Throughout his career, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, Jasper Johns printed, painted, and even sculpted words as elements in his art. His False Start series of paintings and prints, to which this work belongs, is exemplary of Johns’s linguistic play. Here, he threatens to empty color names of their customary meanings by rendering them “incorrectly,” in incongruous ink colors (for example, “red” is stenciled in a dark blue-gray). The “mistakes” do not undermine the power of language or of color, but they do remind us as viewers that we are the creators of meaning in front of a work of art.
Label from The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing, May 26–October 28, 2018
