“It may be a great work of his to have brought doubt into the air that surrounds art.” Jasper Johns wrote these words in A.i.A.’s July/August 1969 issue, for a remembrance of Marcel Duchamp, who had died the previous year. Perhaps the most significant heir to Duchamp’s legacy, Johns took up the doubt in the air around art in his early works of the 1950s and set about working through it. Since then he has continued to devise ways of approaching meanings, materials, and artistic processes to amplify questions about what art is and how it works. On the occasion of “Mind/Mirror,” the Johns retrospective opening simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in late September, we have invited eight artists to comment on the possibilities that Johns’s work has opened and the problems it poses, and how their own work has been shaped through encounters with his.
Johns’s whole trajectory is illuminating. I do not know everything he has done with printmaking, but I feel I have a holistic understanding. Painting all the time can be a little much. It is good to take some time to explore other creative situations. A print studio is a place to take big or small risks and perhaps make small or big discoveries. Two or three days of working with a real printmaker is a break and a chance to be with distinctly talented people. The smell of a print studio is sweet. The inks and chemicals are refreshing after being around oil paint and turpentine too long. There are the colors of the ink too. They’re different and can’t be replicated with oil colors. Paper is another big part of the craft. Such delicate and special papers can be deployed to carry an image. Once you start noticing the subtle aspects of everything, you can begin to build a world.