Jasper johns

Tuesday

September 14, 2021

Flagging energy

Paintings so nice you’ll see them twice. That’s the gambit of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the gargantuan ‘simultaneous retrospective’ that’s currently split between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. OK, so the concurrent presentations of painting and sculpture by the neo-Dada, quasi-proto-Pop artist aren’t exactly duplicates. The museums promise a sort of imperfect symmetry: ‘each half of the exhibition will act as a reflection of the other, inviting viewers to look closely to discover the themes, methods, and coded visual language that echo across the two venues’.

Saturday

August 1, 2020

Michael Millner

Last of the red-hot lovers

John Giorno’s breakthrough work, he explains in his richly salacious telltale memoir of the Sixties New York art scene, was ‘Pornographic Poem’. In 1964, Giorno took phrases from mimeographed erotica and reconstituted them as homosexual lyric poetry: ‘I shivered/ looking up / at these erect pricks/ all different/ lengths/ and widths/ and knowing/ that each one/ was going up/ my ass hole.’ ‘Pornographic Poem’ is a ‘readymade’ or ‘cut-up’ that follows Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and William S. Burroughs — all of them artistic appropriators, and all of them Giorno’s lovers. These revolutionary artists are Giorno’s ‘great demon kings’.