BRACK: The creativity of Jasper Johns is mind-blowing

See if you can find your home state in this abstract map of the United States.

By Andy Brack, editor and publisher  |  A broad retrospective of the art of South Carolina-raised Jasper Johns is too much to absorb.  Hundreds of paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures split between museums in New York and Philadelphia, cover several periods of the career of the artist, who still lives and works in Connecticut.

The Whitney Museum of American Art hosts half of the Mind/Mirror exhibition, which features familiar and iconic works by Johns, as well as pieces that offer insights into his creative depth over more than six generations.  The Philadelphia Museum of Art, another museum with which Johns has a long relationship, hosts a second half of the show, which features more than 500 pieces of Johns’s work.

Here’s what the Whitney says about the show, which started in September and runs through Feb. 13: “Johns’s early use of common objects and motifs, language, and inventive materials and formats upended conventional notions of what an artwork is and can be. His profoundly generative practice helped spark movements including Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, among others, and has inspired successive generations of artists to this day.”

After witnessing the boundless enthusiasm in Johns’ familiar paintings of flags, targets, numbers and other icons, one realizes how much the intense artist produced through the years.  There’s a section of the exhibit where viewers see works that Johns developed when he lived in Edisto Island in the 1960s.  You can see palmetto fronts as part of one painting and representation of the blueprints from his grandfather’s house in Allendale in others.  There also are paintings in what obviously was a gray period and others from  a more recent celestial period.  

Frankly, it was all a bit much — but in a good way.  To truly appreciate the depth and breadth of Johns’s work, another visit to the museum — plus a jaunt to the companion exhibition in Philadelphia — will be required.  (If you go, make sure you check the times that the exhibitions are open. Philadelphia’s museum is oddly closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.)

Another map of states.

This overwhelming display of modern art cements Johns’s position as one of America’s most important artists and, perhaps, the greatest living artist in the country today.

The High Line

Note a famous skyscraper in the background.

A fun part of the quick trip to New York was a jaunt down the High Line, the public park in Manhattan’s West Side built on an old, elevated train line.  It features art, plantings and great views of the city in a section that stretches a few blocks from Penn Station to the Whitney.  

Levy cleans her sculpture.

Along the way, we met New York artist Hannah Levy, who was cleaning a marble and stainless steel sculpture of a large orthodontic retainer in an outdoor alcove along the narrow park’s path.  She said the piece, created during the pandemic, has been up for about six months and will come down in March.  

“The piece points to the strangeness of orthodontics and comments on straight teeth as a marker of class, in part because of orthodontics’ exorbitant price,” according to the artist’s statement near the work.  Not exactly the kind of thing you expect to see every day — but certainly interesting and thought-provoking, as was all of the art in the Whitney just a few hundred yards away.

If you get a chance, see the exhibits of Johns’s work.  If you can’t, learn more about him.  And check out local museums and galleries and explore how local works can provide new energy into your day-to-day life.

 Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Charleston Currents, and publisher of the Charleston City Paper.  Have a comment?  Send to: editor@charlestoncurrents.com.