America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Racing Thoughts

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Glossy, stagy, and buzzing with the energy of the street and the media machine, a potent strain of art in the 1980s both reflected and challenged the ethos of the era under President Ronald Reagan. An economic upswing reversed the downturn of the 1970s, though its benefits were felt unequally during a period of political conservatism that valorized conspicuous consumption and Wall Street speculation. Children of the American baby boom, the artists who came of age at this time were the first generation reared on television and the impersonal affect of Pop art. Much of their work relied on their media savvy and new theories of representation that questioned originality and authenticity in a world awash with recycled images and styles.

The sculptures of Jeff Koons, Nam June Paik, and Charles Ray on view in this chapter all incorporate readymade products or the display devices that sell them, from mannequins to lighted cases. These artists conflated the allure of consumer products and art at a time when a booming market led paintings and sculptures to be increasingly seen as commodities, a point emphasized by Louise Lawler’s auction house photograph of Andy Warhol’s take on Marilyn Monroe. Other heroines star in Sarah Charlesworth’s and Dara Birnbaum’s appropriations from art history and television, respectively, while even Keith Haring’s and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti-tinged paintings play with branding and the zip and glow of the screen.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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JASPER JOHNS (B. 1930), RACING THOUGHTS, 1983

Abstract view of a colorful interior, with photographs artwork reproductions, and artworks on the walls; two vases; a faucet; and words embedded in the patterned background.
Abstract view of a colorful interior, with photographs artwork reproductions, and artworks on the walls; two vases; a faucet; and words embedded in the patterned background.

Jasper Johns, Racing Thoughts, 1983. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 48 1/8 × 75 3/8 in. (122.2 × 191.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Burroughs Wellcome Purchase Fund; Leo Castelli; the Wilfred P. and Rose J. Cohen Purchase Fund; the Julia B. Engel Purchase Fund; the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States Purchase Fund; The Sondra and Charles Gilman, Jr. Foundation, Inc.; S. Sidney Kahn; The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund; the Sara Roby Foundation; and the Painting and Sculpture Committee 84.6. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns began making paintings of recognizable objects and images, including the American flag, targets, and numbers. As the artist explained, these subjects are “things the mind already knows,” things that are “seen but not looked at, not examined.” In the early 1980s Johns started to render perspectival space in his paintings. For Racing Thoughts, Johns used trompe l’oeil illusionism to “tack” and “tape” personal mementos, both depicted and actual, to the painting’s surface. The complex layering of imagery is set in the bathroom at his former home (note the faucet at bottom right and the khaki pants hanging at left). Like the flags and numbers, these new motifs—Johns calls them “fragments of thoughts”—such as a lithograph by Barnett Newman, a pot by the ceramicist George Ohr, and a jigsaw puzzle portrait of his dealer Leo Castelli, would recur in subsequent works.

Adapted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 194-195. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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