Target with Four Faces

The test is subtractive, and the work has its own controls in the other targets of these years. Remove the faces and it is a target, the subject of Green Target and its siblings: a different work, saying less. Remove the target and four cast faces in a box are a reliquary with nothing to answer them. The cut below the eyes is required: with eyes the faces would look back, and the argument between a thing made to be looked at and figures who cannot look would go. The newsprint is required by a surface that needs a ground of matter, not of paint. What yields is number and the front. Nothing the work shows compels four rather than three or five, and the front is an option: closed, the box leaves mostly a target with a ledge.

Score: 8.3 / 10

What the work brings into the open can be stated, and it is a meaning, not only a mood. A sign everyone already knows is made a painting without ceasing to be the sign, so that the difference between seeing a thing and looking at it becomes visible: Johns spoke of choosing “things the mind already knows”. Above the sign stand four people reduced to the part of the face that breathes and speaks, without the part that sees: the person as an interchangeable unit, lined up and mute over a mark made to be aimed at. That holds as a statement about anonymity and the gaze, and about the violence latent in an emblem of aim. What holds the axis short of the gate is that the work will not say which of these it means, and much of what it gives is disquiet rather than disclosure.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation is mostly refused, and the refusal is of the work’s kind. There is beauty, and it recurs across the field: the wax holds each stroke separately, the newsprint glows faintly through it, and the rings, flat as a sign, are alive at every edge of every brushload. There is a cold height in the faces, the more unsettling for their calm: four closed mouths, four noses, no eyes, a row of masks over a mark to be shot at. That chill is real and is the strongest moment the work has. But nothing here is grand and nothing transports, and the scale is that of a person’s torso. Beauty of surface, sustained, and one register of dread, felt by some as height and by others as a dry joke, and not repeated in a second key.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The concentric circle is among the oldest of signs: the centre, the eye, the sun, the wheel, and in this century the roundel and the range. The faces bring the mask, the death mask and the chorus. Something of this is built. The structure sets the eyeless faces above the eye of the target, so that the work’s one vertical relation runs between those who cannot see and the mark that exists only to be seen and aimed at: an argument of sight and blindness made by placement, not allusion. But the target was chosen as a sign emptied of depth, a thing the mind already knows, and the casts are anonymous by design. The deeper patterns come from the viewer, and the particular stays particular, a common sign and four casts. Myth built in one relation, evoked in the rest.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance is New York painting of the early 1950s: the gesture as the trace of a self, the canvas as an arena, the image refused. The departure is double. The painterly touch, worked in wax so that every stroke stays visible, is laid over a pre-given flat sign, so that the gesture survives as handling while its claim to express is emptied out. And the body returns, not as a figure painted but as a cast, a thing taken from life and boxed, in a field that had banished both the figure and the object. The stake was real: an unknown painter of about twenty-five against the reigning school, in a work that could be read as a joke; in the event the show of 1958 succeeded. Held below the top because Flag made the first move, and the target is its second instance.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Would another form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. The target fills the square canvas edge to edge, so the painting does not depict a target, it is one, and the question whether it is a sign or a picture can be asked only of this form. Encaustic is the knowledge: it sets each stroke as it falls, keeping the hand visible on an image that needs no hand, and the newsprint beneath puts the printed, public world inside the sign. The casts must be casts: painted faces would be a picture of anonymity, cast faces are anonymity in fact, taken from a person and indistinguishable. The box sets them in their own space, physical and above the plane. Photographed, printed or painted, the work would no longer stand between object and image. Held a step down by the front, whose closed state the work does not need.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence over promise: seventy years of return. Leo Steinberg’s long essay of 1962 on the painter’s first seven years took up the faces and why their eyes are cut away, and set questions that have not closed. Is the target an object or a painting, and does the difference survive the wax? Why are the faces cut below the eyes: to keep them from being portraits, to keep them from seeing, or to keep the viewer from being seen? Is the work a target for the gaze or for a gun, and do the faces stand at the butts or in front of them? Since the 1990s, readings of Johns’s early work as the coded art of a closeted generation have reopened the masks. Held below the top because return to this object yields less than return to the series, and much of the writing reads the targets as a group.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Published, and on view since 1958, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of New York painting in the middle 1950s. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a painting could be, an object that is also a common sign, painted with all the care of the gesture and none of its confession, and joined to real objects taken from a body. The discount: the first move belongs to Flag, and some of the force is shared with Target with Plaster Casts of the same year. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Johns’s first one-person show, at Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York in 1958, changed the conversation of New York art in a season; Pop took the given sign, Minimal and Conceptual art took the object that is its own image, and Stella’s black paintings are on record as a response to Johns’s flags. How much of that reach is owed to this work rather than to the campaign cannot be fixed.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The target, the four casts, the box and the front are all present, none known to be lost or replaced, and the work stands as it was made. Presence: continuous since 1958 in a public collection that shows it often, to a wide public though not the widest; the image is known and has not been worn smooth by copies, and fame is credited only a little. Fabric: encaustic is a stable medium, but newsprint is acid and yellows, plaster chips and its tint can wear, and a hinged front is a moving part. No record of the work’s conservation is given here, and only the general risk is charged. Over seventy-one years the form has held; the fragile fabric of the casts and a presence below the widest hold the figure where it stands.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of encaustic on canvas and of assemblage, to the same anchors as any medium. The encaustic is the achievement: wax kept workable long enough to lay strokes that hold their separate shape, over strips of newsprint dipped in it, so that a flat emblem has a surface as dense and various as any painting of the decade. The rings are true without being ruled dead, and colour holds at full pitch across three hues. The casts are exact and anonymous, as they must be, and evenly tinted; the box is plain carpentry and is meant to be. What holds the figure: the range of command is narrow by design, a ring of colour and a cast; the casts and the box, which carry half the work, are competent rather than commanding; and one medium, wax, carries almost all the virtuosity.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the flat rings of red, yellow and blue, a sign without depth or person, and the four faces, bodies in three dimensions, taken from a life. They obey one law: everything in the work is given, not invented. The target is a public design; the faces are cast, not modelled; the newsprint is found text; even the brushwork is the given vocabulary of the school the work answers. Each given thing is then handled, and the handling makes it a work. The range across that law is real, from emblem to body, flat to solid, public to intimate. What resists is the charge the faces carry, a psychological weight the target refuses, so that the two halves can read as two physics, the sign and the uncanny. The pairing is the work’s argument and holds it, though not for every viewer.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The orders held are few, and held by placement. The body, in four faces, cut and boxed. The public sign, the target of sport and arms. Print and the public world, in the newsprint under the wax. Violence, in the mark that exists to be aimed at and the row of faces above it. Consciousness, in a gaze divided between faces that cannot see and a viewer who must. Art itself, in the gesture of the school the work answers. They are integrated: one vertical relation binds the faces to the target, and the wax binds the print to the sign. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no family, no labour, no state named, no history, no natural order, and no sacred except as a viewer brings it. The figure describes the form, one emblem and four casts.

Score: 6.4 / 10