Jasper Johns: Decoy

Streaming video - 1972

Jasper Johns’s Decoy is rooted inside the notions of reproduction, transformation and memory. Believing that an image gains new meaning each time it is presented, Johns boldly confronts his own past work, most notably Ale Cans (1964), and uses Decoy as a method of metamorphosis. The repetition of certain motifs allows Johns to confront the change an image goes through when approached from a different angle or placed in a new artistic context. As he notes the film, "each time a motif is used and reused additional memories accrue, new layers of meaning, and the image itself begins to acquire its own history." It is through Johns’s reimagining that the items he features in his work take on new life and grow from object to art, th...us redirecting society’s interpretation. more