In the mid-1950s Jasper Johns was searching for a way to move beyond Abstract Expressionism. He took the radical step of destroying his previous work and began painting a set of motifs that included numbers, the American flag, and the alphabet. These instantly recognizable images allowed him to reintroduce subject matter into his work, freeing him to explore other painterly concerns. One of the found images that Johns employed was the target, and from 1955 to 1961 the artist produced several dozen paintings and drawings that explored this device.

Initially, Johns chose a palette of primary colors, a preexisting schema as found as the image itself. The artist’s use of oil and encaustic (pigment mixed with hot wax) created a quick-drying medium that recorded each drag and drip of the brush in almost sculptural terms. Indeed, these gestural nods to his Abstract predecessors allowed him to investigate the subtle nuances between form and material. There also exists a tension between the idea of the representational (a target) and the notion of the abstract (the geometry of concentric circles).

In this work, Johns merged painting and sculpture as well as engaging the viewer with “things which are seen and not looked at.” Johns relied upon newspaper and fabric dipped in encaustic (pigment mixed with hot wax) to build the surface of the painting. He also made plaster casts of the lower half of a female model’s face over four successive months and fixed these out of order in a hinged, wooden box that he attached to the top of the canvas. By incorporating the sculptural elements in the same space as the painting, Johns emphasized the “objecthood” of the painting. This merging of mediums reinforced the three-dimensional object-ness of the paintings.

Beyond the material surface of the work, the concentric circles of the target imply the acts of taking aim, as if you were shooting in archery for example. However, Johns excluded the model’s eyes from the plaster faces, and therefore prevented any chance of an exchange of gazes between the viewer and the faces in the work, this forced the viewer to examine the interactions between the painted target and the plaster faces. Viewed through the lens of the Cold War era, the seemingly benign images can imply the targeting of the anonymous masses by global political powers as well as by corporate advertising and the mass media.

In connection to my own project, Johns’ work follows an abstract genre and incorporates circles in the simple design of the painting and this is what my project follows, circles. I would like to incorporate this idea by perhaps using the image as inspiration for images of targets in the modern day, archery for example. These targets are circular yet serve a different purpose to Johns’ art.