Negative Review of "Gray"

Jasper Johns Dennis Matthews
Gray
At the Art Institute of Chicago
Nov. 3rd to Jan. 6th

What is this? A retrospective or an excavation of some half-brained theme? The concept of a retrospective is odd and can only get more odd when the artist would be included in an overall one of the last 40 years of American Art also. Anyone who gives such an integral artist a bad review on his retrospective, let alone the last one he’ll probably be alive for, is crazy. A good review is no more allowed in my mind either, I mean if you’re crazy successful in your late 20s, 28 to be exact, and that was fifty years ago then what’s the point of this sort of reiteration. It’s a lot of fun and nice to see it all at once, but it is hardly an inspection as in the second half of the word; retro-spective.
A retrospective is about the development over years of an artist and how they have met all challenges along the way. These challenges come from exploring differing mediums and investigations of similar themes in one’s work. How do we even begin to judge a looking back on the work of one artist when we cannot separate the development we are being shown from the context of the same work’s early success? My question needs an answer that only a parallel universe could give us about Jasper Johns’ growth. Can we go through his garbage that would be more enlightening to me about who he is now.
A few guidelines can be utilized if we want, simple stuff like how technically well is it done, but I don’t want to. Where my concern lies is, does the strength of individual ideas had by the artist abandon his overall theme for the sake of one’s progress?

Do we follow his train of thought in the exhibition, is the curator successful at relaying the what for, the “Why is this show happening again?” was my biggest question after several visits. Even if conceptual progression is not linear, is it coherent, is the artist just rambling along but we’re not supposed to notice that an art historical figure like Johns may not be saying anything anymore.
Are we even interested enough fifty years later to “shadow” the artist through his career in the guise of a formal retrospective? I keep using the word retrospective but the Art Institute of Chicago doesn’t, to explain I feel that it really is a surveying of a lifetime of work and that it shouldn’t just be trying to pluck a theme out of thin air then curate a show out of it.
Do we want to even ask why does John care about 0-9 and the complications involved with such a concept? I think Johns is concerned with the idea because it is about ascribing worth by a method of counting used to define what quantity looks like. How the multiple extends to many media and reflects, in art, a disillusionment of concepts like quantity, of bountifulness, security, and brings up the question of what is the real worth of material things. I see the foresight in Jasper Johns’ work, this idea of quantity and its repercussions slides over to, what I think is, a premonitory feeling of how artists like Andy Warhol would abduct this idea a decade later than most of the earliest work in “Gray”.




Honestly, this show is a bore it only becomes a curiosity to see a lot at once of one artist. It could have used half as many galleries to get the idea across that gray is a really important color but more so as a concept to Johns. Really I got it, I trust that you worked these ideas out but I don’t need to see the 6 lithographs of the painting. Either way, the painting came first in every case, can’t you just move on from an image. Jeez if Johns had just picked one image to do, once you know, he would’ve had all the time to do all types of images.
This vocabulary is stifling for intelligent viewers; its dull without the use of the color gray, “Seizure-inducing-Yellow” couldn’t save this show. I feel that he is shown to be very lazy or just not interested in his own work. Early success will kill personal inquiry of one’s own work apparently. I am left as a painter, art historian, teacher, critic with the impression that Jasper Johns stopped being involved, there came a point probably because of the immediate success he had that his work wasn’t personal any more.
There are many ridiculous moves in this exhibition beyond the convoluted descriptions of the wall text. One example is in the number motif gallery, where the voice of the curator is heard saying, “The work plays with the graying of the black-on-white printed elements when seen from the distance required to take in the full canvas.”. Nobody’s smart enough to not be stopped by that wad of crap. I translated it to mean very simply that, if you can see the whole painting at once from where you are standing, then its numbers will look blurry.


The work “Periscope (Hart Crane)” is an excellent example of this too. We are told that every element in this painting is to allude to a “desperation” of its subject, Stephen Crane a poet who committed suicide by drowning. This subject for Johns is expressed by way of the three primary colors, both in text form and as actual color. Did I miss that lesson in color theory? Suicide equals red, yellow, and blue? Really doesn’t give me a feeling of someone who didn’t want to keep his head above water anymore.
What’s less valid about this work is when we notice that there is a 1972/1994 Flag piece. So you did a carborundum wash in ’94 over a ’72 litho? Good thing this piece happened to be in your own collection…otherwise its burglary and destruction of property, jerk. In the same room is a 1960 Flag made of Sculpt-metal from the collection of Robert Rauschenberg, very nice of him to put this one on loan for the show. They are the only case of a break-up becoming a friendship I guess, I would’ve sold it personally.
I imagine Jasper Johns, now aged 77, being one of those stubborn old man characters shown in the movies, like a Walter Matthau if he had been a painter. I see Jasper the man in the show, but it’s not a nice experience, I see him picking up a paintbrush, telling us to shove it and don’t ask questions. I heard he was here in Chicago, did he see this show? I thought I saw him on the street the other day, if it was really Jasper Johns I am not one hundred percent sure, but he didn’t look happy.