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Jasper Johns Quotes
born 1930 United States
Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930, in Augusta, Georgia) is a contemporary artist; painter and printer. He was a close friend of Robert Rauschenberg, with which he shared studio and exchanged intensively ideas and inventions for some years.
Random Jasper Johns quote
19 quotes
To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.
I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage.. .I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.
I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.
People say that my works are "neutral". But if you paint something, it is "something", and it cannot be neutral. Being neutral is a mere expression of a form of intention.
I made the flags and targets to open men's eyes.. ..[they] were both things - which are seen and not looked at - examined.
Every artist feels alone and isolated. Friends are very important in terms of all sorts of definitions of oneself. They tell you what you are and what they are aside from the intellectual aspects.
Everybody is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.
Bend color names which should be made of neon or copper tubing. Place an object on a surface – trace the object – then bend the object – leaving some part of it attached.
As you [Tono] has written, people say that my works are 'neutral'. But if you paint something, it is 'something', and it cannot be neutral. Being neutral is a mere expression of a form of intention.
An invisible drawing made in the air. Make a drawing behind your back. Make a stolen painting.
The relationship between the object & the event. Can they 2 be separated? Is one a detail of the other? What is the meeting? Air?
Put a lot of paint & a wooden ball or other object on a board. Push to the other end of the board. Use this in a painting. – ruler on board.
Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.
Sixteen Americans (1959)
[to see the painting]..as an object, as a real thing in itself. (quote on his Flag-paintings)
I make what it pleases me to make.. ..I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason. I intuitively paint flags.
Make something, a kind of object, which as it changes or falls apart (dies as it were) or increases in its parts (grows as it were) offers no clue as to what its state or form or nature was at any previous time. Physical and Metaphysical. Obstinacy. Could this be a useful object?
Object in/ and space – the first impulse may be to give the object – a position – to place the object. (The object had a position to begin with). Next – to change the position of the object. – Rauschenberg's early sculptures – A board with some rocks on it. The rocks can be anywhere on the board. - Cage's Japanese rock garden – The rocks can be anywhere (within the garden)..
Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art.. .He declared that he wanted to kill art ('for myself') but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object".
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