Jasper Johns, 1954-1958: Persecution and the Art of Painting

In the years after World War II, the theoretical and technical treatment of totalitarianism as a political praxis was systematically repressed and supplanted in the United States by analyses that recast totalitarianism as a psychological and sociological phenomenon. This repression can also be traced in the history of Jasper Johns's early artistic production and its reception between 1954, when he received his first commission from his friend Rachel Rosenthal, and 1958, the year of his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery. Johns produced four paintings that played key roles in securing or denying him crucial opportunities to publish, exhibit, and sell his work in these years: Star, 1954; Flag, 1954-1955; Target with Plaster Casts, 1955; and Green Target, 1955. In their recourse to aesthetic strategies of exposure and concealment, expression and mechanization, attention and distraction, these works negotiated juridical, psychiatric, and perceptual techniques of identification and administration which recoded totalitarian subject positions as deviations from biopolitical norms of social and psychological health. My dissertation explores the ways in which Johns's implication within these biopolitical techniques as a painter, a homosexual, and a citizen of the United States both hindered and promoted his subsequent canonization as an artist. Chapter One of my dissertation, focusing on Star, describes how Johns, Rosenthal, and Robert Rauschenberg recovered the legacy of the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters under circumstances that demonstrated the continuity of a totalitarian logic of political exclusion with the McCarthyist politics of homosexual persecution. Chapter Two addresses the problematic specificity of Johns's relationship to expressionistic painting, showing how post-war artists' preoccupation with the problem of expression related to the newly dominant role of aesthetic disciplines and techniques in translating problems of political autonomy into factors of social and psychiatric administration. Chapter Three examines how the Westernization and modernization of Japanese Zen framed the early reception of Johns's Green Target in terms that appealed equally to an established taste for Abstract Expressionist painting and to an art market thirsting for novelty and exoticism, while suppressing works, like Target with Plaster Casts, which could not be accommodated within a Zen-inspired aesthetic of "pure experience."