A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns

by John Yau, Jasper Johns (Artist)

This beautifully illustrated and profoundly original volume of essays by the New York poet and critic John Yau mounts one of the most eloquent defenses of the art and vision of Jasper Johns ever written--going well past tired and traditional Formalist readings of the artist's work to propose a completely new way of reading One that is intensely human. Praised by renowned American art historian and critic Jack Flam as, "a brilliantly attentive and original reading of Jasper Johns' work," this volume not only makes many aspects of the artist's work accessible for the first time, but also reveals an emotional tenor to the man whom so many critics have characterized, wrongly, according to Yau, as aloof or hermetic.
Expanding upon the ideas he laid out in The United States of Jasper Johns , published in 1996 by Zoland Books, Yau traces the ways that the artist's work conveys a connection to the common experience--a "sense of life" that encompasses thoughts, memory, consumption, excretion, life, death, time and mortality. Yau's readings of the works are broadened by statements from conversations between the poet and artist that have taken place over the course of the last 30 years. Lending to this sense of intimacy, many of the works collected in this volume come directly from the artist's studio or his private collection, and have rarely been reproduced before. According to Flam, "John Yau focuses his attention on how the artist's pioneering paintings relate to life as it is lived--and on what they tell us about what it means to be mortal and alive in time. Along the way, Yau cuts a much-needed clearing through the tangle of narrowly self-reflexive interpretations that have plagued so much critical writing on Johns' work during the past half century--providing a fresh approach and opening our eyes to Johns' accomplishment in revealing ways. This is a groundbreaking book, written with both precision and passion. It should be read by everyone who cares about modern painting."
John Yau is a poet and critic. He is the author of several books, including The Passionate Essays on Art and Poetry , Paradiso Diaspora and Borrowed Love Poems , as well as contributions to monographs and catalogues on Joan Mitchell, Jessica Stockholder, Wifredo Lam and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Since 2004, he has been the Arts Editor of the Brooklyn Rail . He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is currently an Associate Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 2006-2007.

Genres: Art

208 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.

Reviews

[Arnoldo Garcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Yau is my prototype, my ice-breaker model, poet-writer-critic. Well almost because he hasn't spent any time in the hills trying to organize a farmworker uprising or even a union. But still better than nothing!

He has a beautiful and aesthetically straight-forward grasp of art in her inter-relationships. If Yau was a human rights activists his first name would be intersectionalist, one who intersects (in his case) rights, colors, palettes and ars poetica.

So I started reading this new "A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns" by Yau because I know his work as a poet and writer. I don't know much about Johns, except his Flag painting and some others that I've run across in collections and so forth as a "pop" artists of sorts.

I am digging Yau's break down of how he has been used and misunderstood as a someone who changed or made history in painting, Yau says, "By the time of Warhol's death in 1987, Johns had gone from being the precursor of populism to becoming its anathema." Innovators always seem to go through this acceptance/rejection, ground-breakers/grave-site rites, rebel/icon, from darling to detestation. Imperial mentality is the same for an individual as for the empire: to get to the next newest thing, you have to throw away the now old thing. Disposable art, fast-food commercialism, colonial thinking, throw out the baby with/without the water, the trash heap of history, the dinosaurs -- without realizing that to have dinosaurs you might have to recognize your eventual extinction by asteroid or assembly line.

[BespectacledBookGirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read almost all of this for thesis so I'm gonna count it. Final thoughts are that John Yau might be the most outrageous art historian I've ever read and I think I dig that, and also that I'm not a huge Jasper Johns fan. Woo!

[Leopard · Rating 4 out of 5]

the author is very intuitive and knowledgable of Johns' approach to art making. I enjoyed some of his ideas.