Flatness and Depth

I believe that Jasper Johns’s Study for “Skin 1,” 1962, is a perfect example of artwork that crosses the boundary of “flatness” as articulated by both modern and postmodern critics and artists. His preliminary study illustrates optical depth, psychological depth, and a new identity disguised by stereotypes. First, the piece exemplifies Greenberg’s optical notion of “displacing depth by transposing illusionistic recession into lateral extension” (Kocur and Leung 294). By coating his entire face with oil and rubbing it on paper, he is literally flattening out the contours and depth of his face laterally across the drafting paper. However, Skin 1 demonstrates meanings of depth and flatness beyond optical depth; it reveals a multifaceted psychological depth as well (Kocur and Leung 294).

Skin 1 is an attempt to depict Johns’s facial expression and gestures at a given moment in time. I consider these expressions to be the results of our mood and, moreover, gateways into our psyche. Johns uses his face as a stamp and oil and charcoal as his stamp pad to create an honest likeness of himself. Like Pollock who claims to express his unconscious state through his abstract gestures and movements, Johns communicates his more literally through an actual record of his face. However, Skin 1 also exemplifies Foucault’s psychological notion of the “soul is the prison of the body” (Kocur and Leung 298). Johns appears to be trapped within the boundaries of the paper and struggling to escape. This symbolizes his attempt to free the “self” from the confines of painterly expression (Kocur and Leung 299).

Lastly, though not as poignantly or successfully as David Hammons, Skin 1 illustrates the postmodern concern with stereotypes and identity politics. In order to recognize this piece as a male or female figure we must draw on preconceived notions of how each look. Spectators notice the size of the hands, shape of the head, and outline of the hair. The ambiguity of the flattened and stretched figure requires viewers to make their own racial and gender distinctions; we are forced to judge the piece without certainty. This reliance on preconceived notions perpetuates the stereotypes with which postmodern identity politics is most concerned (Kocur and Leung 300-301).

Kocur, Zoya, and Simon Leung. Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. 1st ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005. 294-301. Print.