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From then on, almost the whole of Johns' work would be cast in terms of an increasing indirection--an oeuvre of blockages, shifts and frustrations: the drawer that won't open, the map of America whose descriptive use is more or less annulled by the flurries of brush marks, the word red rendered in blue or yellow paint, the dead flashlight that can't light because it's solid metal. Now and again he would come up with an enduring joke of a Duchampian sort. It's practically impossible now to think of the fabled existential machismo of AbEx without remembering Johns' 1960 satire on it: a horizontally split canvas covered with ardent AbEx strokes with two small spheres jammed in the crack, titled Painting with Two Balls. And then there was his standing warning to those who write about him, or any other artist: The Critic Sees II, 1964, a metal brick with spectacles, behind whose (absent) lenses are two open mouths, jabbering away, instantly metabolizing sight into opinion, seeing nothing.
As the critic Brian O'Doherty remarked, Johns' work, with its cool, cerebral language games, contained everything desired by the higher New York criticism in the 1960s and '70s to requite its own narcissism. Such a tall hedge of exegesis sprang up that it seemed impertinent to dare to look at a Johns if you hadn't read Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The work could offer intense visual pleasures; that was undeniable. The accumulations of silvery marks in his drawings could be almost as beautiful as Seurat, and as a lithographer (particularly when working with Tatyana Grosman) he was the supreme technician of his time. The pelt of parallel creamy gray hatchmarks in a painting like Usuyuki, 1977-78, is about as gorgeous as abstract art gets.
Yet at the same time there was something costive about Johns, in sharp contrast to the effusive generosity of Robert Rauschenberg's vision. He didn't want to give anything away. His later work is suffused with traces of violence (the dismembered casts of body parts, for instance, in According to What, 1964), but it never lets you in on why they're there, what emotions are fossilized in them. Moreover, Johns' continuous recycling of his own imagery without much indication of why it should matter so much to him, or why we should care about it, becomes claustrophobic in the end.
You can't traverse this show without getting a sense of decline, of gradual burnout. It begins with the Seasons series, started in 1985, vastly overpraised by Johns' fans as a turning point in his work, in which he let his guard down a little and painted something more or less autobiographical. A repeated, faceless shadow-silhouette (the artist's own) falls across a clutter of objects and images familiar from his earlier work--flags, crosshatches, perceptual puzzles--with, weaving through them, allusions to a famous Picasso of a minotaur moving out of house with a ladder on his back (suggesting the artist carting his own stock of imagery around). But what we see isn't at all commanding as painting. Given those inert surfaces, the jumbled palimpsest of composition, the general dullness of color, the fact that Johns lets an extra inch of himself show--as though appearing briefly on the balcony of his own reputation, with an enigmatic wave--is of small interest.