Jasper Johns and the Direction of Art

Love? Lost. Beautiful images of women? Absent. Gorgeous landscapes? Take a photo. Harmony and peace? Old fashioned.

Art has moved in a different direction. It’s the same direction as the rest of the planet, a direction determined by the imperialistic advance of the cerebral cortex. (For more, see our series of posts on the impact of the “runaway cortex” on several aspects of contemporary life.)

That direction can be discerned in many works and schools of art but jumped out at us in Susan Tallman’s 2022 review of a Jasper Johns exhibit (“Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror”) when we approached it with an impressionistic approximation of content analysis.¹

Following are words and phrases the author uses to describe Johns’ work:

• Cognitive dissonance
• Paradox
• Philosophically provocative, thoughtfully made
• Skeptical, outward-looking, and prone to question
• Hints of thwarted revelation
• Take a machine apart and build it back up
• instability of definitions and measurements
• Conceptual innovations
• Overtly linguistic
• Racing thoughts
• Things the mind already knows
• Disrupts the mental shorthand that converts complex mental shorthand into simple mental categories
• Find insight into being strung between two points
• Consciousness
• Unconscious thought

Tallman believes, and we agree, that Johns’ work is about the mind, not the body, and not the emotions. We submit that his work, like so much of the art of the last hundred or so years, is primarily designed to amuse, instruct, influence, and entertain the cerebral cortex, often using techniques that derived originally from other, purely intellectual pursuits, such as puzzles, diagrams, sayings, philosophies, political principles and other elements that require language and knowledge to be appreciated. “Conceptual art” is just one particularly obvious manifestation of the trend.

As we have argued in previous posts, the cortex has been progressively transforming the entire environment of the planet and our species for around 12,000 years. It has given us, among other things, agriculture, work, investment, delayed gratification, cities, mass society, science, technology, war, climate change, and a cascade of unintended consequences. The progressive abstraction and intellectualization of the arts are more recent “gifts” of the cortex.

Something similar has happened to classical music Music, like the rest of civilization, has walked with painting down this same cortical path. For example, John Cage, whose music is abstract and philosophical, famously produced a musical work entirely composed of silence. The piece, 4’33”, was massively influential; from this silence, some say, was born “noise music.”² In his blog, “The Piano in My Life,” Cage scholar James Pritchett gives us an account of the creation of “4’33” based on Cage’s words:

The piece started with a duration structure. This structure was presumably in three parts, since the piece consists of three movements. Each of these large parts would be subdivided into a number of phrases, the exact number and lengths of phrases for each movement determined by the structure proportions (Pritchett, 2022).

The idea of a musical composition entirely composed of silence is certainly clever, but, as Pritchett’s analysis demonstrates, it is a cerebral endeavor that can appeal only to the cortex. Cage maintained that his goal in composing 4’33” was to get the audience to pay attention to the other sounds around them—the rustle of clothing as people moved, a cough, traffic outside, etc. Nevertheless, when silence is proposed as music, we can't help thinking of The Emperor's New Clothes.

The human mind has shaped, is shaping, our world, down to the last detail, But the mind, unlike evolution, hasn’t got millennia to try out and integrate all the ideas it comes up with. Thus, the unintended consequences of the cortex at work are strewn around us—for better or for worse.