![]() © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.Ĭlearly, the two cities were too close to each other (just a hundred miles apart) for a tour each presentation had to be different. From left: Mirror’s Edge, 1992 Painted Bronze, 1960/64 Mirror’s Edge 2, 1993. View of “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” 2021–22, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Both museums have done major Johns shows and own major Johns works, although the Whitney leads on both counts. Less well known but pointed out in one of the Whitney wall texts is that Johns may be the only living artist (certainly, he is one of the few) to have spent significant time at all four of the Whitney’s incarnations, from its original Eighth Street building, which it left in 1954, to its current quarters on Gansevoort Street, occupied in 2015. Johns received his revelation of Marcel Duchamp’s work in Philadelphia in 1957, when he visited the museum to see what art historian Robert Rosenblum meant by calling his work Neo-Dada. Both had some history with this giant of contemporary art, as did their respective institutions. My guess is that’s what happened here, and indeed, there was good reason for Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf to have had the same idea twenty years after the MoMA show, in 2016, which is apparently when their discussions began. So why do it? Sometimes two curators in different cities have the same thought at the same time. There has already been plenty of criticism of this device, to use a word that Johns enshrined in several early titles: It makes unreasonable demands of time and travel on the visitor, it allows the curators to get away with a too-big show, it is East Coast–centric, etc. The double-venue idea brought out something essential, if hardly hidden, in Johns’s work: namely, his penchant for pairs of all kinds-near repetitions, mirror reversals, other symmetrical inversions, monochrome-polychrome pairs, optical illusions that toggle back and forth, tracings, casts, imprints, etc. (Go ahead, call me a structuralist.) And the governing one, the metaterm, was the split nature of the exhibition itself. That is never easy to tease apart, but I suspect that my sense of clarity, which only grew after I saw the presentation in Philadelphia, was partly the result of experiencing Johns’s art as a set of oppositions. ![]() In any case, my feelings in the present were real, but what had occasioned them-the works in the show? The work of the show? Both? We are alive.” I read those words years ago in the catalogue of the 1996 Johns retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. Asked by a Danish reporter in 1969 about the state he hoped to induce in his viewers, Johns said, “When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. what? Calm? Clear? Alive to the particulars of visual experience? Those were the words I jotted down. I CAME OUT OF “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney, not yet having seen the Philadelphia part of the show, feeling. © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Wall, from left: Two Flags, 1962 Corpse and Mirror II, 1974–75 Two Maps, 1989. View of “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” 2021–22, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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