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AbEx, in its transcendentalist ambitions, shunned the specifics of contemporary American culture; its followers created a veritable academy of "authenticity," sign of the hot, tragic and inventive sensibility. Johns wanted to work with something not invented, something so well known, as he put it, that it was not well seen. Hence the flag. In real life, after Johns, it continued to be the common property of all Americans, the climax of their stock of public symbols. But in the art world, it became Johns' own sign. Other artists would use the Stars and Stripes in a spirit of provocation. Not Johns; his flags had a beautiful and troubling muteness. They were cooler than the culture wanted them to be, in the midst of the cold war.
Was Johns' Flag, 1955, a flag or a painting? The American flag is the best-known abstraction in the world; is a painting of an abstraction a representation? The questions twist back to Rene Magritte's famous brainteaser, the painting of a pipe with "This is not a pipe" written above it (of course not, dummy; it's a painting). Flag is designed like a flag, but it's made of paint, not cloth, and it cannot "fly"; it is static, stretched, rigid. You are meant to pay attention to its surface, which never happens with a real flag. This surface is discreetly sumptuous and full of energy, with marks and dribbles of wax encaustic over a ground of glued-on newspaper. On one hand, Johns seemed devoted to the flag--but his devotion was esthetic, not patriotic. On the other, by treating its sacred form as mutable, he undermined it as a conventional symbol. And since he did so without any visible aggression or skepticism, you couldn't tell where he stood in the American frame of the '50s.
Something akin to this game of hide-and-seek with public symbols happened with his target paintings. Everyone "knows" what a target is--a test of a marksman's skill. But beneath its muteness a target is supercharged with an imagery of aggression: every target implies a weapon and someone aiming. This had an inescapable point in the mid-'50s, when politicians and all the American media were pounding into the collective imagination, like a 10-in. spike, the message that the whole nation was a target for Russian thermonuclear weapons.
This is part of the background to Johns' targets, and a little further back is another form of "targeting"--the virulent hatred and distrust of homosexuals as deviants and possible spies that the right encouraged. Johns was a reserved, closeted gay, and a work like Target with Four Faces, 1955, is all about threat and concealment. Its impassive, identical plaster casts of faces are contained in a box with a hinged door, a "closet" above the ominous target. Your gaze, in looking at them, is assimilated to the eye of the inquisitor, hunting out what is concealed. It is a pessimistic and, above all, defensive image.