Johns_Drawer_Mark

Mark Auslander on Jasper Johns, Drawer (1957)

The anthropologist Alfred Gell suggests that potent works of art exercise a kind of enchantment over their viewers through what he terms “cognitive indecipherability.” In the face of certain visual paradoxes, our minds seem to stutter, as we momentarily can’t quite process what we are confronted with. Such is the case with Jasper Johns’ enigmatic Drawer. We rationally know the work is flat, with hardly any depth. Yet who among us isn’t tempted to reach out, grasp the knobs and pull out the drawer?

And if we did succeed in pulling out this impossible drawer, just what might we find inside of it? What old treasures might emerge from beyond the thick application of gray paint, redolent of the passage of time?

Might we find Grand-mother’s beloved china dishes, neatly stacked?

Old delicate linen, slightly frayed yet carefully ironed?

Dried flowers in an aged corsage, with a faint handwritten note penned to a long-forgotten lover?

Please dial Zero followed by the pound sign and tell us what you might find if you could open John’s drawer!