What if I’ve been wrong all along about the origin story of Jasper Johns’s Flag?
The first flag painting I did came in the Fifties when I was trying to become a painter, and I had been working in various…styles, I guess. Nothing seeming to mean much to me, except that one made a picture, there it was. And I one night dreamed that I had painted a flag of the United States of America and I got up the next morning and went out and bought materials and began to paint this flag.
That’s the longest version of the story I think I’ve seen, from a 1966 TV interview with curator Alan Solomon. When I put parts of the interview transcript online in 2011, I was skeptical of the dream story. Not that I didn’t believe it, or thought Johns wasn’t telling the truth, but that it seemed like he hinted at other possible stories, but was now sticking with the one no one could question or investigate.
There’s nothing more subjective and unassailable than a dream. It completely removes the historic or referential or metaphoric or biographical possibilities for painting a flag. Or rather, “this flag.”
But instead of holding out for a truer or more revealing alternative, long suppressed, maybe there’s value in taking Johns at his word, and accepting the dream story on its own terms. Because there is a natural follow-on question: “Why did you do what you dreamed you did?”
There are myriad examples across many eras and cultures, of dreams as a source of knowledge and a system of inquiry. Freud and Jung were only some of the most credible practitioners of dream interpretation, believing dreams held clues to the individual psyche and the collective consciousness.
I did not remember writing that, “Friends like Rachel Rosenthal have said that Johns was very interested in his dreams and would write poems about them.” Has anyone ever asked Johns about his interest in dreams? Do we have any poems he’s written about his dreams? Or about anything, ever? Dream journals are a technique for exercising the memory of dreams. Directed or lucid dreaming is a practice of documenting dreams, then cultivating an awareness of dreaming such that you can affect their contents. Is any of this of interest to Johns?
Dreams complicate empiricism, because their fugitive, untestable nature calls into question the reliability of subjective, sensory experience that we otherwise rely on to define [waking] reality. But dreams are an alternative epistemological framework in themselves, and sciences and religions and entire constructs exist in many traditions for interpreting dreams, for gaining knowledge, for making sense of the self and the world. And they’re not the only alternative system of knowledge Johns is/was interested in.
While thinking about Johns’s 1954-55 work, Target With Plaster Casts a few weeks ago, I looked again at Untitled (1954), another boxlike work with a plaster cast (of Rosenthal’s lower face), which is at the Hirshhorn.
There are two clipped palm reading diagrams on the back, which is a motif shared with at least one [lost] shirtboard collage Rauschenberg made in Morocco, while traveling with Cy Twombly. Looking again for the source(s) of these images proved more productive than it was in 2015.
The diagrams are from a book of palmistry by Martini the Palmist. A 1957 edition has been scanned into Google Books, but as anyone who visited the Boardwalk in Atlantic City could tell you, Martini the Palmist was your palmist authority for much of the early 20th century.
Another perennial banger from Martini?—who also published as Frederick Daniel Martini, and whose real name was Frederick Daniel Peters— was What Your Dream Meant, first published in 1906. The subject-based guide expanded regularly and was retitled sometime in the Flag era as, The Meaning of Your Dreams. The 1962 edition is on the Internet Archive.
So, Martini the Palmist, what does dreaming of the flag mean? “To dream of your country’s flag, relates to great success and victory. For the unmarried to dream of their flag, indicates admiration from a soldier.” Oh, that is nice, and so true!
And what about painting? Martini doesn’t say what it means for a man, but “For a woman to paint a picture, predicts that the person she admires adores someone else.” Oh no!
Interpreting dreams—especially someone else’s, from seventy years ago—seems like perilous business. Better, perhaps, to just ask how (else) Johns handled his dreams, and how that related to his practice.
And then let’s take a closer look at what (else) was on his bookshelf. Because between Martini the Palmist and A History of Orgies, there are possibilities one could only dream of.
2011: ‘Which Flag story? Which one do you know?’
From Jasper Johns’ A History of Orgies
2015: In the palm of your hand