Maleren kommer til at skrive et digt

Begyndelsen på Marjorie Perloffs artikel "Watchman, Spy, and Dead Man: Jasper Johns, Frank O'Hara, John Cage and the "Aesthetic of Indifference":

In a sketchbook for 1964, Jasper Johns began to make notes for his paintings Watchman and According to What. On one particularly tantalizing page, he makes a sketch for what would appear in both paintings as the wax cast of a man's lower torso, positioned on the seat of a chair, itself bisected vertically to accommodate the depth of the fragmented figure (fig. 1). Torso and chair are inverted so that the long left leg extends upward to meet the word "spy" at the lower margin of the enigmatic text, positioned as a reversed L-shape above it:

The Watchman falls "into" the "trap" of looking.
The "spy" is a different person
"Looking" is & is not "eating" & also "being eaten"
That is, there is continuity of some sort among
the watchman, the space, the objects.
The spy must be ready to "move," must be aware
of his entrances & exits.
The watchman leaves
his job & takes away
no information.
The spy must remember
and must remember himself
& his remembering.
The spy designs himself
to be overlooked. The
watchman "serves" as a
warning. Will the
spy & the watchman
ever meet? In a
painting named Spy,
will he be present?
The spy stations himself
to observe the watchman.

If the spy is a foreign object
why is the eye not irritated?
Is he invisible?
When the spy irritates, we try
to remove him.
"Not spying, just looking"--
Watchman.

[WSI 59-60]
In the square inside the L-shaped text, Johns has written: "Somewhere here, there is the / question of "seeing clearly." / Seeing what? According to what?"


Jasper Johns: Watchman (han har aldrig/endnu ikke malet et maleri, der hedder "Spy")