Jasper Johns
Reading Charlie Finch’s (of Coagula and Most Art Sucks fame) catty and bitchy review of the new Johns show caused me deep anger not only because it seemed to be homophobic, but also because it is so canonical and not very creative. Finch is usually our most iconoclastic, complicated and astute critic. But the critical consensus from the beginning of John’s career was the assumption that his discretion and dislike of interpretation could be viewed as being closeted and by extension all of John’s work was queer work, and that the work got worse because of his hermeticism.

John’s newest colleges, assemblages and paintings are the first work since the Target series of the early 60s that directly concerns issues of male bodies and the first ever that talks explicitly of those bodies working together queerly. Ironically, this matters less then the obvious care about formal concerns relating to his recent severe classicism. The austere reflections of bodies in desire make this so little about the things critics usually care about. Things like line placement, or history, or colour, or devotion to out of fashion artists. Devotion to the body as a thing rather then a theory, then.

Up to this series, if one only looked at the work on the walls, and did not read critical accounts or biographies, John’s queerness disguised well. Here in the new works called Catenary (which is the muscle that holds up either the penis or the labia and also a math term used to describe a chain hanging from two ends) Think of one end as literal and one as metaphorical. Think of one end as the muscles of the body and the other as abstracted geometries. Think of the chain that swings between them as Johns swinging beween form and metaphor. Between abstraction and reality. Between the body and the sky. The literal and the poetic extensions are never addressed in Finch, who thinks of them as just one thing.

Finch does not notice John’s classicism, the career history, the formalism of his colour choices, the dialogue with other writing. He assumes repeatedly that the strange, small grey works here, and the problematic sexual references are just about fucking. That the hermeticism of Johns work is not a virtue and that his work has declined with success, as opposed to being more strange, more exhaustive and more hauntingly, mournfully beautiful. It is the work of a man close to death who’s children were only ever his paintings.

To assume that every piece of art by queer artists is a reflection of sexuality is an explicit dismissal of other readings and other energies. The conservative critic Robert Hughes once wrote about Robert Rauschenberg’s 1959 combine. The combine features an Angora goat with a tire around its middle; Hughes clearly called it a symbol of sodomy. Rauschenberg responded, “It’s a miracle Hughes did not get run over more.”

We risk being run over, if we do not look at the art on the walls. Assuming that queer artists not only talk about being queer, but talk about other concerns, both formal and personal gives a larger respect to the pieces in question. Calling a work poor because it did not fulfill the desires of the critic in question is much more shallow then anything that Johns has placed in his new show.