
LIAR’S PARADOX
WHO AMONG US has ever prevented our ego from experiencing a new body of work through the lens of our own current projects? This writer, for one, has not.
Recently, I found myself approaching the work of Jasper Johns, lavishly presented in the new retrospective, through the grid of Roland Barthes, on whom I am now working, and here, most particularly, through Barthes’s 1953 essay “The World as Object.”
What are we to make of Johns’s constant recourse to the material object—the maps, targets, flashlights, lightbulbs, ale cans, shoes, inanimate body parts, partial faces? Barthes’s “World as Object”