Customer Reviews

Jasper Johns: Privileged Information

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The deeper I got into this book, the more I disliked it. It is an invasion of privacy...of a person who has decided to try and remain as private and secluded as he can be (which, by the way, is his right to do). I did read with interest as she helped to unravel the complexity behind his paintings, but did not find any interest in her exploration of his deeply personal life. Besides, the author has a tendency to rant and ramble for whole chapters at a time, which I found tedious to say the least. I gave the book 2 stars because I did learn a few things about Johns. But I can't really recommend the book to anyone.

May we all live to see the day when the present fad of mixing up biography with criticism ends! Once again a critic (i.e., wannabe artist) does her best to soil the work of a truly creative artist by trying to impose her own notions of his life on his work. Or is it the other way around--imposing notions of the work onto the life? It hardly matters--the result is the same. Nothing of substance is said about either, and in the process of saying nothing, she drags in all kinds of ugliness. Of course all the while, the author is claiming to be a great admirer of Johns, even as she purveys her gossip and hearsay. Finally, as is usually the case with such psychographers, she's just revealing her own unsavory motives and hungering ego. The only reason I give the book two stars is that she's not a bad writer. Too bad she had to waste her talent on such a project.

This is a non-standard, art-detective approach to weaving a tapestry composed of art interpretation and biography. The art detective slant makes the erudite prose forward-moving. Johnston does a good job reporting her detection of a motif hidden in plain sight in Johns' canvases. She conveys formative experiences that may be relevant to why the motif was included in paintings Johns produced year after year. In so doing, she discovers fascinating information from Johns' life. This includes repeated abandonment in childhood, family lore, patterns of his living with Robert Rauschenberg, participation in the 1950s power group of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and himself. She discusses the polydetermined sources of the images and patterns in the paintings. The author's work here complements similarly-themed writing of the period, including the 1989 Pollock biography, Larry Rivers autobiography, 2003's *Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara*, Lee Hall's Betty Parsons biography, Calvin Tomkins' *Off The Wall*, and Irving Sandler's memoir.

Readers who posted reviews on this site seem to have more objections to Johnston's book than the critics did at the time of the volume's publication. If the objections involve homosexuality, one wonders how the criticisms would sound had the artist been a secretly-married straight man being researched, or an asexual ascetic. Protestations about the homophobia Johnston explores are refuted by the increasingly documented 1950s actions of critics such as Clem Greenberg with Pollock, Harold Rosenberg, etc in the books noted above. The objection about an artist's privacy seems more viable, but here Johnston is not discussing a reclusive figure such as Clyfford Still who removed the artworks from public view but rather Jasper Johns, who participated actively in a growing, lucrative art market and publicity venues such as The Simpsons. Whether Privileged Information should have been released prior to John's death is a debating point; I for one am very glad to have read the book as it has sharpened my appreciation for the art many times over.

Jill would have you believe that every ounce of Jasper's creativity is saturated by his repressed sexuality. He has purposefully kept us all at arms length while coding his entire oeuvre with clues to his "secret". (and here I was thinking that Bob and he had just been friends). Some of what Jill says is true, however she takes hold of sparse biographical information and slathers it with accusations, paranoia, and just good ole fashioned gibberish.
I find it ridiculous to imply that Jasper has done nothing more in his entire career than to publicly evade questions of his homosexuality, all the while flaunting it publicly in his works. I find this view insulting to Johns, artists in general, as well as the homosexual community. (hey Bob Dylan has been evasive to the press, lied in interviews, has created an entire body of work laden with hidden meanings, double entendre, and tried to keep his private life, well, private... perhaps Jill should write a book about his closet homosexuality?) - sorry couldn't resist.
Jill would have you believe that Johns has controlled the reception of his work. He even knew that his flag would overthrow abstract expressionism and reinvent the art world. All the time proclaiming that a flag is just a flag, and laughing maniacally that his subversive 'gay' flag took down the machismo ab ex's strangle hold. Now he controls the pen and tongue of every critic. Even Kramer speaks only in code, attacking Jasper's "work", when he's really attacking Johns for being gay. - I may have exaggerated here, Johns certainly can't control every critic's tongue. Here is Jill standing alone, carrying the truth that we've all been deprived of, ready as meek little David to take down Goliath with a pebble etched with a single three letter word. How's that for accusational and paranoid?
As far as gibberish, just try to wrap your head around anything that she says about Jasper, Bob, John, or Merce's fathers. It seems as if Jasper couldn't have an opening until the day his father died? And then arranged for the entire art world to honor him on his father's death anniversaries?
By the way Judy Garland is beloved by gay men, that may be my favorite piece of information I "learned" from reading this awful, awful book. awful, just plain awful.


I was reading the introduction to Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space" when I stumbled across a wonderful example of what really irritates me about this book. This is Bachelard's explanation of the shortcomings of psychoanalysis in regards to deciphering the work of poets. I found it particularly apt in relation to Jill's abusive interpretation of Jasper's art and personal life.
"And right away, the psychoanalyst will abandon ontological investigation of the image, to dig into the past of a man. He sees and points out the artists secret sufferings. He explains the flower by the fertilizer.
The phenomenologist does not go that far. For him, the image is there, the word speaks, the word of the poet speaks to him. There is no need to have lived through the poet's sufferings in order to seize the felicity of speech offered by the poet - a felicity that dominates tragedy itself. Sublimation in poetry towers above the psychology of the mundanely unhappy soul. For it is a fact that poetry possesses a felicity of its own, however great the tragedy it may be called upon to illustrate."

He then later quotes C.G. Jung further expanding this line of thought, "interest is diverted from the work of art and loses itself in the inextricable chaos of psychological antecedents; the poet becomes a 'clinical case', an example, to which is given a certain number in the psychopathia sexualis. Thus the psychoanalysis of a work of art moves away from its object and carries the discussion into a domain of general human interest, which is not in the least peculiar to the artist and, particularly, has no importance for his art." (On the Relation of Analytical Pyschologyto the Poetic Art)

Abandoned? That sorry father of his went to his mothers house and stole him from the playpen which was outside. Those men could do anything and get away with it. The grandfather literally ruled the town. Big Fish in a Wee town. That's the story I heard all my life and there was no reason for mama to lie--she was on the scene at the time. The snoopy author didn't talk to enough people.

If you could just pick out some of the info it would be interesting; but her crude slant on everything was rather pathetic. It was like trying to see the big dipper thru a small crack in the wall of an outhouse.

i love jasper johns, how dare she degrade this man. is she jealous? hahaha.
i bet so.
he is one of the twelve riches artist in america. one of the twelve that gets his money. not like some good artist who dont see much of their money...
i have more to say, but dont know how to post.