"The soul is the prison of the body." Just as Foucault argues that he human soul exists "around, on, and within the body", Jasper Johns' series Study for Skin seems to postulate that 'art' exists in the same manner in relation to the canvases he used; the work gets wrapped up in and around the flat surface, it's flatness becoming an integral part of its existence, it's existence having everything to do with it's flatness. Johns relates this idea by stretching his body out on canvas, unwrapping his three dimensional form onto the two dimensional surface.

If 'Art' has become about allegorizing the mind, gesticulating the unconscious, then art-making becomes focused on considering how to wrap one's soul, the work, in a flat picture frame. Jackson Pollock did this through rhythmic paint-flinging, capturing the soul on canvas as something "constituted through bodily inscription", as David Joselit calls it in his essay "Notes on Surface" (8). The soul no longer resides within, it resides on the surface, coexisting with the form it inhabits, and so painting especially becomes about its flat surfaces.

I enjoyed the connection between Joselit's description of the "belated painterly gesture of applying charcoal" as being the revealer of the body indicated in Johns' Skin and Juli Carson's discussion on "living logos" and the son-begetting-the-father in "1989" (4). However, I have a hard time making the same leap from flatness to stereotype that Joselit makes in "Notes on Flatness". Perhaps the dangers of stereotype are expressed in the flatness of identification on canvas (or in Kara Walker's case, on walls)? Maybe that's completely off ... Thinking of flatness, I can't help but think of it as a positive for if, as Saussure suggested, meaning is created out of juxtaposition and difference, then flatness in such a sense is the backdrop to expression and identification, and 'Art' is the performance we attach to its surface, one which inhabits and takes control of the flat surface with which it exists.




1. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison. pp 24-31. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Print.

2. Joselit, David. "Notes on Surface". Theory in Contemporary Art. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

3. Carson, Juli. "1989". Theory in Contemporary Art. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.