The Image As Object Is Inevitably Political

Jasper Johns, Flag on Orange Field, 1977, Ink on plastic, 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches, originally a gift to Mark Jenkins Craig Starr has a show of Jasper Johns Flags organized with the artist, in memory of Agnes Gund. I like the little catalogue and Richard Schiff’s essay about the artist as a subject. But I really love this bit of the show’s announcement text, which sums up where we find ourselves right now on the US flag as a subject: Across the exhibition, Johns tests how far this familiar symbol can be altered while remaining legible. The flags are stripped of their usual conventions—their singularity, their expected color palette, and even their stable symbolic meaning—turning the motif into a flexible structure whose identity is transformed. These nontraditional treatments activate the associations embedded within the symbol itself. A flag is never neutral: it carries meanings that shift with the viewer’s nationality, historical moment, and personal relationship to the nation it…