Constructed Painting || Constructing Physicality

Constructing PhysicalityAuthor(s): Richard ShiffSource: Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1, Constructed Painting (Spring, 1991), pp. 42-47Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777084 .

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Constructing Physicality

Richard Shiff

Key to the history of the objectification ofpainting, the brushstroke has served as both the agent of color change-the traditional purveyor of illusion-and the means of affirming painting's physicality. Collage techniques have likewise served this dualfunction. Shiffhere examines some of the qualities of "touch," which he locates in subjective response as well as in

42 objective fact, in particular works by Cezanne, Picasso, and Johns, within the general dynamics of surface, image, picture plane and process, depth and flatness, that have proved ante- cedent to the development of constructed painting.-C. B.

vN v 'o critical essay of the 1960s had more impact than Clement Greenberg's "Modernist Painting." It identified modernism with an assertion of the medium's

integrity: "Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture, one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first. . . For the sake of its own autonomy painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture."' Ironically, just as Greenberg was estab-

lishing such principles, many younger artists seemed to be

violating the new order. Among them, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns employed an unusual diversity of materials to make collages and painted constructions that displayed sculptural properties.

To what extent, if any, did the fabrication and form of the new kinds of constructed painting indicate a reorientation of modernist interests? Greenberg's principles complicate the issue. Despite his belief that painting must be distin-

guished from sculpture, he stressed painting's physical pres- ence; this entails a certain confusion between painting and

sculpture, because sculpture can no longer be identified as the more material, more physical medium. Whether it de-

picts external things or not, Greenberg's modernist picture first impresses its viewer with its own articulated

materiality-to see a "painting as a picture" is to see it as an

object. When seen in the modernist manner, a painting is as

capable as sculpture of conveying material resistance to the

touch; rather than an idealized planar surface, it becomes a real object occupying space and possessing texture, thick- ness, density, and weight. (How a particular work is seen

may well depend more on the viewer's mode of reception than on inherent qualities of the object, yet the material environ- ment induces particular ways of seeing; thus, "modernism" involves both people and things.)

Greenberg's opposition of old-master to modernist art

parallels the critical distinction between "transparency" and

"opacity." The descriptive figure of transparency converts a

painting surface into an immaterial plane (metaphorically, a

window) that renders visible what appears to lie beyond it, a world of normative pictorial representation. In contrast, the

figure of opacity suggests that a painting surface remains

undeniably material, exhibiting its own detailed physicality. Obviously, transparency facilitates vision; whereas opacity impedes its course, seeming instead to invite the touch. The

figures of transparency and opacity thus offer structural

analogies to the working of the two senses most directly involved in the practice of painting. Vision corresponds to the coordinated view of objects that a transparent painting affords; it is readily (but not exclusively) conceived as a

totalizing mode of panoramic survey. Touch corresponds to the unyielding physicality of an opaque surface, one that retains its immediate particularity at all points of contact. Touch is performed piecemeal, touch by touch, just as a planar surface is painted.

When we attend to indications of and references to touch, Greenberg's critical discourse of old-master transparency and modernist opacity expands to lend meaning to material constructions that might otherwise seem to escape the bounds of modernist concerns. It is not a question of

determining what is modernist and what postmodernist or otherwise (usually an idle exercise), but of reorienting the critical investigation of certain artworks to focus on pervasive cultural interests. As a cultural force, modernist art explores the interaction of touch and vision as well as the links between "active" manipulation and "passive" observation. The modernist attitude itself does not just happen; it too is constructed. We currently use the term "construction" (as in

"constructing the self," "constructing reality") to signal awareness of an active element in the production of aspects of art and its viewing, such as style and subjectivity, that custom regards as natural or passive.

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Any painting constructed so as to call attention to its own material fragmentation, system of internal attachment, or simple physicality denies, or at least interferes with, what is required conventionally for effective illusionistic representation: the fictive establishment of a transparent plane through which a pictorial world can be viewed (as if such

panoramic distancing would reveal a universal natural or-

der). It is common to argue that all paintings create a tension between the reality of their immediate flatness and the illusion of their distanced, represented volume. That point is not in question here. We are concerned instead that in many recent paintings (or in collages and relieflike constructions that derive from the tradition of painting) pictorial references to tactile materiality-thick paint, irregular support sur-

faces, blatantly heterogeneous materials-seem to dominate references to visual immateriality. What does such involvement with the tactile indicate?

At issue is touch: the painter's touch becomes the vehicle for a metonymic exchange between an artist's or a viewer's human physicality and the material, constructed

physicality of an artwork. When we see a picture in terms of its material references to touch (as opposed to its fictive allusions to vision), we reorient not only a local pictorial order but also our global sense of how human bodies contact their

surroundings; we reconstruct the functioning of the body and its senses, how it relates to the world. When vision domi- nates, knowledge becomes centralized, abstracted, and dis-

tanced; with touch, experience is multiple, concrete, and

proximate-close "at hand." "Touch," as the term is commonly used, refers to at

least three aspects of a painting and its process. First, touch is the gesture that deposits the painter's mark as an imprint or

impression. We regard the mark as an indexical sign of the

gesture. Second, touch is the applied paint mark itself, in its

capacity as a visible form; discernible features of a touch (or group of touches) relate it iconically to things of similar form seen both outside and inside paintings-say, both clouds and pictures of clouds. We call the applied paint material a touch because it is the effect of an act of touching; this is a

straightforward case of metonymy, with the name of the action or cause-touching a surface to leave a mark-being given to its effect, the mark or "touch." Third, touch is the tactile sensation the painter actually experiences or the viewer imagines to be associated with making such a mark. Each of these

aspects of the experience of painting (both painter's and

viewer's) is "touch." The modernist opacity to which Greenberg refers is

very much a "visible" feature of many paintings of the nineteenth century, which, in accentuating the artist's touch, seem to assert the body's physicality in a realm traditionally occupied as exclusively as possible by the mind. Eye, mind, and visual transparency evoke one set of associated qualities, while hand, body, and tactile opacity suggest another. The polarities are evident in J.-A.-D. Ingres's anxiety over

painting's physical threat to cerebral vision: "Touch should not be apparent. . . . Instead of the object represented, it makes one see the painter's technique; in the place of

thought, it proclaims the hand."2 Despite Ingres's concern, nineteenth-century art invested in touch as the immediate mark and the marking (or production) of authorial identity.3 To craft a painting by hand was to assert oneself as an independent author (with connotations of social liberation and political independence); purchasing a painting was to partic- ipate in, by buying into, a social system of transferable identitites (markings) and fashionability.

Among nineteenth-century painters, no one exem- plifies a more thorough involvement with touch than Paul Cezanne, whose unsigned works were said to be "better [that is, more authoritatively] marked than by a signature."4 Sig- nificantly, Cezanne is one of the major figures in Greenberg's history of modernism, a painter whose repetitive brushmarks, seeming to refer more to each other than to features of depicted objects, constitute a surface of paradigmatic modernist opacity.5 Does Cezanne's manner of painting also create the persistent tactile physicality associated with objects that actually project into space? In a certain way it does, because of the fictive "solidity" that critics have so often attributed to Cezanne's art-yet such illusionistic sculptural quality is but a commonplace of the old-master tradition. Greenberg himself made a more interesting observation concerning "solid" materiality. He explained that Cezanne's failure to give his surface of Impressionist color an old-master quality of illusion amounted inadvertently to a modernist success: "Cezanne's effort to turn Impressionism toward the sculptural was shifted, in its fulfillment, from the structure of the pictorial illusion to the configuration of the picture itself as an object, as a flat surface. Cezanne got 'solidity,' all right; but it is as much a two-dimensional, literal solidity as a representational one."6

What Greenberg here observed-and, in effect, reor- iented or "corrected"-is a metonymic exchange operating between material surface and immaterial image: the "solidity" previous critics saw actually belonged to neither the objects depicted nor even the illusion of their "real" pres- ence; instead, it belonged to the construction, by means of juxtaposed "touches," of a rather overdetermined (and hence unusually "solid") compositional order. Each discernible shape, and indeed each mark, on a Cezanne surface bears so many possible relationships to its contiguous neighbors that the viewer need never assess the overall visual order of the image to arrive at a sense of "construction." Cezanne's paintings exhibit a visuality that seems to retain a thoroughly localized tactile order; it can be appreciated by imagining a hand's rhythmic movements as responses to both the given materiality of a surface and the pattern of marks the hand itself is creating.

Obviously, a hand that touches is also touched by whatever it contacts-touch, in other words, is reciprocal.7

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For this reason, we find the kind of overabundant compositional play that characterizes Cezanne's art analogous to the

immediately physical experience of tactile marking, as opposed to detached visual surveying. When describing a

painting, we commonly attribute features of the act of touch-

ing to the mark that is the "touch" (we call a mark "awkward," for example); in a comparable act of metonymic exchange, the "solid" physicality of Cezanne's articulated surfaces has often been attributed to his "awkwardly" rendered objects. It

might be more meaningful, finally, to reverse the direction of this transference (as Greenberg saw fit to do): Cezanne's art takes "solidity" from the world of represented things and returns it to the picture surface itself, where it acquires a more immediate physicality.

Cezanne's technical procedure seems sensitive to this matter of locating a proper place for depicted physicality. The artist explored the problem in a particularly challenging way in a number of still-life compositions which, like Cubist

collages, amount to visual puns. Still Life with Plaster Cupid 44 (fig. 1) is a notorious example. Its central depicted object is a

cast of a sculpture, placed on a table as part of a still-life

arrangement. The background shows canvases propped against the studio wall: at the upper right, a painting of a

sculptural cast of a flayed man; at the middle left, an unfinished still life with a patterned cloth (corresponding to Cezanne's Still Life with Peppermint Bottle [1893-95, Na- tional Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.]); and in the center,

FIG . 1 Paul C6zanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid, ca. 1892-94, oil on paper on panel, 27Y2 x 22V2 inches. Courtauld Institute Galleries, London (Courtauld Collectionl

directly "behind" the Cupid, a stretched canvas that appears to be blank, prepared but unarticulated.

Cezanne's configuration of a depicted blank canvas "behind" a depicted sculpture subverts the pictorial fiction that a measure of "space" must separate the foreground Cupid from its pictorial background. Instead, the composition suggests that the sculpture has become "literally" a

painting. (The word "literally" does not quite fit, since we are

dealing here with metaliteralness, a materiality that itself comments on the nature, representation, and perception of

materiality.) This interpretation follows in part from an anal-

ogy established between the Cupid and the flayed man, the latter being a painted image of a painting of a sculpture. The

depicted canvas "behind" the Cupid is itself without specific figuration, as if becoming the neutral background for the very image that both masks and occupies its center, the figure of the Cupid.8 This visual order implies that the image of the

sculpted Cupid has been converted-by the figurality of Cezanne's picture-into the image of a painting, not a sim-

ple picture, but a picture of a picture. The sculpted Cupid becomes "literally" (or metaliterally) a painting, being both

painted and set into a pictorial context that indicates its nature as a painting; after all, this image "covers" the surface of a depicted canvas not only by lying in front of it, but by lying upon it, touching it.

Here not only identifiable parts of the representation shift between figurality and apparent literalness, but sensory modes shift also. For touch and vision are caught in the kind of reciprocal exchange that characterizes Cezanne's "solidity": touch is figuring vision, and vision is figuring touch. As we view Cezanne's painting, the fictive sculptural quality of the plaster Cupid is converted into a "literal" surface of

paint. The possibility that the image of the plaster Cupid really belongs to the canvas depicted "behind" it facilitates this conversion. A visual illusion thus becomes (or returns to) tactile reality, material surface. The arrangement of the

represented objects in Cezanne's painting, coupled with our modernist critical orientation, leads us to witness this transformation.

Seen in this manner, Still Life with Plaster Cupid represents only one surface and one distance, the surface the artist touched and the distance laid out by his hand. Whether

intending it or not, Cezanne concentrated on the movement and rhythms of his hand across the painted surface rather than projecting the passage of his eye from one level of depth to another. This allowed him to combine the forms of dispa- rate objects positioned in his studio at different distances from him, lending these forms a "literal" physicality. They are, first of all, what they appear to be: painted figures covering a canvas surface (just as the artist's characteristic

repetitive brushmarks also map out a surface). If, standing at arm's length from the canvas, the viewer assumes a tactile orientation and imagines a condition of reciprocal touch, of hand and pictorial surface acting one upon the other, then

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Cezanne's formal structures cease to be distorted or paradox- ical. Foreground and background become one because the hand can respond only to what it can touch, the painted surface. It grasps that surface by moving across it, linking elements together and shaping them analogously. We detect the artist's habitual involvement with this responsive move-

ment, yet we also perceive a certain self-consciousness and

distancing: in Still Life with Plaster Cupid Cezanne created a set of visual puns that exaggerate the conflict between what is

expected of vision and what of touch-think again of the

painted sculptural Cupid that, within its pictorial context, becomes a painted painting.

When I see Cezanne's paintings, I do not know that the artist thought things looked as he represented them, but rather that this is how surfaces and other things can be

experienced ("seen," if you will) through a certain mode of

touching. Neither visual reality nor the "solidity" of distanced

objects is idealized in Cezanne's art, as traditional critics

(but not Greenberg) would have us believe. Rather, this art idealizes the physicality of actual tactile experience, render-

ing it visible, picturing it. Given this focus on touch, we can reconsider the com-

mon association of Cezanne's "solidity" with qualities of more

obviously "constructed" works, such as Pablo Picasso's col-

lages. Cezanne's practice resembles Picasso's not because it involves seeing objects from multiple perspectives and re-

constructing them (as familiar accounts claim), but because the general "perspective" of both operations might best be described as tactile. Picasso made touch an inescapable feature of his pictorialism in his sculptures and assem-

blages, and perhaps even more so in his collages. Their cuts, tears, and attachments feature the hand so as to divorce its actions from references to vision that traditionally accompany the use of stylus or brush. The conventional claim is that the brush responds to moments of the eye's panoramic survey; Cezanne's individual brushmarks are thus said to correspond to discrete visual sensations.9 In contrast, the actions of

collage transform rather than document. Or perhaps they transform in order to document, since they characterize mate-

rials by altering them, defining localized physicality. The

quality of a cut, for example, indicates qualities of the given material. So, too, the quality of a brushmark might actually indicate the texture of its support surface; brushmarks, how-

ever, are customarily regarded as "expressive"-indexes not

of material qualities, but of emotive forces. Cuts bear no such

association and can be even more opaque than the heaviest, most physical strokes of paint. They call attention to them-

selves, the depersonalized gestures that generate them, and

the physicality of the materials upon which they act. 10

Picasso often configured marks or contours made by

cutting so that the distinction (indeed the modernist contra-

diction) between visual illusion and tactile physicality becomes a necessary part of any attentive description of the

picture. Consider his papier colle, Bowl with Fruit, Violin,

45

FIG. 2 Pablo Picasso, Bowl with Fruit, Violin, and Wine Glass, 1913, pasted paper, watercolor, chalk, oil, and charcoal on cardboard, 25Y2 x 197/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection.

and Wine Glass (fig. 2). Depicted at the upper left are five

pieces of fruit in a bowl. These illusionistic fragments have

been cut from a preexisting set of chromolithographic botani-

cal illustrations, then combined with other pieces of paper to

form part of an elaborate still-life composition. The pictorial

question is whether these "pieces" are to be seen first as fruit

or as paper. Picasso arranged his five pieces of paper so that

three pieces (of fruit) seem to be "in front" and two "behind."

This is how it looks initially. But when the cuts themselves

are inspected as material manifestations, it becomes apparent that all five pieces of paper abut on the surface with no

overlap. In fact, the two pieces "behind" are nothing other

than the cut-away remains of two of the "front" pieces. If the

paper supports do not overlap, can the illusion of overlapping fruits be sustained?

Usually, the answer would be yes, because the physi-

cality of a pictorial surface remains recessive, truly a back-

ground. But in Picasso's collage, the fragmentary images of

the five pieces of fruit are particularly closely identified with

their paper supports; we are, after all, looking at pictures from a preexisting printed page. When we discover that the

material support of each piece of fruit extends no farther than

what we can see of the image, we determine that the fragmen-

tary look of the two "back" fruits is no illusion; these pictures are "literally" (or metaliterally) fragmented. To be sure, they

may have looked fragmented from the start, but only in a

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FIG. 3 Jasper Johns, Corpse and Mirror, 1974, oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas, two panels, 50 x 681/8 inches overall. Collection of Mrs. Victor W. Ganz, New York.

visual sense, and in a way that conforms to pictorial conven- 46 tion. Inspection reveals that the fragmentation is actual-the

pictures are physically cut, truncated. This may come as a curious surprise or a strange disappointment. At any rate, the realization undermines the traditional sense that the material order of a work of art should be subordinated to the demands of visual illusion.

Picasso's collage presents difficulties analogous to those of Cezanne's Still Life with Plaster Cupid: illusionistic visual differences between "front" and "back" cannot be secured (in Greenberg's terms, we cannot determine what is "in" the painting); and localized relations of tactile contiguity assume extraordinary representational import. Picasso has selected or prepared pieces of material, most of which either

exemplify those features of objects that facilitate visual representation (recognizable contour, color, texture) or already present an illusionistic visual image. But these materials have been arranged so as to subject any implied sense of "front" and "back" to the physicality of the support surface, which allows only a shifting in two dimensions: up or down, to left or right. Within this tactile order an object in "back" is constituted just as is one in "front": by juxtaposing one piece of paper to another across the surface.

The hand acquires the habit of moving from side to side or up and down through its experience with surfaces, which are everywhere accessible to glancing touches but resistant to penetrating ones. 1 Acts of "glancing" and "penetrating" connote antithetical modes of vision, with the former invoking localized knowledge and the latter the more generalized depth effect of pictorial illusion. Vision "penetrates" a picture and coordinates a totalizing perspective; touch is con- fined to surface contact rather like a limited glance. The

opacity of modernist painting, which resists penetration, challenges traditional metaphors of the power of encompass- ing vision as well as mystical insight.

Accordingly, the tactile order of both Cezanne and

Picasso establishes a realm of experience that is neither distant like the visual panorama, nor so immediately identified with the self that material physicality cannot intrude. Within this realm, the artist-viewer faces a pictorial object that evokes a sense of tactile physicality, which in turn guides interpretation to an understanding of localized situations and conditions.

Understanding by touch corresponds to the modernist

(we might now say postmodernist) preference for multiplicity: in a tactile mode, we are able to move from one position or

perspective to another, tolerant of change, sensing at every moment that the situation remains "true" despite its variance from the previous moment. What we lack is a totalized

panoramic image. The experience of touch neither offers nor demands it.

Understanding by touch: this is very much the mode of

Jasper Johns, whose paintings index touch in numerous ways; they include attachments appearing to alter the work itself (a stick that scrapes the painted surface) as well as imprints of studio objects and body parts (hands, feet, faces, and more). Johns's art operates in the mode of touch, continually re-

orienting whatever localized physical connection to his works the viewer may succeed in establishing. Elsewhere, I have discussed the character of Johns's art in terms of the multiple, exchangeable perspectives of anamorphosis; significantly, the kind of anamorphic relationship Johns establishes remains always subject to change (unlike classical an-

amorphosis, Johns's construction implies no single "correct"

viewpoint). 12 As in the case of Cezanne or Picasso, works by Johns have parts that relate to one another in conflicting and overdetermined ways; the works themselves seem to demon- strate that their representational meaning will change ac-

cording to the conditions of their close inspection. Johns couples the immediate physicality of handprints

and other "opaque" markings with a highly conceptualized sense of physical objects (again, this seems to link his mode of construction to that of Cezanne and Picasso). His paintings render evident the building blocks of our conceptual architecture-"things" on the order of fronts, backs, sides, maskings, mirrorings. Consider just one feature among those shared by his Corpse and Mirror (fig. 3) and Corpse and Mirror II (fig. 4): the prominent X near the top of the right panel of Corpse and Mirror. An X is also to be discerned in the analogous position in Corpse and Mirror II; but there it is

nearly invisible, having been produced by laying down tape, painting over it with white, removing the tape to leave a

recessed, colorless X, adding a thin dark gray or black X

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FIG. 4 Jasper Johns, Corpse and Mirror 11, 1974-75, oil on canvas with painted frame, four panels, 575/8 x 75/4 inches overall. Collection of the artist.

within the wider recessed area, and then overlaying the entire area with more white and a pattern of colored hatch-

ings. Because it is obscured but layered, this complex X

might be detected by the hand more readily than by the eye. We can differentiate the second Corpse and Mirror from the first by tactile properties and physical structure as much as

by visual appearance. The constructed layering of the second painting corre-

sponds to a physical orientation reversing that of the first: if the second were seen from its hidden "back" side, it would have the physical feel of the first, with its X projecting forward, to the "front." Other aspects of the two works rein- force this observation.13 Instead of a projecting frame, Corpse and Mirror II has a recessed frame painted with the

hatchings pattern of the picture surface, implying that the entire surface can be both front and back. The frame, just like the X, would be normalized if it could somehow be seen from its other side-it is a "back" (recessed) seen as if a "front" (painted). Reversal characterizes additional details of color and layering in the two paintings. In the right panel of

Corpse and Mirror II, chromatic hatchings cover an area of neutral pinkish beige located near the X; they also obscure a

diagonal bar along the right edge. Whereas in Corpse and Mirror, analogous motifs in corresponding positions, a chromatic pinkish swatch and a diagonal line, have been painted over black and white hatchings, so that they are superim- posed, and fully visible.

The panels that make up Johns's two paintings act upon each other as units within a set (corpses opposing their mirror

images) and as contrasting sets that become fronts and backs in relation to one another. They offer a visual tension like that associated with representational illusion, but now a tension that derives from the physical orientation of the construction. Which "side" of Corpse and Mirror II is its face? Which side should we face-front or back?

Paintings of the kind discussed in this essay remain

close at hand, like people we face in intimate conversation.

They address the interpreter as collaborator and equal, as if viewer and artwork possessed complementary physicalities (we too have bodies, faces, fronts, backs, mirrorings). We

tacitly recognize a natural affinity between the bodily actions

implied by the features of such paintings and actions our own bodies can perform. As a result, the order of these paintings becomes more social and shared than individual. We can become part of their tactile pictorial order; it belongs not only to the works and their makers but to us, connecting us to the material world and engaging us in consciousness of a common

physicality. That physicality is at one and the same time constructed and lived. o

Notes 1. Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (revised), Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965): 195-96. For the initial version, see "Modernist Painting," Arts Yearbook 4 (1961): 104. 2. From the artist's notes, ca. 1813-27, reprinted in Henri Delaborde, Ingres, sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine (Paris: Plon, 1870), 150. 3. On modernist professionalization, authorial marking, and the painting hand's

appropriation of functions of the eye, see my "Performing an Appearance: On the Surface of Abstract Expressionism," in Michael Auping, ed., Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments (New York: Abrams, 1987), 94-123. 4. Gustave Geffroy, "Paul Cezanne" (1895), La Vie artistique, 8 vols. (Paris: Dentu, 1892-1903), 6:215. 5. "Every [one of C6zanne's] brushstroke[s] that followed a fictive plane into fictive

depth harked back-by reason of its abiding, unequivocal character as a mark made by a brush-to the physical fact of the medium"; Clement Greenberg, "Cezanne" (1951), Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 55. 6. Greenberg, "Cezanne," 54. 7. The classic source for recent discussions of the reciprocity of touch is David Katz, Der Aufbau der Tastwelt (Leipzig: Barth, 1925), esp. 19-20. 8. One might object that since the Cupid extends beyond the boundaries of the

background canvas, it can hardly be contained within it; but that is to ignore the cumulative figurality of Still Life with Plaster Cupid. Note that other details similarly conflate or compress foreground and background elements: for instance, the "real"

patterned cloth that forms part of the foreground still-life arrangement extends into and merges with its "painted" counterpart in the canvas "behind" it. 9. For example: "[Cezanne] gave to the space of the image the aspect of a world created free-hand and put together piecemeal from successive perceptions"; Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cezanne (1952; New York: Abrams, 1962), 10. 10. On Picasso's cuts (including their metonymic status), see my "Picasso's Touch:

Collage, Papier Colle, Ace of Clubs," Yale UniversityArt Gallery Bulletin, 1990, 38- 47. 11. The surfaces that offer a hand its initial experiences and induce its habits and practices are, of course, neither canvases, panels, nor papers, but instead those of human bodies and domestic environments. 12. An anamorphic representation appears distorted when viewed from a "normal" position, one implied by the conventions of the medium; it is regularized when the viewer assumes some other, deviant position. See my "Anamorphosis: Jasper Johns," in James Cuno, ed., Foirades/Fizzles: Echo and Allusion in the Art of Jasper Johns, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1987), 147-66. 13. But by no means do they exclude alterative inferences-Johns's works are

copiously overdetermined.

RICHARD SHIFF directs the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is preparing a book on modernist modes of representation.

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