The irony of uncertainty — that’s my moniker for Jasper Johns’ American flag and perhaps for all of his art. Yesterday’s New York Times has a rather brilliant web piece in which contemporary photos and close-ups of Johns’ ‘In Memory of My Feelings – Frank O’Hara ‘(1961) are juxtaposed with analyses variously trenchant and banal written by Jason Farago.
The comments on the American flag are interesting. Johns’ rendering of the flag gives it meaning that isn’t purely symbolic/abstract. It’s both a painterly object, and a flag (“the thing”), and there’s more. John Seed, writing in the Huffington Post, points out that what is notable is the novel (for the time) context in which Johns located this symbol of America. By painting it, putting it in a museum, he brings the flag to a new level of abstraction (my thought, not Seed’s). This is the abstraction which, to my mind, seems the inevitable product of irony. The deliberation of dislocation is evidence of a mental game which can only be abstract. The flag is a toy in this game.
The flag in the pickup truck demonstrates another kind of abstract symbolism, but one which, in contrast to Johns’, relies on complete and unquestioning identification of object with idea. This is symbol as dead end, as the antithesis of stimulant to further thought or questioning.