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

Categorized in : Space Garden Rocks

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.

Jasper Johns

taken journey art

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.

Jasper Johns

beautiful inspirational life

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

Jasper Johns

objects creative art

One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.

Jasper Johns

flags morning night

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

awake treats alive

I'm not looking for images, They just appear and take on an interest. Sometimes you look at a thing and it has no interest and then you see it in a different way and it has another meaning. Or something that was of no use will become useful.

Jasper Johns

different use looks

It's simple, you just take something and do something to it, and then do something else to it. Keep doing this, and pretty soon you've got something.

Jasper Johns

simple

Art is either a complaint or appeasement.

Jasper Johns

appeasement art-is art

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

vision art thinking

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

focus eye sometimes

I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life.

Jasper Johns

failure would-be life

When you work you learn something about what you are doing and you develop habits and procedures out of what you're doing.

Jasper Johns

procedures habit

I’m interested in things which suggest the world rather than express the personality... The most conventional thing, the most ordinary - it seems to me that those things can be dealt with without having to judge them; they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy.

Jasper Johns

personality judging ordinary

One works without thinking how to work.

Jasper Johns

work thinking

There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

Jasper Johns

childhood museums art

I have meant what I have done. Or I have often meant what I have done. Or I have sometimes meant what I have done. Or I have tried to mean what I was doing.

Jasper Johns

done sometimes mean

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.

Jasper Johns

world ideas thinking

Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

Jasper Johns

painting different ideas

I tend to like things that already exist.

Jasper Johns

My experience with life is that it's very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.

Jasper Johns

differences different space