Jasper Johns’ Painted Words

Abstract

The painted words in Jasper Johns’ art act in two different capacities. First, by being concealed beneath opaque layers of encaustic or oil paint, they partake in the artist’s interrogation of visual perception. Second, by being repeatedly set against images, the painted words, this time visible, question classical representation. The questioning of sight is directed against the modernist limitation of painting to pure opticality as well as against the privileged position of sight in Western culture. Words and Johns’ means of critiquing modernism; and the different relationships that he establishes between signifiers and signified, either verbal or pictoral, and between signs and things contradict the system of representation, both substitutional and repetitional.