We now have a winner for the free copy of the (new) 2007 album we call Old!.
It was probably like shooting fish in a barrel for art critic and artist, Walter Robinson1 to figure out that Jasper Johns’ 1960 Painting with 2 Balls was the answer that we were looking for. This is the artistic precedent for including the two ball bearings in the aforementioned CD packaging.
In 2010, when Johns received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, any televised recapping of his career undoubtedly focused more on his American flag paintings and didn’t delve so much into his Painting with 2 Balls motif.
DB: The Painting with 2 Balls—was that title an ironic reference to the (macho) Abstract Expressionist sentiment of the time?
JJ: It’s a phrase I used to hear all the time. I used to hear that remark.
DB: About ballsy painting?
JJ: Yes—“It was a ballsy painting,” that “he was really painting with two balls”
from Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews
(More about this painting and its title, after the fold…)
On the one hand, this painting was seen as a provocative gesture on Johns’s part—another in a series of pot shots aimed squarely at certain Abstract Expressionists. [See also: Painted Bronze (Ale Cans)]
His painting was a chaotic landscape of colorful, gestural brushstrokes composed on three separate panels with two painted balls forced into a darkened slit between the top two panels. The energy of his brushwork echoed the work of other abstract expressionists but the title of the painting and the obvious anatomical reference within the work itself reflected Johns’s personal concerns. A gay man and a reserved man, Johns had little respect for the overtly masculine displays of his fellow artists who believed that the potency of their brushwork, either dripped, splashed, or poured across the canvas, testified in some way to their heroic natures.
… Johns was clearly not painting in the same potent manner and not in the same anatomically derived way. Johns recognized that the widespread defense of abstract painting as a masculine enterprise was in fact part of a larger cultural panic… over the perceived loss of autonomy in modern society, which many believed was caused by the loss of any sense of masculinity in a world of castrated, dependent men… In response, many took it upon themselves to reclaim their own masculine identities within this damaged landscape, whether through aggressive sexual displays, alcoholic drinking binges, or spontaneous styles of artistic production.
…“There was this idea associated with Abstract Expressionist painting that the work was a primal expression of feeling,” argued Johns, “and I knew that that was not what I wanted my work to be like.”
Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America, By Robert Genter
But on the other hand, using spherical objects to disrupt the continuity of a picture’s surface is certainly in keeping with Johns’s usual formal concerns. And neither of the two balls in his 1960 painting were the first that Johns had ever included in a painting. There’s an earlier 1958 painting, entitled Gray Paint with Ball.
Gray Painting with Ball is an early and eloquent example of the artist’s willingness to challenge the spatial integrity of the canvas surface…
…two canvases are seemingly pried apart at the center by the insertion of a wooden ball2 within the picture plane, revealing the wall behind the work and including it in the three-dimensional composition as the new background for the painting… Johns first explored this idea in two works on paper in 1957, one done in encaustic on paper… and Drawing with Two Balls. In the later work, three panels are separated by two vertical slits with a single ball inserted in the center of each. In this work however, the idea is still abstract and intellectual; whereas in canvas form and with painterly technique, the idea is presented with full force and tension.
…The theme of canvas panels divided by wooden balls appears in several works by Johns in a variety of mediums. Most well-known is the second painting of this theme, Painting with Two Balls (1960), which is on loan by the artist to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Painted in primary colors, Painting with Two Balls is constructed of three horizontal panels with two wooden balls inserted between the top two canvases.
Gray Painting with Ball, Lot 36, Contemporary Art – Part I, Sotheby’s May 8, 1996 (Sold for $1.3 Million)
While Grey Painting with Ball would appear not to carry the same testicular baggage as a Painting with 2 Balls, at least one writer has interpreted it in much the same way:
Johns programmatically opposed the macho attitude of the Abstract Expressionists, poking fun at their stance in his Grey Painting with Ball. It was a widely held notion of the Abstract Expressionists, as Schimmel points out, that “a painting should have balls.” Tellingly and symbolically, Johns’ painting is minus one ball. Its very appearance, with the ball sandwiched between split halves of the canvas, is antithetical to a central tenet of Abstract Expressionism: that a painting had to be a unified field of gestures.
Re: Old!
As for why a CD of my old songs should include two ball bearings in the design of its packaging, the reasons are quite analogous. Just as abstract artists3 have, for years, posited that “a painting should have balls,” for rock music to “ have balls” is pretty much a prerequisite for many musicians. For a rock song to be described as lacking “balls” would be a scathing criticism. So it’s in this context that I thought to include two rusty ball bearings in the design of the CD package.
Same basic idea, only I just don’t have the, uh, nerve to actually entitle the album, “CD with 2 Balls.” (Not that Old! isn’t a pretty courageous title, considering.)
Footnoted Digressions:
1. In a review of Robinson’s exhibit this year at Dorian Grey Gallery, (ironically entitled, “The Greatest American Painter”) critic Charlie Finch asserts, “Walter Robinson is the most influential American painter since Jasper Johns.” (See also: The Art Damien Hirst Stole)
2. Because Johns tended to paint stuff gray, I had always thought that the two balls were made of steel, but according to Sotheby’s auction catalog and other sources, they are actually wooden balls. I’m not the only one to have made that mistake…
“Two steel balls seem about to crack open the surface of this triptych to reveal what is hidden beneath.”
–Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas
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“Two ball bearings lodged in a crevice parodied the macho culture of Abstract Expressionism.”
–The Whitney Museum Audio Guide
3. There were artists espousing the idea that good painting should have “balls,” (metaphorically speaking) as far back as the late 1800s…
“It is more than apparent that Pissarro and Cézanne prized the same notions: painting with ‘balls’…”
“Picasso and Braque both thought a painting should be bien couillarde, or “ballsy”—a term they’d borrowed from Cézanne..”
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