Category: art

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.