edit: it fucking rained last night and ruined my fucking canvas. also, could my throat decide to either get really bad or clear the fuck up?
and some
Tell me a story.
Look how much I love stories! It actually was a good book.
I'll tell you the story of Jasper Johns and my shitty freshman art history final paper. Deal?
The concept of artist identity in painting seems at first glance to be utterly redundant; naturally, that which emanates from the self will necessarily be autobiographical, or at least in part. Must biographical background, then, be provided for an optimal understanding of the visual experience before viewing a work? Upon examining the various modes of artistic criticism available for Jasper Johns, one notices a startling disparity between methodologies and foci. Of particular interest may be the divaricating critical treatments of Johns homosexuality. Ken Silvers, in his article Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art, narrates Johns homosexuality in an organic style which creates the gay identity through language and semiotics, allusion and a socially constructionist approach. Diametrically opposed to this mode, one finds Jonathan Finebergs text Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, which ignores Johns homosexuality except in subtle ambiguities. Neither text can be said to be unabashedly impartial; the authors use strategic methodologies to construct divergent commentary from an identical source: the inarguable corporeality of Jasper Johns work.
Semantics play a telling role in the two texts. In the first sections of Finebergs writings about Johns, the author describes Johns ideology as one in which input becomes the focus of the artist. Fineberg puts the active role on Johns; rather than personifying the product/process of painting with furthering Johns own identity, Fineberg gives Johns the power of the catalyst: words like formulated, called out, and analyzed. Johns becomes the alpha male; masculinized in a typically heterosexual fashion, he acts on the painting in physically definable terms which create, godlike, a new world rather than retrieve the world of his subconscious. Johns, according to Fineberg, stopped at what is literally there, enjoying the physical presence of the art object in all its concreteness. In fact, Fineberg entirely dismisses iconography as a valid method of critique: the evidence does not support an iconographic reading. Instead, Fineberg credits any sensuality evidenced in the paintings as specifically due to experiencing what is [in the world] rather than recording an act of introspection. Intentionally or not, Fineberg invalidates any possibility of Johns creating his own sexual identity through painting.
Fineberg rarely refers explicitly to other artists and movements with which to compare and categorize Johns. Ken Silver, however, performs the act of outing Johns homosexuality, to which some argue Johns himself hinted. Silvers methodology depends on semiotics; he creates an iconicity of gayness by establishing an iconic ground. Nearly every painting which he critiques becomes subject to comparison and identification with a different gay artists work. Johns Figure No. 5, he writes, is an homage to Demuths coded portrait of William Carlos Williams, I Saw the Figure 5 in GoldJohns interest in Demuth was closely allied to his interest in Hartley[who evidences] striking similarities [to] Johns surfaces In making such comparisons with other undeniably gay artists, Silver substantiates the role that homosexuality played in Johns own work. This strategy works as a system of relative comparisons; just as pictures derive meaning from being compared to other pictures, artists gain identity in relation to other artists. Silvers attempts to neatly categorize Johns and create an iconicity of homosexuality.
Stylistically, Silvers applies the technique of colloquial, flowing prose as he analyses Johns paintings. This is only appropriate; he is, after all, giving Johns an identity, mythicizing his homosexuality in the tradition of the storyteller. In the words of social constructionist Ken Bergen, narrative accounting in the present era gains its character from long-standing traditions of story telling, oral history, accounts of personal memory, and a variety of literary genres. Another relevance of social constructionism dictates that the storyteller, or, one who uses such tactics, must have a predetermined endpoint. This endpoint is commonly saturated with value and, as such, this demand for a valued endpoint introduces a strong cultural component to the critique. Fineberg, writing to document and not to inoculate, does not write with such a value in mind as his final goal. Silver, whether intentionally or not, showcases his predetermined stance in his choice of narrative construction in his critique.
Discussing the paintings In Memory of My FeelingsFrank OHara and Periscope (Hart Crane), Silvers speaks of the inclusion of Frank OHaras name, which insists that we attend not only to his art but to his person, and summarily relates Johns own feelings of desolation during the turbulent final years of his love affair with Robert Rauschenberg to the painting in question. The use of such anecdotal tactics are conspicuously absent in Finebergs cut-and-dry narrative; also conspicuous is the fact that Fineberg does not choose to include In Memory of My Feelings in his anthology. Discussing Periscope, Fineberg mentions Cranes text as influential only in its charged nature and an iconographic reference to Johns work in the line dim past reversed, which only ambiguously suggests a denial of his homosexual past. In contrast, the first line in which Silver mentions Crane says that the poem isa memorialto his gay poet ancestor, Walt Whitman, immediately allying the work, and subsequently, Johns, with a latent homosexual activism.
One could argue that Fineberg ignores the fact of Johns homosexuality because he does not believe it is influential in the context of his art. One could also make a strong case concerning Silvers sensationalizing Johns gayness to further his own ends. The format of textbook, in which Johns is a small part of the cohesive work, should ideally not be a pulpit from which the author airs his personal feelings. Still, to ignore sexuality and identity as even a possible component of arts meaning, as Fineberg does, seems a personal bias in its own right. This being said, while Fineberg is decidedly lax in this matter (sexuality and homosexuality as it pertains to art cannot even be found in the books index), Silver should in no way be accused of impartiality; his entire essay, in the largest sense, uses diachronic tactics to historicize gay art and as such give it meaning and legitimacy.
Both artists employ the condemnable tactic of the sweeping generalization to further their own ends. Silver makes unqualified statements like As has long been recognized, well-known, and it must be obvious, in conjunction with trivia about the gay art world. They are unqualified in that Silver never mentions which experts corroborated these facts which make the gay painter an institution with a history separate from the more general term of painter. However, they serve his purpose in establishing the tropes of homosexual art as a tradition in their own rights. The problem of validating such art as specifically gay is uniquely apt, as many of the artists who Silver cites have only recently been outed. Thus a sense of history must be created rather than discovered. Fineberg can afford to give Johns the creators role; his written product, the comprehensive textbook, is respected as history in itself. Silver, however, must delve beneath the surface so highly touted by Fineberg and grasp at straws to create a solid foundation in historical retrospect.
It is interesting to compare Silver and Finebergs interpretations of identical works of art by Johns. Silvers relentless use of personal opinions (I thinkWe have) comes into play again in his exegesis of Johns iconoclastic Target with Plaster Casts as a homosexual reference. Silver first dates the work on a literally sexual timeline: the making of [this work] more or less coincides in date with the beginning of [Johns and Rauschenbergs] relationship. In doing so, Silver places all construction in the context of the sexual arena and sets the stage for further analysis as pertaining to a specifically gay art. Fineberg, in contrast, uses Plaster Casts as the example which, to him, proves that Johns is a decidedly non-introspective painter. The furthest to which he will commit, in iconographic terms, is that the painting is a general evocation of the senses. Ironically, where Silver dates and thus memorializes the painting, Fineberg chooses this moment to see time as diachronic and historical. He says, Johnsretained [his motifs] indefinitely. He began making casts of body parts in 1953 and they have recurred intermittently in his work ever since One soon sees the pattern; critical methodologies serve the critic when, and only as long, as they prove his or her point. In a now familiar trope, Silver relates Target with Plaster Casts to a Walt Whitman poem of which the painting personally reminds him. We are again reminded that Silvers critique is above all a persuasive one, whereas Fineberg prefers that the reader form his or her own conclusion at the price of glaring omissions in content.
In Silvers unending quest to substantiate gay art as a thing unto itself, he weaves the synchronic with the diachronic, attempting to create a multidimensional and thus, literally substantial support for his argument. Just as cloth weavers work with both warp and woof to create the strongest tapestries, Silver compares Johns work not only to his predecessors and later events (the advent of AIDS) but also to Andy Warhol, a contemporary. Silver plays up the swishiness inherent to Warhols identity in such a way that Johns homosexuality is qualified and defined negatively. This methodology of negative identity formation serves not only to bolster Johns as an indisputably gay painter but invest the artist with a mysteriously layered iconography all his own. Silver begins by saying, if with Johns the irony which structures the work pulls us ineluctably farther inwith Warholwe remain outside Silver allies Warhol with camp, and follows with his ideology of taking his art at face value, [insisting] that we remain on the surface of things, derived from acute awareness that depthcould all too easily assume the shape of the closet Utilizing such sequential strategy, Silver makes it nigh on impossible to argue that Johns work must contain iconographic elements; when compared to Warhol, a self-avowed lover of all things and only things that are shallow, any other artists work seems fraught with rich layers of meaning.
Fineberg, on the other hand, eschews the comparative tapestry weaving in this limited sense; Johns becomes a thread in the narrative of a 500-page tome in which his homosexuality becomes scaled down to negligibility in favor of the cohesive effect. Silver, working with such a small scale, must magnify the individual threads such as shades of homosexuality in order to create the same effect of agglutination.
No form of critique can be considered wholly impartial and unbiased; omnipotence being out of the question, mere mortals must settle for the tangible and the experiential to dictate their decisions and subjectivities. Through Finebergs analysis, one receives a picture of Johns as a calculating scientist, determined to analyze the basic structural elements of painting; in contrast, Silver sees Johns work as a typical example of self-analysis in the form of homosexual outing. How can such disparate interpretations result from looking at an unarguably stable object: the same works of art, in fact? Methodology, one realizes, is always employed with an eye to the result created by the particular methods employed; this may seem self-evident, however, in the case of art theory, subjectivity is the sole diagnostic. As such, social constructs and categories like homosexuality are often used, with or without specific intent, to make greater alliances and prove one critics particular desideratum. An understanding of Jasper Johns as homosexual may or may not preclude an understanding of Jasper Johns as artist; in their choice to ignore or highlight this aspect, Fineberg and Silver disclose volumes about themselves and their chosen formats of information alongside the relative outing of their intended subject.
and some
Tell me a story.
Look how much I love stories! It actually was a good book.
I'll tell you the story of Jasper Johns and my shitty freshman art history final paper. Deal?
The concept of artist identity in painting seems at first glance to be utterly redundant; naturally, that which emanates from the self will necessarily be autobiographical, or at least in part. Must biographical background, then, be provided for an optimal understanding of the visual experience before viewing a work? Upon examining the various modes of artistic criticism available for Jasper Johns, one notices a startling disparity between methodologies and foci. Of particular interest may be the divaricating critical treatments of Johns homosexuality. Ken Silvers, in his article Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art, narrates Johns homosexuality in an organic style which creates the gay identity through language and semiotics, allusion and a socially constructionist approach. Diametrically opposed to this mode, one finds Jonathan Finebergs text Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, which ignores Johns homosexuality except in subtle ambiguities. Neither text can be said to be unabashedly impartial; the authors use strategic methodologies to construct divergent commentary from an identical source: the inarguable corporeality of Jasper Johns work.
Semantics play a telling role in the two texts. In the first sections of Finebergs writings about Johns, the author describes Johns ideology as one in which input becomes the focus of the artist. Fineberg puts the active role on Johns; rather than personifying the product/process of painting with furthering Johns own identity, Fineberg gives Johns the power of the catalyst: words like formulated, called out, and analyzed. Johns becomes the alpha male; masculinized in a typically heterosexual fashion, he acts on the painting in physically definable terms which create, godlike, a new world rather than retrieve the world of his subconscious. Johns, according to Fineberg, stopped at what is literally there, enjoying the physical presence of the art object in all its concreteness. In fact, Fineberg entirely dismisses iconography as a valid method of critique: the evidence does not support an iconographic reading. Instead, Fineberg credits any sensuality evidenced in the paintings as specifically due to experiencing what is [in the world] rather than recording an act of introspection. Intentionally or not, Fineberg invalidates any possibility of Johns creating his own sexual identity through painting.
Fineberg rarely refers explicitly to other artists and movements with which to compare and categorize Johns. Ken Silver, however, performs the act of outing Johns homosexuality, to which some argue Johns himself hinted. Silvers methodology depends on semiotics; he creates an iconicity of gayness by establishing an iconic ground. Nearly every painting which he critiques becomes subject to comparison and identification with a different gay artists work. Johns Figure No. 5, he writes, is an homage to Demuths coded portrait of William Carlos Williams, I Saw the Figure 5 in GoldJohns interest in Demuth was closely allied to his interest in Hartley[who evidences] striking similarities [to] Johns surfaces In making such comparisons with other undeniably gay artists, Silver substantiates the role that homosexuality played in Johns own work. This strategy works as a system of relative comparisons; just as pictures derive meaning from being compared to other pictures, artists gain identity in relation to other artists. Silvers attempts to neatly categorize Johns and create an iconicity of homosexuality.
Stylistically, Silvers applies the technique of colloquial, flowing prose as he analyses Johns paintings. This is only appropriate; he is, after all, giving Johns an identity, mythicizing his homosexuality in the tradition of the storyteller. In the words of social constructionist Ken Bergen, narrative accounting in the present era gains its character from long-standing traditions of story telling, oral history, accounts of personal memory, and a variety of literary genres. Another relevance of social constructionism dictates that the storyteller, or, one who uses such tactics, must have a predetermined endpoint. This endpoint is commonly saturated with value and, as such, this demand for a valued endpoint introduces a strong cultural component to the critique. Fineberg, writing to document and not to inoculate, does not write with such a value in mind as his final goal. Silver, whether intentionally or not, showcases his predetermined stance in his choice of narrative construction in his critique.
Discussing the paintings In Memory of My FeelingsFrank OHara and Periscope (Hart Crane), Silvers speaks of the inclusion of Frank OHaras name, which insists that we attend not only to his art but to his person, and summarily relates Johns own feelings of desolation during the turbulent final years of his love affair with Robert Rauschenberg to the painting in question. The use of such anecdotal tactics are conspicuously absent in Finebergs cut-and-dry narrative; also conspicuous is the fact that Fineberg does not choose to include In Memory of My Feelings in his anthology. Discussing Periscope, Fineberg mentions Cranes text as influential only in its charged nature and an iconographic reference to Johns work in the line dim past reversed, which only ambiguously suggests a denial of his homosexual past. In contrast, the first line in which Silver mentions Crane says that the poem isa memorialto his gay poet ancestor, Walt Whitman, immediately allying the work, and subsequently, Johns, with a latent homosexual activism.
One could argue that Fineberg ignores the fact of Johns homosexuality because he does not believe it is influential in the context of his art. One could also make a strong case concerning Silvers sensationalizing Johns gayness to further his own ends. The format of textbook, in which Johns is a small part of the cohesive work, should ideally not be a pulpit from which the author airs his personal feelings. Still, to ignore sexuality and identity as even a possible component of arts meaning, as Fineberg does, seems a personal bias in its own right. This being said, while Fineberg is decidedly lax in this matter (sexuality and homosexuality as it pertains to art cannot even be found in the books index), Silver should in no way be accused of impartiality; his entire essay, in the largest sense, uses diachronic tactics to historicize gay art and as such give it meaning and legitimacy.
Both artists employ the condemnable tactic of the sweeping generalization to further their own ends. Silver makes unqualified statements like As has long been recognized, well-known, and it must be obvious, in conjunction with trivia about the gay art world. They are unqualified in that Silver never mentions which experts corroborated these facts which make the gay painter an institution with a history separate from the more general term of painter. However, they serve his purpose in establishing the tropes of homosexual art as a tradition in their own rights. The problem of validating such art as specifically gay is uniquely apt, as many of the artists who Silver cites have only recently been outed. Thus a sense of history must be created rather than discovered. Fineberg can afford to give Johns the creators role; his written product, the comprehensive textbook, is respected as history in itself. Silver, however, must delve beneath the surface so highly touted by Fineberg and grasp at straws to create a solid foundation in historical retrospect.
It is interesting to compare Silver and Finebergs interpretations of identical works of art by Johns. Silvers relentless use of personal opinions (I thinkWe have) comes into play again in his exegesis of Johns iconoclastic Target with Plaster Casts as a homosexual reference. Silver first dates the work on a literally sexual timeline: the making of [this work] more or less coincides in date with the beginning of [Johns and Rauschenbergs] relationship. In doing so, Silver places all construction in the context of the sexual arena and sets the stage for further analysis as pertaining to a specifically gay art. Fineberg, in contrast, uses Plaster Casts as the example which, to him, proves that Johns is a decidedly non-introspective painter. The furthest to which he will commit, in iconographic terms, is that the painting is a general evocation of the senses. Ironically, where Silver dates and thus memorializes the painting, Fineberg chooses this moment to see time as diachronic and historical. He says, Johnsretained [his motifs] indefinitely. He began making casts of body parts in 1953 and they have recurred intermittently in his work ever since One soon sees the pattern; critical methodologies serve the critic when, and only as long, as they prove his or her point. In a now familiar trope, Silver relates Target with Plaster Casts to a Walt Whitman poem of which the painting personally reminds him. We are again reminded that Silvers critique is above all a persuasive one, whereas Fineberg prefers that the reader form his or her own conclusion at the price of glaring omissions in content.
In Silvers unending quest to substantiate gay art as a thing unto itself, he weaves the synchronic with the diachronic, attempting to create a multidimensional and thus, literally substantial support for his argument. Just as cloth weavers work with both warp and woof to create the strongest tapestries, Silver compares Johns work not only to his predecessors and later events (the advent of AIDS) but also to Andy Warhol, a contemporary. Silver plays up the swishiness inherent to Warhols identity in such a way that Johns homosexuality is qualified and defined negatively. This methodology of negative identity formation serves not only to bolster Johns as an indisputably gay painter but invest the artist with a mysteriously layered iconography all his own. Silver begins by saying, if with Johns the irony which structures the work pulls us ineluctably farther inwith Warholwe remain outside Silver allies Warhol with camp, and follows with his ideology of taking his art at face value, [insisting] that we remain on the surface of things, derived from acute awareness that depthcould all too easily assume the shape of the closet Utilizing such sequential strategy, Silver makes it nigh on impossible to argue that Johns work must contain iconographic elements; when compared to Warhol, a self-avowed lover of all things and only things that are shallow, any other artists work seems fraught with rich layers of meaning.
Fineberg, on the other hand, eschews the comparative tapestry weaving in this limited sense; Johns becomes a thread in the narrative of a 500-page tome in which his homosexuality becomes scaled down to negligibility in favor of the cohesive effect. Silver, working with such a small scale, must magnify the individual threads such as shades of homosexuality in order to create the same effect of agglutination.
No form of critique can be considered wholly impartial and unbiased; omnipotence being out of the question, mere mortals must settle for the tangible and the experiential to dictate their decisions and subjectivities. Through Finebergs analysis, one receives a picture of Johns as a calculating scientist, determined to analyze the basic structural elements of painting; in contrast, Silver sees Johns work as a typical example of self-analysis in the form of homosexual outing. How can such disparate interpretations result from looking at an unarguably stable object: the same works of art, in fact? Methodology, one realizes, is always employed with an eye to the result created by the particular methods employed; this may seem self-evident, however, in the case of art theory, subjectivity is the sole diagnostic. As such, social constructs and categories like homosexuality are often used, with or without specific intent, to make greater alliances and prove one critics particular desideratum. An understanding of Jasper Johns as homosexual may or may not preclude an understanding of Jasper Johns as artist; in their choice to ignore or highlight this aspect, Fineberg and Silver disclose volumes about themselves and their chosen formats of information alongside the relative outing of their intended subject.
VIEW 23 of 23 COMMENTS
Oh and Santa doesn't watch people get it on, that filthy German horrorshow Krampus does!
That makes me want to get off my lazy ass and read one of the dozens of books I have sitting around for decoration.