
DOUBLETAKE
I CAME OUT OF “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney, not yet having seen the Philadelphia part of the show, feeling . . . what? Calm? Clear? Alive to the particulars of visual experience? Those were the words I jotted down. But they didn’t quite belong to me. Asked by a Danish reporter in 1969 about the state he hoped to induce in his viewers, Johns said, “When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.” I read those words years ago in the catalogue of the 1996 Johns retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.1