Art Bomb - 5/30/2014

 Ally says:

Jasper Johns: Regrets

March 15, 2014 – September 1, 2014

It’s cyclical – and you can feel that as soon as you enter the room.

Johns to Bacon to Freud.

I’m not sure what people will make of the MoMA’s latest exhibit, Jasper Johns: Regrets.

Mainly because it consists of only 10 drawings, two prints, and two paintings.

That’s it.

Let’s start with Jasper, himself. At 84 years of age has been producing work for nearly 60 years. And this latest exhibit includes what he has spent his time on during the last year and a half.

So what is that really?

What are these 10 drawings, two prints and two paintings of?

This:

That is a picture of Lucien Freud, the painter. It was taken by the photographer John Deakin for Francis Bacon, also a painter. Bacon is famous for things like this:

 

Three Studies of Lucian Freud

But his portraits all came from photos. He didn’t paint a single portrait from life, instead, buried in his filthy amazing studio he painted from photos. 

And in doing so, he ruined them – wrinkled them, ripped them, bent them, tacked them to things, splattered paint all over them. And when he was finished he dropped them on the floor and moved on. Francis Bacon was not one for sentimentality.

In 2012, Johns got his hands on that photo of Freud and spent a year and half recreating it. And can you blame him? It’s a fantastic image, Freud, abject, rejected, isolated on an old bed covered in the kind of quilt that makes you think of home. He holds his head in his hands. Is he crying? Frustrated? Desperate?

One word rises to the top: Regret.

And yet – even this term is tongue in cheek because as John’s recreates this image over and over and over again, he rubber stamps it with “Regrets, Jasper Johns” – a stamp used by the artist many times to decline a myriad of invitations and obligations.

Johns is playful here:

But it’s here, where the image of Freud is completely brushed back that things start to get interesting.

Funeral? Skulls?

How is it that the negative space of this image speaks of Regret even more than the actual image of Freud himself? He’s reduced to nothing but a blur and from that we see even more than before.

Blackness. Oblivion. What is that they say about staring into the void? Here it is, staring back.

It’s a layering. Freud to Bacon to Johns. Artist to artist to artist.

A peeling back of the skin, an unraveling.  A delicate spool of thread tossed off the cliff.

In what I can only describe as a “dissection” of an image, pulled through time, rescued from the rubbish, Johns shows us both its, and in a way, our very core. 


Aleathia says:

Years ago when I published a print zine I would put on documentaries and fold paper for hours.  I never did get to watch too many of them, but listening was enough.  I remember listening, eventually sucked in enough to watch, to a film about Agnes Martin called "Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World".

"Close" by Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin was born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912, but grew up in Vancouver.  She later moved to the United States and went to college at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.  She had studied art education and received her bachelor's degree from Columbia University.  While going to school there she heard a lecture by D. T. Suzuki and became deeply interested in Asian thought as a code of ethics.

She later matriculated at the University of New Mexico and taught art courses before receiving her master's degree at Columbia University.  She left New York City in 1967 and moved to New Mexico.  She built an adobe home and lived there the rest of her years, alone.

Agnes Martin is most known for her biomorphic paintings in subdued colors.  She was considered by most to be a minimalist, but she considered herself an abstract expressionist.

"The Sea" by Agnes Martin

She has been quoted praising Rothko for having "reached zero so that nothing could stand in the way of truth."

"The Wedding" by Agnes Martin

I have been a big fan of minimalism since an art class I took in Seattle where the teacher really ingrained in us that less can sometimes be more.  In my Buddhist studies I spend a lot of time trying to make life more quiet and simple.  I can also see where Agnes Martin would consider herself and abstract expressionist.  I feel like she is a holy marriage of both.  Up until 2011, I had never seen one of her paintings in person.  I had the privilege of going the Chicago Museum of Art and finding one of her glorious paintings tucked in the corner by a window.  It brought me to tears.....silent, heart felt tears at the stillness of her hand and her resolve to paint with such subtlety and grace.