Creativity Quote by Jasper Johns

Johns is smuggling a radical kind of humility into what sounds like a casual shrug. “The thing is” drops us into conversation, not doctrine, and that matters: he’s not building a theory of mind so much as making space for how art actually gets made. By staking a simple claim - “if you believe in the unconscious - and I do” - he aligns himself with a lineage (Freud, Surrealism, the postwar aura around automatism) without performing allegiance to any single school. Then he immediately pulls the rug out from under certainty: belief opens “room,” not conclusions.

The key move is his refusal of proof. In a culture that treats explanation as the highest form of legitimacy, Johns insists on a zone where causality is slippery, where intention can’t be audited. That isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s a defense of practice. The unconscious becomes less a mystical engine than a permission structure: a way to legitimize ambiguity, contradiction, and the feeling that a work knows more than its maker.

Context sharpens the stakes. Johns emerged when Abstract Expressionism’s heroic psyche was hardening into mythology, and when critics were eager to pin down what a painting “meant.” His own work - flags, targets, numbers - looks brutally declarative yet feels conceptually haunted, as if meaning is both obvious and unreachable. This quote echoes that tension. He’s saying: I’ll admit the forces beneath the surface, but don’t ask me to turn them into a courtroom argument. Art isn’t a lab report; it’s a record of possibilities we can sense, use, and never fully verify.