False Start: Jasper Johns and the Problem of Origins

UW Center for Visual Cultures lecture by Isabelle Loring Wallace, 5 pm, 4/4, Elvehjem Building-Room L140.

press release: Neither Johns’ first nor oldest extant work, Flag (1954-55) is often described as a personal emblem and point of origin, both for Johns’ oeuvre and postmodern culture more generally. But what kind of emblem is Flag? And, indeed, what kind of origin? With these two questions in mind, this lecture revisits Johns’ much-discussed painting and places it in dialogue with two contemporaneous, but seemingly unrelated developments outside the field of art history: 1) Jacques Lacan’s return to Freud as developed in his Parisian seminars of the mid to late fifties, and 2) the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. As I will argue, these never-compared phenomena reflect a profound shift in our perception of the human subject, which is in turn aligned with a profound shift in the conception of art, evident, I claim, in the self-reflexive, mid-century paintings of Jasper Johns.

Biography: Isabelle Loring Wallace is associate professor of contemporary art at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on a wide range of objects and images, ranging from mid-twentieth-century American painting to early twenty-first-century photography, video, and installation. She has written essays on Manet, Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Steven Meisel and Paul Pfeiffer, and co-edited of two anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennifer Hirsh (Ashgate 2011) and Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility co-edited with Nora Wendl (Ashgate 2013). Professor Wallace is also author of Jasper Johns (Phaidon, 2014) and is currently completing a second book on Johns that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis. Simultaneously, she is working on a new project that considers recurring intersections between new media art and assorted Judeo-Christian themes.

Sponsors: Events made possible thanks to the Anonymous Fund and the Departments of Art, Art History and English.