"I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement"
About this Quote
Johns is pushing back against the tidy myth of the artist as a person with a message and a clean delivery system. “Intended statement” sounds like an artist’s press release: a single, controllable idea that the viewer is supposed to decode and applaud. He wants the painting to outgrow that. “More experience” is the tell. It shifts the goal from transmitting meaning to staging encounter: the stubborn physicality of paint, the drag of repetition, the viewer’s time in front of the object, the aftertaste of recognition and doubt.
The line lands harder in Johns’s context because his most famous images (flags, targets, numbers) look like pure statement at first glance. A flag reads like an assertion of identity, patriotism, politics. A target reads like aim, aggression, attention. Johns uses that instant legibility as bait, then complicates it with encaustic surfaces, visible brushwork, and seriality. The “statement” gets you in the door; the “experience” is the room you realize you’re standing in: texture, ambiguity, the uneasy gap between symbol and thing.
Subtextually, Johns is defending art against both propaganda and overconfident interpretation. He’s also defending the viewer. If a painting is only what the artist “intended,” the audience becomes a test-taker. Johns offers a different contract: the work should contain more than any single intention, including his own. That’s not vagueness; it’s an ethics of looking, where meaning is felt, revised, and never fully pinned down.
The line lands harder in Johns’s context because his most famous images (flags, targets, numbers) look like pure statement at first glance. A flag reads like an assertion of identity, patriotism, politics. A target reads like aim, aggression, attention. Johns uses that instant legibility as bait, then complicates it with encaustic surfaces, visible brushwork, and seriality. The “statement” gets you in the door; the “experience” is the room you realize you’re standing in: texture, ambiguity, the uneasy gap between symbol and thing.
Subtextually, Johns is defending art against both propaganda and overconfident interpretation. He’s also defending the viewer. If a painting is only what the artist “intended,” the audience becomes a test-taker. Johns offers a different contract: the work should contain more than any single intention, including his own. That’s not vagueness; it’s an ethics of looking, where meaning is felt, revised, and never fully pinned down.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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