Watchman, Spy, and Dead Man: Jasper Johns, Frank O'Hara, John Cage and the "Aesthetic of Indifference"

--How does the flag sit with us, we who don't give a hoot for Betsy Ross, who never think of tea as a cause for parties?

John Cage, "Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas" ¹

In a sketchbook for 1964, Jasper Johns began to make notes for his paintings Watchman and According to What. On one particularly tantalizing page, he makes a sketch for what would appear in both paintings as the wax cast of a man's lower torso, positioned on the seat of a chair, itself bisected vertically to accommodate the depth of the fragmented figure (fig. 1). ² Torso and chair are inverted so that the long left leg extends upward to meet the word "spy" at the lower margin of the enigmatic text, positioned as a reversed L-shape above it:

The Watchman falls "into" the "trap" of looking.
The "spy" is a different person
"Looking" is & is not "eating" & also "being eaten"
That is, there is continuity of some sort among
the watchman, the space, the objects.
The spy must be ready to "move," must be aware
of his entrances & exits.
The watchman leaves
his job & takes away
no information.
The spy must remember
and must remember himself
& his remembering.
The spy designs himself
to be overlooked. The
watchman "serves" as a
warning. Will the
spy & the watchman
ever meet? In a
painting named Spy,
will he be present?
The spy stations himself
to observe the watchman.

If the spy is a foreign object
why is the eye not irritated?
Is he invisible?
When the spy irritates, we try
to remove him.
"Not spying, just looking"--
Watchman.

[WSI 59-60]

In the square inside the L-shaped text, Johns has written: "Somewhere here, there is the / question of "seeing clearly." / Seeing what? According to what?"

What or who are watchman and spy? "If the artist is the spy (never depicted)," writes Francis M. Naumann in a 1992 catalogue essay, "the watchman is the spectator/critic, a member of the viewing audience. In his capacity as a spectator, the watchman remains momentarily inactive--seated--his disoriented position and fragmentation suggesting that he has, as Johns has predicted, fallen into 'the trap of looking.'" ³ And Michael Crichton takes the distinction even more literally, "The notes suggest that this is a picture about looking. They identify the cast of the leg and chair, inverted in one corner; that is the watchman (falling into the trap of looking?)." ⁴ But why would Johns, who always resisted allegorical readings of his work, refer to the "spectator/critic" as a mysterious watchman in seemingly endless struggle with an equally mysterious artist-spy? And why, to make matters murkier, would he use an encaustic cast of a leg, unconnected to a body, as a representation of something as specific as this "watchman"? A few pages earlier in Johns's sketchbook where the cast of the leg (not yet inverted) is outlined in the upper right, next to a hinge picture, we read:

One thing made
of another
One thing used
as another.
an arrogant object
Something to be folded or
bent or stretched.
(SKIN?)
Beware of the body
& the mind.
Avoid a polar
situation.
Think of the
edge of the city &
the traffic there.

[WSI 56; fig. 2]

"Avoid a polar / situation": Johns always preferred the "traffic" at the "edge of the city"--a border situation--to binaries like artist/spy and spectator/watchman. In his Watchman note, an arrow points from the enigmatic phrase "'Looking' is & is not 'eating' & also 'being eaten,'" to the parenthetical comment "Cezanne?--Each object reflecting the other" (WSI 59). The reference is probably to Gertrude Stein's observation that "Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole." ⁵ For...