I made the choice carefully. I guess that is the best word, though polemically
also comes to mind. The decision arose, not from any absence of
earlier studies, or from any longstanding allegiance to Johns as an
artist, but from his flags themselves, which seemed to give access to
exactly those questions that any present-day citizen ought to have on
her mind. As so often, the key issues engage politics while also
defining an art form, painting. They do so directly, as Johns’s first Flag,
laboriously manufactured in 1954-55, aimed to declare. To be even more
specific, I am concerned with the coming together, within a single
image, of politics and painting: Flag provides an immediate
and local instantiation of both terms. It also volatilizes the question
of art’s role within what we often too blandly term context: at issue is the national and political culture to which art belongs.
Much of my account depends on getting in place at least a bare-bones
description of this object—how it looks and was made. The process was
elaborate. By now it has been carefully inventoried by others,
especially Fred Orton, whose findings I have relied on, but also been
able to expand.2
Here is what Johns did: using a bed sheet as backing and pencil marks
as guidelines, he built up the familiar pattern using small pieces of
cloth and newsprint he had torn or cut into bits. We know from a
photograph taken by Robert Rauschenberg that at least within the field
of stars, the process obscured an initial layer of drawing: sub-cubist
geometries which at one point, whether accidentally or otherwise, came
together to suggest the cheek, jaw and mouth of a glamorous female
face—the sort of visage de Kooning saw as epitomizing the seductions of
Woman. Yet all this was soon enough covered by bits of fabric or paper
that were dipped dangerously in hot wax—blue, white, or red—and pressed
into place within the penciled scaffolding of lines. Rauschenberg’s
photo records the tins and tubs of Johns’s homemade apparatus, as well
as the requisite wax; the process seems so makeshift that Johns’s
comment in the mid 1960s that “it’s sort of in bad shape; it tends to
fall to pieces” makes perfect sense.3
Sometimes the printed snippets were obscured by the wax or the
layering, but at many places they can still be read by the naked eye:
ads, cartoons, headlines. The familiar press repertoire is sampled, with
each utterly ordinary fragment–real estate promotions; the
help-wanteds; stock reports; mentions of the Middle East and the State
Department; advice from a “Famous Hollywood Figure Telling you How to
Reduce”–speaking to and of the texture of everyday life: Kerouac’s
“everythingness” in metonymic form. There is even a recipe, not for
apple pie, granted, but for applesauce, which when comfortable normalcy
is to be signaled, can certainly serve as second best. The result is
that time and place seem both present and muted; each scrap has its own
message, yet also stands in for its origin elsewhere, at another quite
ordinary moment and site.
