Both had some history with this giant of contemporary art, as did their respective institutions. My guess is that’s what happened here, and indeed, there was good reason for Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf to have had the same idea twenty years after the MoMA show, in 2016, which is apparently when their discussions began. So why do it? Sometimes two curators in different cities have the same thought at the same time.
There has already been plenty of criticism of this device, to use a word that Johns enshrined in several early titles: It makes unreasonable demands of time and travel on the visitor, it allows the curators to get away with a too-big show, it is East Coast–centric, etc. The double-venue idea brought out something essential, if hardly hidden, in Johns’s work: namely, his penchant for pairs of all kinds-near repetitions, mirror reversals, other symmetrical inversions, monochrome-polychrome pairs, optical illusions that toggle back and forth, tracings, casts, imprints, etc.
(Go ahead, call me a structuralist.) And the governing one, the metaterm, was the split nature of the exhibition itself. That is never easy to tease apart, but I suspect that my sense of clarity, which only grew after I saw the presentation in Philadelphia, was partly the result of experiencing Johns’s art as a set of oppositions. In any case, my feelings in the present were real, but what had occasioned them-the works in the show? The work of the show? Both? We are alive.” I read those words years ago in the catalogue of the 1996 Johns retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. Asked by a Danish reporter in 1969 about the state he hoped to induce in his viewers, Johns said, “When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. what? Calm? Clear? Alive to the particulars of visual experience? Those were the words I jotted down.
I CAME OUT OF “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney, not yet having seen the Philadelphia part of the show, feeling. © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Wall, from left: Two Flags, 1962 Corpse and Mirror II, 1974–75 Two Maps, 1989. He is well known for his depictions of the American flag and other US-related topics.View of “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” 2021–22, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Jasper Johns is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker whose work is associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art. Each a self-contained exhibition, the two related halves mirror one another and provide rare insight into the working process of one of the greatest artists of our time. This vast, unprecedented retrospective-simultaneously staged at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York-features a stunning array of the artist’s most celebrated paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints as well as many lesser-known and recent works. With a body of work spanning seventy years, and a roster of iconic images that have imprinted themselves on the public’s consciousness, Johns at ninety-one is still creating extraordinary artworks. September 29, 2021–Febru– Few artists have shaped the contemporary artistic landscape like Jasper Johns.
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