Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America

Six: Masculinity, Spontaneity, and the Act: The Bodily Ego of Jasper Johns

cHAPtEr SIx Masculinity, Spontaneity, and the Act: the Bodily Ego of Jasper Johns A t a 1960 solo exhibition in New York, the abstract artist Jasper Johns presented his bluntest statement about the hostile atmosphere of the New York art scene. Having recently achieved notoriety for his 1958 one-man show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, where he exhibited his infamous painting Flag, Johns spent the next several years deconstructing the assumptions about art within the abstract expressionist movement. His Flag painting , for instance, challenged the widespread ban on direct representation by offering a literal translation of the iconic American image, a rigid design that was clearly out of place in art galleries filled with the explosive canvases of Jackson Pollock and his followers. But with his 1960 work Painting with Two Balls, Johns was criticizing more than just the aesthetic norms of abstract expressionism; he was also criticizing the posturing and arrogance of artists like Pollock and Barnett Newman. His painting was a chaotic landscape of colorful, gestural brushstrokes composed on three separate panels with two painted balls forced into a darkened slit between the top two panels. The energy of his brushwork echoed the work of other abstract expressionists but the title of the painting and the obvious anatomical reference within the work itself reflected Johns’s personal concerns. A gay man and a reserved man, Johns had little respect for the overtly masculine displays of his fellow artists who believed that the potency of their brushwork, either dripped, splashed, or poured across the canvas, testified in some way to their heroic natures. Such artists, according to Johns, who created “ballsy painting” or art that was painted “with two balls,” naïvely believed that their paintings were a reflec- 198 revolt of romantic Modernism tion of their masculinity and therefore a representation of some pristine, autonomous self that created artwork uncontaminated by any social or cultural baggage.1 Marginalized in such an art world, Johns struck back, revealing in Painting with Two Balls the absurd pretensions within abstract expressionism. His use of encaustic instead of enamel to build up his exuberant brushstrokes gave his painting an almost frozen quality that mimicked the techniques of action painters like Pollock but that drained such techniques of their presumed dynamism. He was concerned that abstract expressionists had naïvely reduced modern art to being merely a representation of themselves or had simplistically reduced the artistic process to being merely a “cathartic process ” or “release of energy.”2 Johns was clearly not painting in the same potent manner and not in the same anatomically derived way. Johns recognized that the widespread defense of abstract painting as a masculine enterprise was in fact part of a larger cultural panic about shifting gender identities in the new economic landscape of the early Cold War. In Painting with Two Balls, Johns exposed the not-so-subtle connection between aesthetic debates within modernist circles over the nature of art and a corresponding debate about the nature of male subjectivity. For romantic modernists, their project to dismantle the artificial boundaries of the ego was dependent upon the release of libidinal energy, a project that was intimately connected to their aesthetic practices. But this project was also intimately connected to a larger cultural panic over the perceived loss of autonomy in modern society, which many believed was caused by the loss of any sense of masculinity in a world of castrated , dependent men. For many romantic modernists, the autonomous individual toward which Reichian therapeutic practices were directed seemed almost extinct. In response, many took it upon themselves to reclaim their own masculine identities within this damaged landscape, whether through aggressive sexual displays, alcoholic drinking binges, or spontaneous styles of artistic production. In response, Johns openly mocked this modernist panic. “It’s a phrase I used to hear all the time,” Johns explained in reference to the critical discourse about his fellow painters, “that ‘he was really painting with two balls’— I thought perhaps that was intended” (156–57). Obviously, Johns had little patience for those artists whose works were imbued with this kind of anxiety. Two things in particular bothered Johns about the aggressive masculine displays rampant within the New York school. First, he was not only personally intimidated by the often rough treatment he received as a gay man in a Masculinity, Spontaneity, and the Act 199 social network consumed by an existential panic disguised...