Perception Test

Jasper Johns is characterised by impermanence. His subjects are transitory or ephemeral: everyday symbols such as flags, letters and numbers, and practical objects such as coat hangers and light bulbs are repeated over and over in Johns’ paintings, sculptures and prints. This unending repetition plays on our memory of these objects. It questions their representational value. For example, while we rely on memory to make sense of symbols (flags, numbers and letters) and objects, they usually have little material status. These things are disposable and forgettable. Using a dry sense of humour, Johns reminds us that ‘what we see and what we remember’ are two entirely different things.¹ His recurring use of these symbols and objects across decades of practice also reminds us that, as we age, our relationship with these symbols shifts – nothing is stable.

The tension between stability and fluidity is also explored by Johns during his time making in the studio. While collaborating with Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L in 1969, Johns produced an innovative print series of six lead reliefs: Light Bulb, Bread, High School Days, The Critic Smiles, Flag and 0 through 9. An extension of the artist’s inkless embossing Alphabet (1969), the Lead relief series was developed through industrial technologies to generate a thin sheet of lead ‘paper,’ which was then fixed to a moulded backing.

John Yau, author of ‘Light Bulbs and Lead Reliefs’ in Jasper Johns: Seeing with the mind’s eye reflects on the philosophical implications of Johns’ studio processes:

‘Lead, like encaustic, is a malleable material and melts at low temperatures. Both can be applied, shaped, incised, and stamped. They are vulnerable to external pressure as well as heat, and in the case of encaustic, cold. Lead, however, reflects light while encaustic lets it pass through its translucent “skin”. The other essential difference is that encaustic is produced by the body (bees) while lead is poisonous to the body. What the three materials – encaustic, bronze, and lead – have in common is that, being susceptible to heat, they cannot be equated with eternalness.’²

This passage reveals the sophistication of Johns’ creative approach and again directs our attention to the contrast of seeing and knowing. Materials that were once ‘alive’ in the studio are now cold, hardened and ‘dead’ on the gallery walls. The transitional quality of these elements become another device ‘for examining the process of perception and the fluidity of meaning’.³ Appearances are deceiving, and this is most clear in the lead relief Bread. As Yau notes, Johns’ bread is eternally cold to the touch, and will never rot or grow mouldy. [4] The viewer is unknowingly engaged in a test of perception, one that plays with their own memory of the sight and touch of “bread”. 

The Lead relief series are an ironic critique of visual culture, a rhetorical proposition to the looming, unanswerable question – how indeed are these objects intended to nourish us if their message is always changing? Johns offers us no easy solution to this dilemma but instead points to a direction where meaning emerges and submerges in the distance.

Rauschenberg & Johns: Significant others, presented with the assistance of the Tyler Charitable Foundation, is on display at the National Gallery from 11 Jun – 30 October 2022.

1. Goldman, Judith, Jasper Johns Prints: 1977 – 1981 (Boston: Thomas Segal Gallery, 1981) 1.
2. Yau, John, ‘Light Bulbs and Lead Reliefs’ in Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye (China: San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press, 2012) 88.
3. Bernstein, Roberta, ‘Numbers’ in Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye (China: San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press, 2012) 55.
4. Yau, John, ‘Light Bulbs and Lead Reliefs’ in Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye (China: San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press, 2012) 82-89.