Robert Rauschenberg. Canyon, 1959; oil, housepaint, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, buttons, nails, cardboard, printed paper, photographs, wood, paint tubes, mirror string, pillow & bald eagle on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

A block of Grand Avenue in downtown L.A. was completely blocked off a few days ago, but hanging across the barricades was a big red arrow pointing down Bunker Hill with “jurors” written across it. No other signs told passers-by anything about the construction or about detours, but to let the jurors get lost would be un-American. A friend of mine, an artist, was recently “Juror One” in an L.A. case thrown out after only a day. In that day, however, she parked below Disney Concert Hall and got in for free at MOCA. Jurors, it turns out, get certain perks.

The jury happened to include another, younger, self-declared artist, who at first struck my friend as savvy.  The two of them decided to visit MOCA together and, walking through the room with the Johns and Rauschenberg work from the museum’s permanent collection, G. asked the question: “Rauschenberg or Johns? Who’s best?” “Well, I really liked those Rothkos,” the kid she was with said, “but I guess Rauschenberg, if I had to choose, but Pollock’s my favorite.” Clearly, he didn’t get it. Rauschenberg vs. Johns is the litmus test. Your answer shines a mirror on what you want from the world, and on the art scene, it’s a way better personality gauge than, say, Meyers Briggs: the repressed, introverted, and calculating Johns vs. the all-out exhibitionist Rauschenberg.

Jasper Johns. Map, 1961. Encaustic, oil, and collage, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art (C) Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Jasper Johns owned the work of indomitable ceramicist and Dadaist Beatrice Wood, currently of the Santa Monica Museum of Art retrospective. Wood attended the Arensberg salon (“an inconceivable orgy of sexuality, jazz, and alcohol,” according to artist Francis Picabia’s wife) with Duchamp in the 1910s, and then continued art-making, mostly in California, for the rest of the century, until her death in the late 1990s. She made drawings, figurative ceramic sculptures, and then whole armies of outlandish teapots, plates, and cups, getting all the more daring as she got older. One teapot from 1983 is shaped like a fish. Johns never owned that one, however. The two works that were his in the current show include a small brown chalice and a gold plate, both relatively conservative objects but both still exorbitantly shiny, fair examples of Wood’s oeuvre.  It’s hard to imagine Rauschenberg choosing those two, though; I imagine him going for the bolder, weirder shapes—like the teapot with figures dancing on the lid.

Beatrice Wood in her studio.

Wood wrote a book called I Shock Myself in 1985, beginning with the line, “While the substance of ceramics is clay and chemicals, the stuff of life is most certainly people.” Which, I guess, is why thinking about the fact that Johns owns Wood, and playing the Rauschenberg vs. Johns game, remain endlessly interesting: They acknowledge that the art you want and like has some bearing on who you are as a person.

Jasper Johns, "Map," 1961, Encaustic, oil, and collage, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art (C) Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

A block of Grand Avenue in downtown L.A. was  completely blocked off a few days ago, but hanging across the barricades was a big red arrow pointing down Bunker Hill with “jurors” written across it. No other signs told passers-by anything about the construction or about detours, but to let the jurors get lost would be un-American. A friend of mine, an artist, was recently “Juror one” in an L.A. case thrown out after only a day. In that day, however, she parked below Disney Concert Hall and got in for free at MOCA. Jurors, it turns out, get certain perks.

Robert Rauschenberg, "Canyon," 1959, oil, housepaint, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, buttons, nails, cardboard, printed paper, photographs, wood, paint tubes, mirror string, pillow & bald eagle on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

The jury happened to include another, younger self-declared artist, who at first struck my friend as savvy.  The two of them decided to visit MOCA together, and, walking through the room with the Johns and Rauschenberg work from the museum’s permanent collection, G. asked the question: “Rauschenberg or Johns? Who’s best?” “Well, I really liked those Rothko’s,” the kid she was with said, “but I guess Rauschenberg, if I had to choose, but Pollock’s my favorite.” Clearly, he didn’t get it. Rauschenberg vs. Johns is the litmus test. Your answer shines a mirror on what you want from the world, and on the art scene, it’s a way better personality gauge than, say, Meyers Briggs: The repressed, introverted and calculating Johns vs. the all-out exhibitionist Rauschenberg.

Jasper Johns owned the work of indomitable ceramicist and Dadaist Beatrice Wood, currently the Santa of a Monica Museum of Art retrospective. Wood attended the Arensberg salon (“an inconceivable orgy of sexuality, jazz and alcohol,” according to artist Francis Picabia’s wife), with Duchamp in the 1910s, and then continued art-making, mostly in California, for the rest of the century, until her death in the late 1990s. She made drawings, figurative ceramic sculptures and then whole armies of outlandish teapots, plates and cups, getting all the more daring as she got older. One teapot from 1983 is shaped like a fish. Johns never owned that one, however. The two of the works that were his in the current show include a small brown chalice and a gold plate, both relatively conservative objects but both still exorbitantly shiny, fair examples of the Wood’s oeuvre.  It’s hard to imagine Rauschenberg choosing those two though; I imagine him going for the bolder, weirder shapes—like the teapot with figures dancing on the lid.

Beatrice Wood in her studio

Wood wrote a book called I Shock Myself in 1985, beginning with the line, “While the substance of ceramics is clay and chemicals, the stuff of life is most certainly people.” Which, I guess, is why thinking about the fact that Johns owns Wood, and playing the Rauschenberg vs. Johns game remain endlessly interesting: they acknowledge that what art you want and like have some bearing on who you are as a person.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Jasper Johns, “Between the Clock and the Bed” (1982-83), encaustic on canvas. Courtesy Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York

There’s a sweetly prophetic story about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in Calvin Tomkins’ iconic art-crowd chronicle, Off The Wall. The story, which makes the gap between innovation and belonging look extremely narrow, goes like this: it was the summer of ’55 and Johns and Rauschenberg lived symbiotically, popping in on each other at least daily and swapping ideas with so much success that they even tried making one another’s work. By this point, Johns had begun his flags—a new direction that “came to him in a dream”—and Rauschenberg found Johns’ encaustic process seductive. “It smelled so delicious, and it looked so good,” said Rauschenberg, quoted by Tomkins, “all those aromatic bubbling waxes.” After some begging, Johns let Rauschenberg add a stripe to a flag, but Rauschenberg, too infatuated by wax to pay attention to composition, dragged a heavy red stripe right across an already-painted white one. He never touched Johns’ work again.

Around the same time,  Johns tried his hand at making some Rauschenberg work. “I thought I understood,” said Johns. “But mine weren’t convincing at all.” A few years later, and the two artists barely spoke to each other.

This hexed collaboration gets at something predictably true about art-making in general—it’s not vision that pulls most into the business of making, at least not at first. It’s wanting to be part of a vision you’ve observed from the outside. But entering someone else’s vision, it turns out, can be excruciatingly difficult, maybe even impossible. Sometimes, it’s easier to find a vision of your own.

Mark Grotjahn, "Untitled (Face for Greece 843)," 2009, Oil on cardboard mounted on linen. Courtesy Blum & Poe Gallery.

Mark Grotjahn’s current exhibition at Blum & Poe intermittently innovates and belongs.  Called Seven Faces, it’s full of lanky yet dense almost-abstractions, paintings with as much primitive gusto as de Kooning’s Woman and as much flat, psychedelic guile as Fred Tomaselli’s Geode. Surprisingly economical—oil has been applied on top of cardboard which has been stapled to stretched linen, and the paintings’ cavities and protrusions come from cut and stacked cardboard rather than lathered paint—each work consists of scraggly calculated stripes that all radiate from an imaginary focal point or boundary line. Tucked in among these stripes, eyes, the flat, symbolic kind that don’t claim to be windows into anything, glare into the space right in front of them. Sometimes, toothy monster mouths break through the stripes, as well.

Mark Grotjahn Untitled (Black Over Red Orange "Mean as a Snake" Face 842), 2009, Oil on cardboard mounted on linen. Courtesy Blum & Poe Gallery.

Grotjahn’s work announces itself as smart. Whether his sleek, perspectival hipster abstractions, or these rougher, stranger faces, a Grotjahn painting exudes self-knowledge. It knows that it fits into a legacy, and embraces every nuance of that legacy from Picasso, whose distorted figures had similar, overly-wide petal-shaped eyes, to Johns, who was pioneered painterly but cooly controlled line-making; it knows that it’s derivative, but it also knows that it isn’t redundant and that it doesn’t seamlessly fit into any pre-existing category. This sort of uber-awareness doesn’t feel contrived, however; it feels like a personality trait.

I would recognize Grotjahn’s work anywhere because of its quirks. Obsession with perspective and symmetry may not be original but it has never quite looked the way Grotjahn makes it look–combining slightly cagey precision with paradoxically liberal painterliness. I like to think of Grotjahn as a big fan who found a signature not because he had something cataclysmic to say but because, like many artists before him, he wanted to talk about how perspective skews perception and how paint adheres to surface. To have a conversation, you need a voice. But you don’t always need an aggressive, groundbreaking clarion call.