Page 31 - Studio International - January 1970

we call paintings and sculptures, drawings all, its devices are apparent, and its paradoxes
and prints. And while these objects may beget are only a charade. Displacement is only
some valid wavering in our own inner confi- juxtaposition, while the new surface as
dence of self, they also tempt us to see them resilient clay or bodily metaphor is merely
as pathological utterances, opening onto a obvious mimicry. Brainwave graphs and X-
dilemma of the ego. ray photographs, these are nothing more than
`Depersonalization is the characteristic pic- data. As for the allusions to memory and to
ture which occurs when the individual does sound, they issue from evident pictorial tech-
not dare to place his libido either in the out- niques. Yet, if one is finally seduced into read-
side world or in his own body . . . the individual ing larger meanings into such art, it's not only
does not recognize himself as a personality. because of a human consonance in the make-
His actions appear to him as automatic. He up of the artist and the viewer, a fund of
observes his actions and behaviour from the legitimate doubt, but because language itself
point of view of a spectator... . is susceptible, a kind of mirror trap, exhibi-
The patient sees his face in the mirror changed, ting in reverse one's optical and sensory con-
rigid, and distorted. His own voice seems fusions. Or really, my doubts, my confusions.
strange and unfamiliar to him, and he The matter could have been dropped here,
shudders at the sound of it as if it were not were it not for the fact that the 'division of the
himself speaking.' (Paul Schilder, in The self' constituted an historical phenomenon as
Image and Appearance of the Human Body.) well as an iconographical interlude. In the mid-
A diabolical view of this no-man's land is fifties, Abstract Expressionism was thought
lithographed by Johns in Voice. Its title is un- to be a loose-limbered species of personal
necessary for us to empathize the visual cata- revelation, whose pictorial mark was charged
ract as a violent, ragged, hoarse sound, with the electricity of a psycho-physical im-
perhaps even a cry or a scream. And its pulse. After the mid-sixties, art, whatever else
modulations in tone are suggestive of varia- it was, became almost an un-manned thing, 13
Robert Rauschenberg
tions in timbre. Moreover, the image itself crafted or manufactured by agents other than Booster 1967
looks like a larynx or throat, a fleshy chamber the artist, who receded to a command Lithograph
72 x 36 in.
for the passage of air and sound waves. designer's position. In recent criticism, the Edition of 38.
Mottled and veined, its surface insinuates the movement from the one state of affairs to the
14
idea of tissue. Finally, the subject is rendered other is usually treated as a formal or stylistic Jasper Johns
as if through some immense fluoroscope, the change. But Action Painting produced a Voice 1967
Lithograph
normally light areas in it appearing dark, and dragging effect upon the look of subsequent 484x 32 in.
vice-versa. All these devices emphasize a con- works of art, and a gravitational pull on their Edition of 30.
text in which one is looking, not at an ordered effort to be freed from the cliches of gymnastic
composition, but observing something bio- `confession'. While pictorial spontaneity may
logically alive. Is it Johns's 'voice' that we see, not have been responsive to new conditions of
magically turned into its own visible instru- experience, or needs for control, it still repre-
ment? Only to the degree—but it is a very sented a norm of personal integration for the
plausible degree—that he thinks of himself as artist. Johns, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, and
two individuals: the maker and the observer, Morris made a tactical assault upon that norm
or even better, the speaker and the listener. by turning its basic assumptions inside out.
His conversational habit of always referring Every succeeding metamorphosis in their work
to himself in the third person indefinite— 'one' — was a front for the increasing withdrawal of
almost succeeds in evoking 'an other', some intimacy between the creator and his pro-
`one' else, as the subject of his sentences. duct. How alarming, finally, was this rite of
Neither teasing nor diffident, this ventrilo- passage, how grim its achievement. The dia-
quism wants to dispossess his talk, and more lectics of espionage, the poignant imprint,
importantly, his art, of its human locus, to the Marsyas complex, the mirror reversals, the
de-stigmatize his own perception as the frame- medical chart: these were guises for a sensi-
work of one individual's subjectivity. Voice. bility caught out in the open. Only the body
. . . The word is terribly alone. It derives a image, dismembered and examined, could
weird generality from the lack of an article or symptomize both the desire for, and the
adjective. (The same can be said of Liar, the flight from, exposure. Appendages, organs,
title of one of his most equivocal paintings.) glands, all the palpitations and pulses of the
Out from the lower right margin of this litho- mortal, were centre-staged, only to show how
graph poke the silkscreen transfer photo- much of the governing mind had been
graphed tines of a fork. Protruding down extruded from them, or could not be associa-
about a foot to the left are echoing crayon ted with them. The idea of art as, in any sense,
scribbles that would cancel over the dif- a personification of the artist, died of murder.
fering levels of illusion in the overall work. For those now basking in the comfort of
It's a small episode taken in itself, but a classic having nothing to reveal, for those taking
instance of how Johns revokes interpretation. profit in the liberation from themselves, a
For in the end, art of this tenor refuses to debt had been incurred. q
deliver itself into the hands of would-be
psychoanalysts. In it, a counterfeit abnorma-
lity spices an otherwise accessible form. After