The Solace Project #34
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Dear Friends,<br/><br/>I went to the <a href="https://whitney.org/exhibitions/jasper-johns">Whitney Museum’s exhibition of Jasper Johns’ </a>work a few weeks ago and haven’t stopped thinking about the flag paintings.  Maybe it’s because my friend Stefanie--who goes to exhibitions like it’s her job, seeking out the popular and the complex, the mainstream and the counterculture, and then texts me to recommend or ask what I think--told me that she just doesn’t get the flag paintings. <br/><br/>How could she not get the flag paintings? In my mind, I immediately flashed to <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79372">Map</a>, the flag painting from 1961 now in the Whitney exhibition, but usually at the Museum of Modern Art. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. Her comment triggered me a bit into my go-to “I’ll figure it out and rescue her,” a high-functioning position that I fall into, the polar opposite of solace. She wasn’t even asking me to explain, but have books and Google and I’ll save the day: Johns traded in direct transposition of common images and signs, he favored “the things the mind already knows,” and starting in about 1955 (he was in his twenties), he took the art world by storm, turning his back on hard-to-read abstract expressionism by starting to use maps, targets, stenciled alphabets and numbers. The curators at the Whitney tell us that Johns “had no particular interest in the nationalistic association of these subjects” yet is it hard for me, at least, to look at the maps and not think of politics and states rights and dividing lines and ideas. Johns made the map paintings during the Cold War, through the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War. When he made the one now owned by MoMA, John F. Kennedy had just been elected president and the painting surely evoked a messy but glorious land, from sea to shining sea.  Now, that same painting is just as relevant, portraying a country just as
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serenaM
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