This Is The Time To Hang Your Johns Flags Upside Down

an installation view of three jasper johns flag paintings on a white wall with a dark floor, from a 2018 show at the broad collection in los angeles, but each painting has been turned upside down. original image by eugenio rodriquez via artforum
altered installation photo of upside down flag paintings from The Broad’s 2018 exhibition, “Something Resembling Truth,” original image by Eugenio Rodriguez, via artforum

When I first thought of it, it was still within the framework that has dominated art critical discussion of Jasper Johns’ work since the beginning: Is it an upside down flag painting or a painting of an upside down flag?

But this is not the moment for glib rhetorical dualities. Right now an upside down flag does not have to be either “a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property” or a political protest. With active attacks on democratic institutions and the rule of law under the US Constitution, it can be and must be, unfortunately, both.

a fifty foot wide american flag hung upside down on the top of the cliff face of El Capitan in Yosemite, with several protesting federal workers on the edge of the cliff next to a couple of scrubby trees, a feb 2025 photo by tracy barbutes for the san francisco chronicle, picked up by the nyt
a 50-foot flag hung upside down from El Capitan to protest illegal DOGE-fueled firings of federal workers, image: Tracy Barbutes/SFChron via NYT

The urgent moment and the symbolic meaning also do not accommodate ambivalence over the recent co-option of the upside down flag by right-wing extremists. No one has been wronger than the hapless postdoc who thought she was describing two right-wing factions in NPR’s upside down flag explainer last June:

“There are people who [consider themselves] ultra-patriots — who think of themselves as defending American principles and institutions from corruption. There are also those who seek to actually overthrow the U.S. democratic system entirely because they don’t believe in democracy,” she said. “That second sect don’t typically use the upside-down flags, but the first sect who view themselves as ultra-patriots do.”

the heritage foundation, which authored project 2025 to unconstitutionally dismantle the us government and put unaccountable power into the hands of a corrupt president that, like itself, is entirely beholden to russia, flying an upside down american flag in mid-2004, as a symbol of patriotic distress lol, photographed for the ap by jose luis magana, via npr,
Jose Luis Magana AP photo from 2024 of the Heritage Foundation being like oh no, American democracy is in danger, oops, I mean it’s in danger from us, via NPR

It turns out that as soon as they seized power, the qanon freaks and 2020 election overthrowers and denialists; the khaki-clad neo-nazi mobs; the complicit Supreme Court justices; and the bought think tankers at the Heritage Foundation, who all flew an upside down flag while posing as ultra-patriots, began violating American principles and pumping corruption into the institutional system they’re actively trying to dismantle from the inside.

a starkly lit photo by robert rauschenberg of his partner jasper johns, young, thin, refined features, a light colored sweater over a white collard shirt, and khakis, sitting sideways on a wooden crate against a white painted brick wall on which hangs flag, his 1954-55 painting of a us flag. also hanging next to it: a saw. on the floor at johns's feet, clad in what look like combat boots, are several low round metal dishes and boxes, a makeshift setup for melting and mixing encaustic, presumably to repair the vertical section of the canton of stars in the painting where there are no stars, and where it looks like a whole was punched through the work.
Jasper Johns and his little diy encaustic setup repairing Flag after it was damaged in a wild loft party, probably in 1955, photo by Robert Rauschenberg

But ever since he started pursuing his American Flag Dream in 1954, the relationship status between the American flag and Johns’s Flag has been complicated. It was ambivalent enough in 1958 to scare off MoMA’s trustees, who parked it at Philip Johnson’s place until the McCarthyist wave of anti-gay, anti-communist hysteria subsided.

In 2006, in the middle of the Iraq War phase of the US’s Global War on Terror, Anne M. Wagner revisited the fraught political implications of Johns’s Flag—for the individual:

Why study Flag? I have done so because I am a US citizen; because the United States, backed by its allies, is once again engaged in murderous warfare; and because, as Johns implicitly acknowledges, actions carried out in the name of the nation raise the issue of the citizen’s ambiguous belonging to the state. If those ambiguities are structured into US hegemony—woven into its double logic, the logic of force and consent—has the time not come to examine again, with microscopic precision, one’s own belonging within that overarching logic and what it conceals? What are its materials? How deeply do they lie buried? According to what allegiances are they deployed?

Now with a president who brags about the warrantless ICE arrest at Columbia of a student with a green card for protesting a genocidal war, and who claims unaccountable power to negate the constitution’s promise of birthright citizenship, and who mobilizes the government to erase the existence of trans and non-white people, the actions carried out in the name of the nation are once again raising the issue of belonging, minus the ambiguity.

Wagner felt that Johns, a gay veteran, was well aware of these conflicts when he made Flag—and when he kept making flag-related artworks throughout the next sixty years of political and cultural upheavals. I agree.

an altered jpg of a proposed painting of an upside down us flag on the upper half of an orange field, based on the 1958 jasper johns painting owned by glenstone
study for Johns Flag on Orange Field, 2025, jpg of encaustic on canvas, based on Johns’ Flag on Orange Field II (1958) at Glenstone

Would Johns paint an upside down flag today? I have no idea, and would absolutely never ask. I’ve learned from Michael Crichton that he does not take requests. So my Sturtevant-style repetition of a c. 2025 upside down Johns Flag is not an interpolation of what Johns might do—or might have done, if he were still painting—but its own speculative thing. [Technically, since it’s just a circulating jpg study I made last night, and not even a real object, it’s doubly speculative.] After testing several options, I went with the Flag on Orange Field II (1958) precisely because its composition meant its nature could be immediately understood. [Or so I thought; several people have still interpreted it as a new painting by Johns.]

But this gets me back to my original question: painting of an upside down flag, or upside down flag painting? In her 2006 essay Wagner mentions a “little-known” Johns Flag from 1971 that David Geffen sold in 2004, that points to an answer:

[N]ot only is it a vertical image, it is one that sees the flag, however improbably, from the wrong side. This means that were it turned horizontally, the familiar canton would appear, against centuries-old custom, on the right. Again, I think we can take the measure of Johns’s experiment by insisting on the literal implications of what, in representation, he has tried to do: to provide a viewer with a different position—an inverse position—from which to contemplate the national sign. [emphasis in original]

Well, yes and no, or rather, no and yes.

a 1971 jasper johns painting of a flag, oriented vertically, and executed mostly in greys in various shades. in a couple of spots the underlying images of newspaper photos or text remains uncovered by the thick brushstrokes of encaustic. the canton of stars in the upper left is kind of a finger painty mess, with just a few stars legible as stars. it had been a few years since johns had painted a flag, maybe this was him getting back in practice. image via jasper johns catalogue raisonne, no p181
Jasper Johns, Flag (JJCR P181), 1971, encaustic and collage on canvas, 26 x 17 in., image via JJCR

Flag (1971) is definitely the first vertically oriented flag painting Johns made. And it is definitely not the same composition just rotated 90 degrees. But Johns’ orientation here is neither either experimental nor “wrong”; it follows the guidelines from the U.S. Flag Code for displaying a flag vertically on a wall, or in a window—from the outside/viewer’s perspective. He would later make three double vertical flag paintings, along with several drawings and prints, all in this same orientation.

The inverse that matters here is on the back. According to the catalogue raisonné, Flag (P181) is the only flag painting on which Johns drew an “upward pointing arrow” to indicate a “correct orientation.” So that leaves at least 31 flag paintings for which the artist has not specified a single orientation.

One could argue, then, with that one exception, every collector, curator, or museum could hang their Johns flag painting upside down if they needed a powerful signal of dire distress or emergency. One could also argue that the ongoing destruction of the US government and its constitutional and democratic infrastructure would present such an emergency.