My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterwards – by those who look for it. Two meanings have been ascribed to the… - Jasper Johns

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My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterwards – by those who look for it. Two meanings have been ascribed to these American Flag paintings of mine. One position is: 'He's painted a flag so you don't have to think of it as a flag but only as a painting'. The other is: 'You are enabled by the way he has painted it to see it as a flag and not as a painting.' Actually both positions are implicit in the paintings, so you don't have to choose.

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About Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930, in Augusta, Georgia) is a contemporary artist; painter and printer. He was a close friend of Robert Rauschenberg, with which he shared studio and exchanged intensively ideas and inventions for some years. The two were also closely befriended with the composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

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Additional quotes by Jasper Johns

Merce [Cunningham] is my favorit artist in any field. Sometimes I'm pleased by the complexity of a work I paint. By the fourth day I realize it's simple. Nothing Merce [Cunningham] does [choreography for dance] is simple. Everything has a fascinating richness and multiplicity of direction. [Jasper Johns did a lot of décors for :Merce Cunningham, as Robert Rauschenberg did and Frank Stella,]

What is meant by "the representation of space"? What distinguishes one representation from another? Does this mean "how does one see that one thing is not another thing?" What constitutes a change of focus?.. .What about "another way of establishing (?) "thingness"? "Something" can be either one thing or another (without turning the rabbit on its side)..

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..it seems to me that you could take the opposite point of view, and say that continuity (in language and in thought, B.K.) is the thing that is so distressing and that what one can do is attempt to create a discontinuous situation. It seems to me that continuity is almost a static concept. And since we have the concept of discontinuity it seems to me that it would be more interesting to attempt to establish that.

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