Art Lies, Volume 27, Summer 2000 Page: 21
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FALLING
EYES
The Bridge between the Physical
and the Metaphysicalby Benito Huerta
Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
"In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psy-
chological state, my emotions.... I sort of stuck to my guns
for a while but eventually it seemed like a losing battle.
Finally one must simply drop the reserve." 1
-Jasper Johns
In tthe work
Pof Jasper
&..Johns has
been understood as an engage ent with issues of "art" and
"what is art?" He was even considered a "saboteur" and an
"artists' artist." In the last two decades, Johns' work has
evolved from this distant watchman to the spy examining
his immediate environment and childhood remembrances
to the contemplative evaluating the universe and our rela-
tionship to it. These steps have revealed Johns' work to benot only autobiographical but also political and philosoph-
ical. One feels that Johns is lying on a couch and slowly
unraveling his life as the impatient viewer waits for the
great catharsis that may not even come.
In the late seventies Jasper Johns was ending his
series of crosshatch paintings with a series that was to fore-
shadow his most personal work of the eighties. In 1980,
Johns' created a series of paintings and one drawing entitled
Tantric Detail. These works are characterized by a cross-
hatching pattern broken in a vertical tripanel, distinguished
by a skull and testicles with a penetrating penis. As Mark
Rosenthal states in his catalogue essay to Johns' Philadelphia
exhibition of 1988, these works are a meditation on Eros and
mortality. The subjects of sex and death provided Johns'
work, for the next few years, with a vehicle to express his
most personal and, possibly, political concerns.ARTLIES SUMMER 2000
nPr
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Kalil, Susie & Bryant, John. Art Lies, Volume 27, Summer 2000, periodical, 2000; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228057/m1/23/: accessed May 7, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .