five

May 04, 2024

Flag, 1954-55 (I)Encaustic, oil & collage on fabric mounted on wood (3 panels)41¼ x 60¾ inches

to read a painting to read a page is to live overlapping moments flattened on a plane

a site of love & aggression every object of study a fantasy object that survives

the inevitable reader who says hello dear other i destroyed you i love you

a technique of individuation & an inescapable condition of cultural production

to paint a flag means design’s taken care of johns says in 1959 it gives me room

to work on other levels which other levels does he mean ? critics ask for decades

the commonplace as a painting its affect flat as a slap it’s the military application

of visual techniques for focusing desire or aggression an affront to certain histories

of art graphic design nationhood & aren’t there other other levels ? i ask the flag

as i pull back the bedsheet beneath layers of newspaper & tinted wax & lie down

not really collage a critic says not really encaustic the dream of a former soldier

with a new boyfriend & an estranged alcoholic father dead the day before his first show

the flag’s a fantasy of love & destruction emblem of everything conflicted inside him

the flag’s an affect wide as migraine debilitating & interesting to lie down inside

White Flag, 1955Encaustic, oil & collage on fabric (3 panels)78¼ x 120¾ inches for Lauren Berlant

the flag’s an affect white as migraine debilitating & interesting to lie down inside

the surface churn of pigment & wax & figure how i feel beginning with structure

a layer of paper & cloth collage over stretched sateen sensual bedclothes of a rough fuck

paramnesia streaked with semen the way sexuality hooks up with national fantasy queer

& visited by crippling symptoms in the visual field of citizenship i’ve been here before

as a boy i earn a badge of merit learning to handle the flag correctly it takes a long time

to remember all the rules to fold & store it properly it’s the gentlest i have seen

the white fathers who teach us who take more care with that fabric than they do with

a sissy afraid of their cold war masculinity indifferent to their curriculum of flags

targets & maps i fashion a passionate impassivity in the locker room a lot

like jasper johns his ready-made images i like about them, that they come that way

he says i am very stupid, politically, actually he says pretty much like a jock strap

holding state knowledge a site of the full coming together of violence & reason

dear johns thank you for the headache i hate your archive a faggot has no true flag

Flag, 1954–55 (II)Encaustic, oil & collage on fabric mounted on wood (3 panels)41 1/4 × 60 3/4 inches

to johns i write a faggot has no true flag as if his painting a simulacrum

on a bedsheet in layers of newspaper dipped in hot wax could be a true flag

i know it’s not + not not a flag the way a faggot’s not a man + not not a man

i hate his archive but i like this snapshot of him just two years out of the army

crouching beneath this painting in 1955 pale & boyish former soldier

the historian calls a docile body object & target of power johns says he dreamt

of painting this a fact art critics repeat without asking why the historian

calls the soldier’s body a fragment of mobile space as if war were just collage

soldier cut out of context pasted into another like time’s man of the year

in 1951 “name: american” “occupation: fighting man” johns is drafted

works on graphic design in japan while soldiers & civilians millions die

in korea & now here he is in a new york loft his boyfriend behind the camera

saucepans & hot plate on the floor white mound of beeswax to make encaustic

for eight more stars each detail part of a political anatomy still unfinished

Flag above White with Collage, 1955Encaustic & collage on canvas22 × 19 inches

forty-eight scars part of a political anatomy still unfinished in the 1950s

the critic writes modern art keeps getting entangled in america’s contradictions

but what doesn’t in any american era i’m an analysand in my anxiety dream

about the flag paintings the analyst says don’t worry paintings also have an unconscious

structured as a language produced in the social field out of a historical situation

some read his deadpan flags as “decadent” rejections of the “heroic” AbEx paintings

the CIA sends around the globe to combat socialist realism i intuitively like to paint flags

johns tells newsweek in ‘58 i have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world

EVERY AMERICAN FLAG writes navajo artist demian dinéyazhí IS A WARNING SIGN

from 1958-59 this painting tours the country in a show called collage in america

in it a white man in a strip of photo-booth pictures johns finds on the street

looks out from behind stripes stretching past an uneven field of battered stars

i imagine him in davenport nashville tallahassee laramie poughkeepsie

a stranger a watchman passing through his looking looks back at our looking

Flag, 1960Sculp-metal & collage on canvas with Sculp-metal on wood frame13⅛ x 11¼ inches

a stranger a watchman i pass through my looking looks back over this flag for R

a gift johns promises ca. 1957 & only delivers the year before they break up gray

not just as a color that avoids a color situation gray as idea condition material

gray as an attachment broken at the point of most intimate contact so the mind hides it

from itself to preserve it in a fiction that avoids the emotional dramatic qualities

of saying goodbye the gray johns says is a literal quality unmoved & unmovable

here has the force of a passion that causes pain denied & stifled a self that can’t be

revealed or spoken of R keeps it until his death unfrightened of the affection

beginning with structure the division of the whole into parts the painting of a flag

john cage writes has its precedent in the sonnet the grand division of fourteen lines

into eight & six cage doesn’t suggest this makes johns a poet & this flag a love poem

the kind only johns can write to glimpse what joys or pains our eyes can share

or answer to quote hart crane a deflection the way i too here throw my voice

still unable to give R the one unbetrayable reply whose accent no farewell can know

Brian Teare is the author of seven books and Doomstead Days, which received the Four Quartets Award from the Poetry Society of America and was Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry. His most recent book, Poem Bitten by a Man, will be published in September 2023 by Nightboat Books. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.