
That said I really enjoyed the exhibit. Guo-Qiang appears to have the tennis balls to keep materials materials. Because resting immediately behind his vast series of illusions is their origins in normalcy. There is a distillation of the spectacle in his work. As if Cai had spent his career in an Appalachian pig farmer’s back field with a series of tubes, funnels, and boilers, ending up with a clear liquid that will get you shit-faced ten seconds before you drink it. We were all lucky not to have gone blind.
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