Target with Plaster Casts (1955) has been vexing people since 1958 [or 1957, actually.] It’s the red-headed stepchild of Jasper Johns’s breakthrough work. Or maybe the green-dicked stepchild. The presence of body parts generally and a penis specifically have made critics’ questions seem especially awkward: What does it mean? What does it reveal about the artist? Oh wait, I didn’t mean that. But actually, does that mean the target’s a butt?
And the penis has been causing curators problems from the beginning. Meyer Schapiro selected Target with Plaster Casts and Green Target to show at the Jewish Museum in 1957. Then the museum put the work in a literal closet until Johns agreed to add some “mystery” to it by closing the penis lid; the artist angrily refused, and had the work returned. [This is where Leo Castelli saw Green Target and determined to track the unknown artist down and give him a show.]
It echoes the oft-repeated story—I’ve repeated it myself, in fact—of Alfred Barr at Johns’s groundbreaking 1958 show at Castelli, wanting to buy Target for Plaster Casts for MoMA, but only if Johns agreed to permanently closing the little door on the cast plaster penis. Johns refused again, and so Barr bought Target with Four Faces instead [and later gave the Sculls retroactive credit for the purchase, which they had nothing to do with], along with two other works, and he arranged for Philip Johnson to buy his other problematic fave, Flag, so he wouldn’t have to rationalize it to MoMA’s other trustees. And so Target with Plaster Casts became one of just two paintings that didn’t sell from that show. [Except that Leo Castelli bought it for himself, and kept it 35 years. So really, only White Flag didn’t sell, which is a mystery for another day.]
Anyway, a recent rightwing-coded attempt to rebrand AI fabrications as Saidiya Hartman-style critical fabulation reminded me of some of the contorted criticism of Johns’s work, his early work, and particularly Target with Plaster Casts. Gavin Butt’s 2005 dissertation on art world gossip, Between You And Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963, is an important and fascinating excavation, not just of often underground context of queer art history; it also makes the case for pulling what had been considered out-of-bounds subjects into meaningful, even revelatory art discourse.
But Butt also writes some hilariously cringe speculative monologues, ventriloquizing contemporary responses to Target with Plaster Casts from the likes of Barr and Andy Warhol. So instead of worrying about trustee reactions or public controversy, Butt imagines Barr angsting out out over his unexpected attraction to Johns’s [sic] penis, while Warhol size queens out about it, certain that it is, in fact, Johns’s, right? This emphasis, like Fred Orton’s much more muted but uptight interpretations, and Jill Johnston’s interviewing, and Jonathan Katz’s queer metaphors, and a lot of criticism since the mid-1990s, ends up concentrating on autobiography and Johns’s identity—acknowledged or not, performed properly [sic] or not—as a gay man.
And suddenly it occurs to me that these constructions don’t do justice to Target with Plaster Casts specifically, and vice versa, and actually even miss some key things Johns was doing, and the context in which he did them. Here’s what I’m wondering, seeing and thinking: my sense is, this work is not an anomaly, but fits in perfectly with what Johns was making and seeing at the time, and with how he worked. And it wasn’t abandoned, a path not taken; it resonates with things he continued to explore.
Did Johns make all these casts? On himself? On someone else? The catalogue raisonné notes that a couple of casts were made in 1954. One of Johns’s earliest surviving works—Untitled, P1 in the JJCR—has a plaster cast face in it. The face in Target does look similar. So that’d be Rachel Rosenthal, who had a studio on Pearl St, and who, along with her mother, saved the 1954 works we do have from Johns’s destruction. Rosenthal’s face is also in Target with Four Faces.
Foot, heel, and nipple feels cumbersome but doable, but I think it would be very hard to cast your own hand, ear, and penis. So there is someone else involved, either as the subject or the maker. That’s sort of a parallel to how casts work, too. Also, they’re reproducible. And for the time it took me to write this paragraph, I assumed Johns had used the same cast of Rosenthal’s face for all three works. But MoMA’s text for Target with Four Faces says they were “taken from a single model over a period of several months [and] are arranged in nonsequential order.” Also those are tinted plaster, while the plaster casts in Plaster Casts are painted with encaustic. So even in the basis of what casts do, or how they are, these works are all different.
The light blue box is typically described as empty, even in the CR, but is it? Butt has an extensive analysis of the cruft around the edges, and suggests the void is an anus. [The target? also an anus, and he’s not alone in saying so. I will only point out that in the three+ years up to Johns’s 1958 show, targets were easily as prominent a subject as anything else.] Anyway, I want a closer look, higher-resolution images, and some material analysis, because I wonder if the blue couldn’t also be a negative, concave cast, like of a knee or thigh?
Which would work with casts, which can be solid, or might just be a shell, a skin. Many casts, including the chest, ear, and penis, appear to have been folded into their spot, not chopped down. This reminds me of a Johns sketchbook note that Jonathan Katz expanded on in “Dismembership: Jasper Johns and the body politic,” his essay in the 1999 anthology, Performing the Body/Performing the Text. In it, Johns lays out a process for casting an entire human head, then flattening the result, and casting it in bronze, essentially a flat bronze skin. [The closest he got to succeeding are his oil and graphite face and body prints, begun in the early 1960s.]
It’s weird that Target with Four Faces has a listed depth, but Target with Plaster Casts is only listed by its height and width. It’s read as a painting, not a sculpture, or a combination of both, even though it has sculptures—plaster casts—right in its name. This is relevant for sculpture reasons, but also for combine reasons.
These are not the only plaster casts Johns was making. These glorious pomegranates and melons were made in 1955 for Tiffany & Co. by Matson Jones Custom Display, Rauschenberg and Johns’s window decorating business they named after their mothers. Or themselves. Or both. They also made plaster lemons, cabbage, leaves, and caves, none of which are known to survive. [And truth be told, I have been worried for the melons and pomegranates for like 12 years.]
They. Johns and Rauschenberg. The context Target with Plaster Casts fits most perfectly into is the one so rarely considered: their shared work, conversation, and life beginning in 1954. Johns’s surviving 1954 works are all boxes, painted and collaged. Rauschenberg’s works from 1951-52 and onward were boxes, too. And had doors or windows or sills, or compartments.
The fetish object-like Scatole Rauschenberg made, showed, and mostly destroyed on his trip through Italy with Cy Twombly included a lot of boxes, each with a treasure. Some made it home, and some just ended up in Rauschenberg’s photos.
One early Rauschenberg box that made its way to Johns: Soles, 1953 which had a collection of wrapped souvenir-ish rocks and fragments inside it of various colors. Dirt balls might have been from around the time Johns helped Rauschenberg make his dirt, moss, grass, and gold paintings in little shadowboxes.
Things opened and closed. Like Rauschenberg’s 1954 combine Pink Door, but also, and most importantly, like Rauschenberg’s 1955 combine, Short Circuit, which had a door that opened to reveal the first Jasper Johns flag painting, or at least the first to be exhibited. The work, before Johns and/or Rauschenberg settled on the term combine, was originally titled, Construction with J.J. Flag.
Along with fragmented [self-]portraiture and “peep show” titillation, interpretations of the body parts—though casts of body parts are not body parts in the way a painting of a flag is a flag—range from “sexual subjects” to Surrealist horrors. It must be the penis and the nipple, because the most prosaic art history references never seemed to come up: classical statuary and —again, right in the name!—study collections of plaster casts.
Did Johns and Rauschenberg know in 1955 about Prière de Toucher, Marcel Duchamp and Enrico Donati’s cover of the Surrealism in 1947 catalogue for the Galerie Maeght? No, but if Butt can invoke the Howl trail, about the appearance of the word “cock” and the non-words “. . . . . . in the . . .,” in Allen Ginsberg’s book, which happened two years after Johns made his . . . . cast, then we can go back eight years to pick up a Duchamp book with a hand-painted breast on the cover, too.
Butt elaborates a non-binary gender identity from the body parts, in part because the unidentified animal bone reads as vaginal, or female. I asked large animal veterinarians where it might have come from, and how hard would Johns have to search for it in 1955 Manhattan. A determination from a large animal veterinarian [who is not on bluesky but who’s within earshot of data scientist Sofia Hauck, who is] is that the bone is the distal [lower] head of the left femur of a pig. That’s the bone in a ham shank, one of the most iconic cuts of meat. So while it might not be at the Rosenthals’, it was trivially available at almost any butcher. It feels closer to a scatole than anything else. But a knee suddenly has other resonances, let the Johns Unified Knee Theory of Painting discourse commence.
Actually, the narrative on Johns I’d like to revisit is that his silence and reluctance to explain his work is a reluctance to explain himself. His early work especially is treated as evasive, which gets compounded into his refusal to come out of a closet. But he is also an artist who put a cast penis and nipple and other possibly erogenous male body parts in one of his first artworks, and then refused to censor them when asked by two major museums. He refused to compromise to sell his work to MoMA. Which trustee did Barr get to buy Flag when it got problematic? The gay one. [Also the nazi, but still.]
I think if Johns’s work, particularly the work he made with and alongside Rauschenberg, with Twombly bouncing around, were considered in the context of this/these relationships, a lot would change. It would not “solve” or “reveal” the work, but it would make a lot of things clearer that have been erased, ignored and obscured. It’s too bad Target with Plaster Casts was not there for this.
Also: John Yau’s 2019 essay, In Praise of Paintings’ Ambiguity [hyperallergic]
Previously, related: In the palm of your hand [that Untitled, 1954]
The Tiffany’s Windows of Matson Jones
Jasper Johns: If he did it [Rauschenberg works he made or worked on]