536 / 676
536
MAX KOZLOFF
sionist, after all, ever claimed to have gotten his ideas from dreams,
least of all ideas as irritatingly commonplace as these. The suggestion
of imagery received automatically and unconsciously had an implausi–
bility that contrasted with the actual product, than which nothing
could be more ordinary. With his first public showing at the Castelli
Gallery in 1958, the critical term Neo-Dada was created.
If
one examines this idea in the light of Johns's work since then,
the Dada element is, I think, only half applicable. But this is already
fifty percent more than
is
acceptable for the many who eventually
came to reject the entire label. The single, continuing, undeniable
principle of Johns is his practice of "displacement"-the transpo–
sition of an idea, motif, or object from one context to another. Johns
does not undertake a single work without operating by displacement
and attempting to widen its possibilities. Furthermore, it is necessary
that the one context "art," or at least, recent art, be fixed, while the
other context varies. By selecting flags, targets, numbers, letters, coat
hangers, maps, shadow outlines, the artist elevates the function of
choice
as the decisive imaginative act. It circumvents the original usage
of the motif and opens it up
to
a completely different form of con–
sumption. Johns himself has said, "I am concerned with a thing's not
being what it was, with its becoming something other than what
it
is,
with any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely and with
the slipping away of that moment...." The more this aim brings
him to emphasize the displacement as the transforming agent (as op–
posed to execution), the more a Dadaist he is, the more, in fact, he
becomes the single most important inheritor of Marcel Duchamp. In–
deed, Johns is responsible for reintroducing Duchamp as the most
potent influence on the younger generation of American artists.
Still, he is singularly unfaithful to his mentor. Not only because
his themes are different, and his outlook more public, but because he
conceives his work primarily as a painter (which he can't help being),
does he part ways with Duchamp, particularly the Duchamp who has
striven successfully
to
repudiate his own painterly gifts. In Johns there
is
an involvement with paint handling that comes overtly out of
de Kooning and Philip Guston. Thus, even though one of his primary
accomplishments has been to formulate predictable and reproducible
structures for the picture, he contradicts the nature of those structures
by implementing them unpredictably, and, what's more, with a free–
dom gained by Action painting. Further, when Johns displays patinaed
bronze casts of flashbulbs and lightbulbs, he joins and yet opposes
the things in themselves with a way they might be represented, not