I really wished I’d seen the show of Jasper Johns drawings at Matthew Marks when I went deep on the little stick figures motif. Perilous Night, a 1990 watercolor, was the earliest of several works in the show in which the little guys appeared.
And I REALLY wish I’d gotten the catalogue immediately, because I just picked it up this afternoon, and Hilton Als had this to say about the stick figures in Perilous Night:
The right side of this watercolor and ink on paper is a replica of a score by John Cage, a close friend of Johns for many years. Cage wrote “Perilous Night” in 1943 and 1944. A composition for a prepared piano, it’s an angry piece whose strong rhythms speak to us emotionally—he was going through a difficult time with his then wife, the surrealist artist Xenia Cage—even as we understand that Cage is asking questions about what the piano can and cannot do. Who’s to say? In Johns’s piece, the sheet music floats against an abstract field made up of vertical shapes that reach up, up, up toward the top of the page. On the bottom of the work, a strip of green field. Three little stick figures stand on that green, gesticulating. Who are they? What are they? Fallen notes from Cage’s score?(Johns doesn’t render the notes in Cage’s score; all we see are traces of notes.) Or are those tiny figures from Johns’s and Cage’s past? Johns’s Perilous Night is an exercise, too, in depth—an experiment that challenges Johns’s famous flatness. One image tells us about another: the sheet music leads us to the abstraction, and the abstraction leads us to that little strip of green. It’s a work that’s giddy with possibility, a kind of “what if” piece. What if I put a little green here? And figures there? What happens to the work? To the eye? To the eye of the ideas?