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03/19/2014 09:00 AMAmerican artist Jasper Johns is known for being a challenging person to interview. Michael Crichton, a critic and friend of Johns, dubbed the artist’s “deadpan and oblique way of answering questions about his life and work” as “the Johnsian conversation.”
A group exhibition at the Yale School of Art attempts to open up a new round of “Johnsian conversations” among 20 contemporary artists and approximately 25 works, in media that include painting, video, photography, sculpture, and multi-media. The show is titled Reliable Tension, or: How to Win a Conversation about Jasper Johns.
“Johns acts as a muse and model for evoking tensions between mediums, cultural iconography, and material languages,” says John Pilson, critic in the Yale School of Art and the exhibition’s curator, “while at the same time challenging our definitions of an artwork’s subject.”
Pilson proposed the idea of the show to his colleagues a year and a half ago. He says he was inspired to put forth an artist-curated exhibition as opposed to an art historian’s or scholar’s show.
“I’ve found that listening to people talk about Jasper Johns, certain things were provoked, which I found mysterious…There was something very intriguing to me about the way people talked about Jasper Johns, and the subject of conversation seemed to always be about what it means to choose a subject, what it means to rely on careful choices of materials in order to present an image, and also this question about what it means to be contemporary,” he says.
“From my understanding, Pilson continues, “Johns came into the stream, the development of American art, at a moment in which expressive content, gesture—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning; these were titanic figures—and also the idea of painting an image, choosing an image to paint, was being revisited.”
Pilson notes that the show includes a wide range of media and is not chronological.
“There’s the issue of novelty and how artists relate to a new thing and how they relate to an old thing,” he says. “For me, the title Reliable Tension is a two-word poem—the place artists occupy…in relationship to art history.”
Almost every artist whose work is in the show was selected by Pilson after a direct conversation and studio visit.
Among the artists represented are Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Alighiero Boetti, Glenn Ligon, Kianja Strobert, Alix Pearlstein, Stuart Elster, Raymond Pettibon, and Rachel Harrison.
“Often I would come and just tell them what was on my mind and we would arrive almost together on what would be the most appropriate piece,” he says. “I really enjoy visiting artists in their studios and I pay real careful attention to how they talk about what they do, and so the idea of the investment in mark making, the investment in materials—there’s a lot that kind of crosses mediums. I see it as a virtue in my mind that there’s many, many mediums and I think we’re in a moment when a lot of students are interested in the virtues of multi-mediums: ‘I make sculpture, I do photographs, I make videos’—this is a way of being dynamic.”
Referring to Johns as a muse for other artists, Pilson says, “The more you look at Johns, the more he reveals. One could curate a show of Jasper Johns’s work in such a way you wouldn’t know [it was all his] because he’s done so many things, these iconic works. I also gotta say, if there’s a virtue in an artist-curated show, it’s putting people together that only [another artist] would and also putting someone who’s at the beginning of their career next to someone who’s a major, major figure.”
Pilson thinks it’s interesting that Johns’s work, “not by design, but whatever confluence of energies, is also credited with changing the American art market—the most money ever spent on a living artist’s work. Students ask that question, too: ‘What does a market do to the poetics of a work; does it change it?’”
According to Pilson, all the works selected to be in the exhibition point to a productive anxiety about the meaning of medium in a post-medium age, which is a question that for many started with Johns and continues today.
“The show allows each artist to be experienced individually, while at the same time suggesting a share exploration that binds wildly disparate practices together,” he says.
Reliable Tension, or: How to Win a Conversation About Jasper Johns is on view through Friday, March 28 at 32 Edgewood Avenue Gallery of the Yale University School of Art in New Haven. The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. For more information, call 203-432-2600 or visit www.artgallery.yale.edu.