Jasper Johns | Target

[Jasper Johns]

Technics and Creativity : Gemini G.E.L.

New York City, USA: The Museum of Modern Art. 1971

108 pp.,  27 x 22.5 cm., clamshell box

Edition of 22,500

The high edition size of this classic explains why - despite being celebrated and over fifty years old - this can still be picked up for a few hundred dollars. 

More commonly known as Target, this publication consists of a white plastic clam-shell box that contains a catalogue raisonné of prints by Gemini G.E.L. and a newly commissioned multiple by Jasper Johns.

The book features 364 illustrations (20 in colour) of the prints and multiples issued by Los Angeles-based Gemini G.E. Artists featured include Josef Albers, John Altoon, Wallace Berman, Sam Francis, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Claes Oldenburg, Ken Price, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and Frank Stella. 

Target is a do-it-yourself collaboration where the buyer is invited to complete the target with the paint-by-numbers watercolour pads and brush provided. Johns’ signature is printed and a space is left to co-sign. 

For a different type of do-it-yourself target work, see Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shoot-it-yourself Picture, here. 

"The target, a form that can be construed as being both image and object, has been a central motif for Johns since 1955, when he created the encaustic and collage work Target with Plaster Casts. Targets, as well as some of the other intentionally banal objects Johns employs — such as ale cans, flags, maps, and stencilled letters and numbers (all things that the artist claimed “the mind already knows” — evoke Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade. Yet whereas Duchamp effected a readymade by selecting an ordinary object, removing it from its expected location and function, and placing it in the context of “art)” Johns instead creates representations of such objects in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. 

Rather than prioritizing the originality of each composition, Johns focuses on methods of representation and translation between mediums and contexts; he famously wrote in a notebook in 1963-64 about his intent: “Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it.” 

In 1960 Johns produced the lithograph Target. In this, his first published print, sketchy outlines and expressionist marks appear at seemingly random intervals and evoke not only the aesthetic of drawing — particularly the 1958 drawing Target (private collection), with which the print is closely aligned — but also Johns’s autographic touch and, by association, his presence. In the two 1971 Target prints (both based on a 1960 drawing, also called Target, originally in the collection of his dealer lleana Sonnabend [now private collection]), however, Johns revised the process, instead creating works comprising the outlines of five concentric circles with three dried watercolor cakes in the primary colors and a small red paintbrush affixed to the bottom. Johns humorously makes reference to both the ubiquity of targets and the seemingly simplistic construction of his celebrated depictions of the motif, even providing watercolours that correspond to the palette he frequently employed. Below the stamped title and date of the work is the artist’s signature (written in graphite for the lithograph and stamped for the offset lithograph), followed by the word “AND” and a blank line, signalling an invitation for viewers to become active participants in the construction of the piece.

The tension between finished and unfinished is integral to Target. Both works embrace a non finito aesthetic and evoke the possibility that they can only be completed when a participant, unknown to the artist, acts independently and makes modifications of which Johns would be unaware. In this way, Johns challenges concepts of originality, uniqueness, artistic skill, and authorship. A principle behind editioned prints is that each work maintains the same standard of quality; however, by inviting a future collaborator to make key decisions about such things as the degree of finish or the amount of detail and material used, Johns opens up the possibility that the corresponding works would become fundamentally different and therefore unique. By supplying his signature, Johns indicates his approval of any and all modifications in advance, provided the coauthor also signs his or her name. Target thus address a paradox: because the works can only be “completed” by someone else, even though to do so would perhaps destroy them, they therefore must remain in a state of being perpetually unfinished.”

- Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible