Craig Starr has a show of Jasper Johns Flags organized with the artist, in memory of Agnes Gund. I like the little catalogue and Richard Schiff’s essay about the artist as a subject. But I really love this bit of the show’s announcement text, which sums up where we find ourselves right now on the US flag as a subject:
Across the exhibition, Johns tests how far this familiar symbol can be altered while remaining legible. The flags are stripped of their usual conventions—their singularity, their expected color palette, and even their stable symbolic meaning—turning the motif into a flexible structure whose identity is transformed. These nontraditional treatments activate the associations embedded within the symbol itself. A flag is never neutral: it carries meanings that shift with the viewer’s nationality, historical moment, and personal relationship to the nation it represents. As an emblem of the United States—its government, ideals, and people—the image is inevitably political. It is also a popular symbol that, much like the Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, can be recontextualized through repetition and display. By altering its palette, multiplying its form, or isolating its structural elements, Johns transforms the flag from a stable symbol into a site where cultural attitudes, anxieties, and projections surface. The motif hovers between familiarity and estrangement, inviting viewers to reconsider an image they thought they already knew.
I also love the little ink on plastic Flag on Orange Field Johns gave to Mark Lancaster in 1977, which is at once a depiction of an image as object—the original 1958 painting—and an incredible object itself.