Flags, Jasper Johns; Universal Limited Art Editions

Exhibition Label: “Make a Mark: Art of the 1960s,” Mar-2008, Lara Kuykendall Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Take a canvas. Put a mark on it. Put another mark on it. Jasper Johns. “Sketchbook Notes,” 1965 In the 1960s artists from the United States and beyond strove to “make a mark” on the art world and the culture at large by exploring the nature of creativity. Each of the three themes in this exhibition, color + form, gesture + splatter, and layer upon layer, shows how vivid and dynamic the art of this decade was. Some artists used color and geometric shapes abstractly, often to foster unusual optical effects, whereas others employed the personal, autographic gesture of expressionism. Still other artists exploited various methods of layering to create new kinds of collage. By doing something to an object or putting marks on a surface, artists in the 1960s responded to the realms of art, politics, and popular culture. The objects and images they made defined the visual culture of their generation. Exhibition Label: "Views of Vietnam," Oct-2006, Steve Goddard From the mid-1950s on, Jasper Johns made paintings and prints given over entirely to the image of the American flag. He rendered this seemingly inalterable image with a variety of techniques and slightly varied stylistic approaches. By the time the U.S. was deep into the Vietnam War, when this lithograph was made, Johns was subverting his flag images in subtle ways. In this case, the top flag is rendered in colors that are the opposite of the flag’s actual colors. If you stare at the small with dot in the center of the flag for a brief time and then shift your gaze to the black dot in the center of the bottom flag, you will see the flag in its actual colors. By using a well-known characteristic of human vision (if the color receptors in the retina become saturated with one color, and then are allowed to rest on a neutral ground, they will give the mind the impression of seeing the opposite color) Johns seems to be associating the flag with questions about the reliability of what we see and know. The following year he again used the green, black and orange American flag in a poster proclaiming “moratorium.” Exhibition Label: "Conflicting Memories," Oct-2003, Steve Goddard It is possible to argue that all thinking requires some form of memory, even at a neurological level. Flags reminds us that some information is processed even before we consciously think about it. If you focus your gaze on the dot in the center of the green, black and orange flag and hold it steady for about a minute and then quickly shift your gaze to the dot in the center of the gray flag, you will see that your eye has "remembered" the image and compensated by conveying it in complementary colors, which Johns has correctly calculated to be red, white and blue. While this is a common optical illusion, it is nonetheless what we experience. Can we trust the flag in other ways?