Jasper Johns quotes

Jasper Johns is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, widely recognized for his role in shaping modern art. His iconic works often incorporate familiar images like flags, numbers, and targets, challenging traditional notions of symbolism and meaning. He continues to influence generations of artists through his innovative techniques and conceptual approach. Here are 60 of his quotes:

I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.

Jasper Johns

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.

Jasper Johns

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.

Jasper Johns

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)..

Jasper Johns

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.

Jasper Johns

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.

Jasper Johns

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."

Jasper Johns

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?

Jasper Johns

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.

Jasper Johns

Donald Judd spoke of a 'neutral' surface, but what is meant? Neutrality must involve some relationship (to other ways of painting, thinking?) He would have to include these in his work to establish the neutrality of that surface. He also used 'non' or 'not' – expressive – this is an early problem – a negative solution or – expression of new sense – which can help one into – what one has not known. 'Neutral' expresses an intention.

Jasper Johns

It all began with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn't have to design it. So I want on to similar things like the targets things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I've always thought of a painting as a surface; painting it in one color made this very clear... A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.

Jasper Johns

I made the flags and targets to open men's eyes.... [they] were both things - which are seen and not looked at - examined.

Jasper Johns

Merce [Cunningham] is my favorit artist in any field. Sometimes I'm pleased by the complexity of a work I paint. By the fourth day I realize it's simple. Nothing Merce [Cunningham] does [choreography for dance] is simple. Everything has a fascinating richness and multiplicity of direction. [Jasper Johns did a lot of décors for :Merce Cunningham, as Robert Rauschenberg did and Frank Stella, ].

Jasper Johns

.. I don't see any point in simply stating something that is easily available. But then that may just be my own psychology, a kind of negative position. It seems to me that if you avoid everything you can avoid, then you do what you can't avoid doing, and you do what is helpless, and unavoidable. That seems to me more interesting than any other position at this moment – for me anyway.

Jasper Johns

I met him Cummingham around 1953 after a performance I saw. He was teaching and making dances for his company and was already working with John Cage. What interested me initially wasn't just the movement but also the music he worked with, which was unfamiliar to me... Later Bob Rauschenberg had been doing sets and costumes for the Cunningham Company... I can't say exactly how, but for a period of time, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and I saw each other frequently and exchanged ideas. John [Cage] was very interested in presenting his ideas to other people, so it was impossible to be around and not to learn... He could apply his ideas on space and time to painting, or music or architecture... I don't have a clear sense of cause and effect in my painting, but it is probably there.

Jasper Johns

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.

Jasper Johns

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.

Jasper Johns

What is meant by "the representation of space"? What distinguishes one representation from another? Does this mean "how does one see that one thing is not another thing?" What constitutes a change of focus?... What about "another way of establishing (?) "thingness"? "Something" can be either one thing or another (without turning the rabbit on its side)..

Jasper Johns

Painting has a nature which is not entirely translatable into verbal language. I think painting is a language, actually. It's linguistic in a sense, but not in a verbal sense. I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. And I think that is true. One wants to be able to use all of one's facilities in all aspects of one's life... You may have to choose how to respond and you may respond in a limited way, but you have been aware that you are alive. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement.

Jasper Johns

When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.

Jasper Johns

He Robert Rauschenberg was a kind of enfant terrible at the time [around 1960] and I thought of him as an accomplished professional. He'd already had a number of shows, knew everybody, had been to Black Mountain College in South Carolina, working with all those avant-garde people.... Rauschenberg focused very much on working. I was prepared to do that, too. He was also involved with Merce Cunningham dance group and totally unconcerned with his success, in the cliché term. All of the activity had a lively quality, quite separate from any commercial situation.... [Rauschenberg moved into a loft in Jaser John's building and they very closely worked together for a couple of years]. You get a lot by doing. It's very important for a young artist to see how things are done. The kind of exchange we had was stronger than talking. If you do something then I do something then you do something, it means more than what you say.

Jasper Johns

His [Marcel Duchamp's] idea was that anything could be art by focusing the mind to think of it as art. My images are similar but at the time my work was first being shown, 1958-'59, I was unfamiliar with Duchamp and Dada. Everyone said my work was Dada, so I read on it, went to Philadelphia to see the Arensberg Duchamp collection, was delighted by it and later met him (Duchamp)... But it was all more a coincidence. Perhaps it's that certain ideas get into the air, ideas that come out of our living and out of the environment automatically.

Jasper Johns