The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jasper Johns · oil on canvas with objects, several canvases joined in one long horizontal field · one object: the single painting with everything fixed to it, the related paintings of the same year weighed only as context · the words red, yellow and blue in paint and as letters standing from the surface, a chair turned over with a cast of part of a leg seated on it, scales of graded colour, a newspaper carried as print, a small canvas on hinges turned to the wall · 1964 · its holder not given · no part known to be lost or replaced
Mode
A painting with objects; a lexicon of the ways a thing is represented, set out along one long field
Mythos
The heir and the shadow of the father, built in one hinged canvas; the relic and the naming word summoned and left
Phase
1964, a decade after the first flags; the painter established, the readymade taken up again, the method of the sketchbook notes at work
Presentation
Oil on canvas with objects, several canvases joined in one long horizontal field; the colour words painted and standing out, a chair and a cast, a small canvas on hinges
Register
Cool and withholding; brightness where the primaries break from the grey, a small chill at the overturned chair
Scale
One long field read along its length; language, perception, the body, an object of use, print and the history of art, and no world beyond the question
Governing Proposition
A long horizontal painting of joined canvases sets side by side the words red, yellow and blue in paint and the same words as letters that stand out from the surface and throw shadows on it, a real chair turned over with a cast of part of a leg seated on it, scales of graded colour, a newspaper carried as print, and a small canvas on hinges turned so that its back faces the room. The wager of the painting is that a thing is never simply given but given according to some system, and that a field placing many ways of standing for a thing beside one another can make the title’s question visible and keep it open.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
According to What is dated 1964. It is oil on canvas with objects: several canvases joined into one long horizontal field, on which painting, printed matter and things fixed to the surface share a single plane. The work scored is that one painting with everything fixed to it, as it stands: the joined canvases, the painted words and the letters that stand out from them, the chair and the cast, and the small canvas on hinges with whatever its hidden face bears. No part of it is known to be lost or replaced, and nothing stands in place of an original.
Across it the words red, yellow and blue, a device the painter had used since about 1959, appear more than once: painted on the surface, and made as letters that stand out from the canvas and bend into the room, so that they throw shadows on the paint. A real chair is turned over and fixed to the canvas, with a cast of part of a human leg seated on it. There are bands of graded colour and grey, a newspaper carried as print, and grey brushwork binding the field. The number of canvases, the order of these things across the width and the materials of the objects are not given here.
Counted, the field holds at least seven ways of standing for a thing: the painted word, the word as an object, the real object, the cast of the body, the print, the scale of colour and the hidden image. They are set side by side at one scale, and the title puts the same question to each. A colour is given by its name, by its sample and by its place in a scale; a word is paint, and then the same word is a thing with a shadow. What anything is, the painting proposes, depends on what it is given according to.
Movement II
The names of the three primary colours had been in the painter’s work since about 1959. Here they are given twice over: in paint, flat on the canvas, and as letters made into objects that stand out and bend away from the surface. The same word is first a mark and then a thing, and the field holds both at once, so that neither can be taken as the word itself.
A standing letter, lit, throws its shadow on the painted ground. The shadow is real, cast by a thing, and it falls on paint that is itself about seeing. A painted word cannot do this; the standing word does it without being asked. This is the clearest single image of the title’s question: the word made object, and the object marking the picture with what it is not. The relation of the painted letter to the standing one, and of each letter to its shadow, is exactly calculated, and the making is load-bearing there.
Against the greys the primaries break out with a real brightness, in the letters and in the bands of graded colour, and the eye is carried across the width by them. The scales give colour a third standing, after the name and the sample: a place in a series. Elevation is not sought. The register stays cool, and the moments of wonder, a word turning into a thing in the light, are brief and do not gather into a sustained rise.
Movement III
From the painter’s sketchbook notes of the early 1960s come the words “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” They are notes on the method of the period, not a statement about this painting, but the painting performs them across its width: object after object, each done something to, then something else. The method is additive, and in places the field reads as an inventory of the painter’s devices up to 1964.
At one place the body enters. A real chair is turned over and fixed to the canvas, and on it sits a cast of part of a human leg, so that the body sits upside down against the painting. It is the only body in a field of signs, and it enters inert, detached and the wrong way up. It gives the painting its one chill, and it summons the relic and the ex-voto, the part for the whole, without building on them. It too is a thing given according to a system: the body according to the cast, as the colour is given according to the scale.
The method costs the painting something. Take away the newspaper, or one band of graded colour, and the argument stands with less evidence rather than broken; some passages read as samples set down rather than painted in, and in places the assembly has the evenness of a catalogue. What cannot be taken away is the core: the painted words against the standing ones, the chair and the cast, and the canvas turned to the wall. Each is a distinct answer to the title’s question, and together they carry it.
Movement IV
A small canvas is fixed to the field by hinges and turned so that its stretcher and back face the viewer. What it bears is on the side that cannot be seen. That face is reported as a profile of Marcel Duchamp, drawn as if it were a distorted shadow; how the profile is handled is not argued here. What can be argued is the act: a picture is present in the work and turned away from the one who looks.
Homage is given and withheld in one act. The elder is present, and present only on the face of a picture turned to the wall, so that the heir shows the back of his debt and hides its face. Here the painting builds a myth rather than summoning one, the son and the shadow of the father, and it builds it with a hinge: an image of the elder in plain view would lose the act of hiding. The structure is real, and it is small. It rests on one device on one small canvas, and it does not carry the whole field.
The painting is read in the writing on it as an answer to Duchamp’s Tu m’ of 1918, the long horizontal canvas in which Duchamp painted the shadows of his readymades. The association belongs to the criticism, not to the object, and it is taken here as a reading. On that reading the two long canvases, forty-six years apart, each register objects as shadows and each names the end of something in painting; whether this one completes Duchamp’s farewell to painting or refuses it is still argued.
Movement V
By 1964 the painter was established. The reorganisation this painting extends had been made a decade before, in the flags, the targets and the colour-word paintings of 1954 to 1959; the readymade had been taken up again; Rauschenberg’s combines had already joined object and canvas. The painting widens a path already proved, with authority, rather than placing a new wager. Its force lies in the gathering: a canvas made into a lexicon of representation, language, object, body, print and colour system on one plane, putting the question that Conceptual art would put without paint.
The reach that can be documented lies chiefly within the painter’s own work and in the conversation with Duchamp; the cast body within painting is shared with other artists of the decade, and that this painting redirected them is not shown. The questions it opens have stayed open for sixty-two years: what the hinged canvas withholds and why, whether the painting sums up the painter’s first decade or begins his later, denser and more private allegories, and what the cast body does to a painting otherwise made of signs. Much of that return concerns the career and the Duchamp question as much as this canvas.
No part is known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is recorded here. The painting is not argued as one on continuous public view, and a chair, a cast, standing letters and hinges are more exposed than a flat canvas. What it holds has not dated: language, perception, the body, an object of use, the public world as print and the history of art, joined by one question. The newspaper brings the world in as print and leaves it there. It is a wide field of signs, not a world, and it keeps asking of each sign according to what.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the parts, which are many by design. The method of the period, take an object, do something to it, then something else, is additive, and the painting shows it: in places it reads as an inventory of the painter’s devices to 1964, the colour words, the object fixed to the canvas, the cast, the grey ground, the printed page. The subtractive test bites. Take away the newspaper or one band of graded colour and the argument stands with less evidence rather than broken. What resists removal is the core: the painted words against the same words standing out and casting shadows; the chair and cast, where the body enters; the canvas turned to the wall, the one thing withheld. The cap clears, narrowly.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What the painting brings into the open can be stated. A thing is never simply given but given according to some system: a colour by its name, its sample, its scale; a word as paint, and the same word as an object with a shadow; a body as a cast; a person as a profile. The same thing changes its standing as the system changes, which is the title’s question and the painting’s demonstration. More faintly there is a human condition: the self present only as a fragment seated upside down, the admired elder only on a face turned away. These are meanings, not moods. What holds the axis short of the gate is that the condition disclosed is chiefly that of representation, and only at its edges a life outside the studio.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation is not sought; the register is cool and withholding, and what rises is intermittent. The primary colours break out of the grey field in the letters and the bands with a real brightness, and the letters standing from the surface, lit, give a moment of physical wonder as a word turns into a thing and casts a shadow. The cast leg on the overturned chair gives the opposite, a small chill: the body inert, detached and the wrong way up among signs. Neither reaches transport, and neither recurs across the width as a sustained field does; the length gives presence rather than grandeur. What holds the axis among the lowest is that the work seldom rises, and does not depend on rising.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Mostly evoked, and built in one place. The built place is the small canvas on hinges, turned so that its back faces the room, with the precursor present only on its hidden face: the heir shows the back of his debt and hides its face. That is a structure, the son and the shadow of the father, carried by a physical device rather than by allusion, and it is small. The cast body on the chair summons the relic and the ex-voto, the part for the whole, and stays a summons. The colour words summon the old myth of naming, the word that makes the thing, without building it. What holds the axis among the lowest: one device on one small canvas carries the myth, and elsewhere a chair, a newspaper and a bent letter stay particular.
Score: 6.8 / 10
The inheritance is double: New York painting’s large field and worked surface, from which Johns had already turned in the flags and targets a decade before; and Duchamp, the readymade and the canvas that records its objects as shadows. The departure here is in degree and in gathering: a painting enlarged into a field where each mode of standing for a thing is set beside the others, real objects and the body admitted beside the painted word, and the conversation with Duchamp made overt. The stake was low. In 1964 the painter was established, the readymade had been taken up again, Rauschenberg’s combines had already joined object and canvas, and the devices were his own and proved. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve; this widens one, with authority.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is comparison, and the long horizontal field is its instrument: modes of representation set side by side at one scale, so that the eye passes from painted word to standing word, to shadow, to sample, to cast, and is made to ask at each step according to what it reads. The objects must be real and fixed: the standing letters know something about words that painted letters cannot, because they throw actual shadows on a painted ground. The hinged canvas must be a hinged canvas; an image of the elder in plain view would lose the act of hiding. Held below the top because the field is in part a sequence, and some elements could shift along it without the work knowing less.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence over promise: sixty-two years in which the painting has had its place in the writing on Johns and on the reception of Duchamp, and its questions are still open. What does the hinged canvas withhold, and why turn the homage to the wall? Is the painting a summary of the painter’s first decade, or the first of his later, denser and more private allegories? How far does it answer Duchamp, and does it complete his farewell to painting or refuse it? What does the cast body do to a painting otherwise made of signs? The painting yields on return, detail by detail. Held below the top because much of the return concerns the system, the Duchamp question and the career rather than this canvas alone.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Field: American painting of the early and middle 1960s, between the close of Abstract Expressionism, Pop and the first Minimal and Conceptual work. The intrinsic force is real and partial. The painting makes a canvas into a lexicon of how things are represented, language, object, body, print and colour system held on one plane, and it puts the question that Conceptual art would put without paint. But the reorganisation was the painter’s already, made in the flags, targets and colour-word paintings of 1954 to 1959; this work gathers and extends it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach that can be documented lies chiefly within the painter’s own work and the conversation with Duchamp; the cast body within painting is shared with other artists of the decade, and that this painting redirected them is not shown. Its reach is narrower than its maker’s.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Survival of what makes the work, weighed on form, presence and fabric, at sixty-two years. Form: no part is known to be lost or replaced, and nothing of its defining arrangement is known to have changed; no restoration is recorded here, and none is invented. Presence is charged in part: the painting is not argued as one on continuous public view, its holder is not given, and fame is not proof. Fabric: an assemblage with a chair, a cast, standing letters and hinges is more exposed than a flat canvas, and that general risk is charged lightly. Whole in form and charged a little on presence and fabric, the painting sits between the figure usual for its age and the figure lowered where either is charged.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of painting with objects, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is skilled and in most places load-bearing. The grey brushwork that binds the long field is the painter’s own surface, worked and varied without loss of unity. The relation of painted letter to standing letter, and of letter to its own shadow, is exactly calculated: the shadow falls on paint that is itself about seeing. The brightest colour, placed against the greys, carries the eye across the width. The chair and cast are set with control enough to chill without becoming theatre. The costs: some passages read as samples set down rather than painted in, the newspaper above all, and in places the assembly has the evenness of a catalogue where the painter’s best has the density of one surface.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the cast of a leg seated upside down on a real chair, and a graded scale of colour. One is the body and an object of use; the other is a system of measurement. They obey one law, the one the title names: each is a thing presented according to a system, the body according to the cast, the colour according to the scale. The same law governs the painted and standing words, the newspaper as print and the profile on a hidden face. The law holds across a wide range of kind, wider than in a single readymade or a single grid. Held below the top because it is held by concept more than by sight: the eye meets a sequence of unlike things, and the question, not the surface, supplies the coherence throughout.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The orders held: language, in the colour words; perception, in the scales of colour and grey and in the shadows; the body, in the cast; the domestic object, in the chair; the public world, in the newspaper; the history of art, in the hidden elder; and faintly the self, in a painter’s inventory of his own means. One question integrates them, how a thing stands for another, and the integration is achieved. What holds the axis among the lowest is what lies outside the question: no family, no labour, no state, no history beyond the history of art, no nature and no sacred order. The newspaper brings the world in as print and leaves it there. A wide field of signs, not a world.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Made at 8.5 and The Living Form at 8.3. A painting whole after sixty-two years, no part of it known to be lost or replaced, held a step below the usual figure because it is not on continuous public view and its fixed objects are more exposed than a flat canvas; a making in which each standing letter throws its shadow on paint that is itself about seeing, and a grey ground holds a long field together; and a form whose length is the instrument of comparison, each way of standing for a thing set beside the others.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed at 6.8. A cool register that rises only where the primaries break from the grey and a word turns into a thing, and in the small chill of the body upside down; myth built on one small hinged canvas and summoned elsewhere; and a wide field of signs holding language, perception, the body, an object of use, print and the history of art, with no family, labour, state, nature or sacred order. Next above them, The Swerve and The Inevitable at 7.6: a widening of a proven path, and a core of required devices set within a catalogue.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 7.9, Pressure on Tradition at 7.7, The Swerve at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 6.8 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 6.8, and The Archetypal Deep, 6.8, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: the twelve sum to 92.9, an average of 7.74 that displays as 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of According to What, painted by Jasper Johns in 1964 in oil on canvas with objects, and of its place in his work and in the writing on Duchamp; not from standing before it, and no image or written source was consulted. The work scored is one object: the single painting with everything fixed to it, the joined canvases, the painted words and the letters standing from them, the chair and the cast, and the small canvas on hinges with whatever its hidden face bears. No part is known to be lost, replaced or added by another hand, and nothing stands in place of an original. The sketchbook notes of the period, the related paintings of 1964 and the works of Duchamp it is read against are context, and are not scored. The painter’s words are quoted once, from the sketchbook notes, as the method of the period and not as a statement about this painting; the date of the note is not given. The reading of the painting as an answer to Duchamp’s Tu m’ is given as a reading of the criticism, not as a fact of the object, and the profile on the hidden face is given as reported. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions, the number of canvases and the order of the devices across the width, the materials of the letters and the cast, how the profile is drawn, the painting’s holder and exhibition record, its condition and any conservation, and the record of its influence on later work.