Jasper Johns: Privileged Information.

Hey, psychology fans! If you thought the mysteries of the great duogram "JM" (that is, Janet Malcolm versus Joe McGinnis, Jeffrey MacDonald, and all the way back to Jeffrey Masson) were fascinating, you might want to try "JJ" - that is, Jill Johnston versus Jasper Johns and, in a snit of noncompliance, a bit of vice versa. To explain: Jill Johnston is the out-long-ago former Village Voice dance critic who has just written an art-critical biography (or bio-heavy volume of art criticism) on Jasper Johns, the never-quite-outted great artist. The book is titled, somewhat disingenuously, Privileged Information - I say "somewhat disingenuously" because Johns, a putative old friend of Johnston's, refused to cooperate with her to the point of preventing her from reproducing his work - which is also why I say "noncompliance" and, since this is such a small-minded violation of fair use for the free exchange of ideas, why I say "snit."

Here's a guess as to how we ended up at this sorry - the book isn't very good - pass: (1) Johnston wanted to do a biography of her friend the great artist; (2) Johns, who's notoriously closemouthed about his personal life, declined to cooperate; (3) pissed, Johnston decided she'd write a book anyway - a book that'd really nail his ass; (4) the trouble was, she was afraid to nail his ass too hard lest she undercut the perception of Johns' greatness that would allow her to sell her project to a publisher in the first place; (5) aha! The solution: get the biographical goods on Johns through secondary sources and, in the art-critical parts, decode his paintings according to the biography. He'll just hate that!

Of course, it's possible that Johnston started out with (5) in mind and ran into the flagstone wall of (2). It makes little difference; the book reads as though it happened as speculated above. Thames and Hudson, for its part, pitched in with a jacket that not only puts the names of both author and subject in the same-size type (a Johnsian stencil face, hers on the victimized bottom in innocent blue, his on the perpetrator's top in bloody red) but parodies the well-known Johns device of the backward-facing stretched canvas, in a likely comment on the artist's inconvenient resolve.

It comes as a bit of a surprise to me that Johnston inadvertently paints herself as something of an art-world hanger-on. In the very first sentence of Privileged Information, she notes that she agreed to review Johns' "Seasons" exhibition "over lunch" with an art-magazine editor. On later pages she finds herself lunching with Johns at an Italian restaurant (she later calls this "our Da Silvano lunch," as if it were the art-world equivalent of the Yalta Conference); boarding an Alitalia flight for London (no domestic carriers, please); and in London again, at an Anthony d'Offay opening. She probably needs to cite these minuscule bona fides because she suffers so much abuse-by-omission from Johns in trying to research her book. Encountering him in an airport, she asks him if he participated in the installation of his 1988 Venice Biennale exhibition. No answer. So she asks him if the canvases arrived in Venice rolled or stretched. (Let's see: would Leo Castelli roll up not-that-big paintings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, some in brittle encaustic, to save a few bucks on crating?) No answer again. At a later date, she asks Johns when AIDS "registered" with him as a phenomenon. No answer. So she asks him if he's lost many friends to it. No answer again.

Not only is Johnston impervious to Johns' dissing, however, she turns his coolness into the thesis of her book. "Denial of self in Johns's work would become a heuristic enterprise"; "As an artist, he can magically obliterate both his own and his medium's histories"; "In any event, Johns' goal, from Flag to the Seasons, has remained the same - to avoid positing 'existences other than surface and paint'; even his own existence, as implied in the Seasons, is that of someone wholly immersed in surface and paint, and indistinguishable from them as their maker." Certainly Johnston has at least part of a point. But while Johns' nonconfessional stance may separate him from current artists who might as well have trotted themselves out on The Jenny Jones Show, he's right in step with painters he'd most likely prefer to hang with: Poussin, Vermeer, Manet, Cezanne, de Kooning. Sure, the biographies of such artists inform their work, and enrich our understanding of it. But plangency isn't their starting point. Nor should it be ours with Johns. He wants to be judged against historically great painters on the basis of his work. He thinks that if he's categorized as, for instance, a "gay artist," the appreciation and judgment will be corrupted. Without becoming the J. D. Salinger of postwar painting, he tries to keep conditions clean. Wise man.

For Johnston, who would obviously disagree with the above, the salient chapters in Johns' life are his South Carolina childhood, his bisexuality (which, one infers, runs about 90-10 gay), the influence of Marcel Duchamp, and his encounter with Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altar-piece. To give Johnston credit, the facts she's dug up are interesting enough to have made me finish her book. Such as: Johns' alcoholic father called him a "sissy" for bleaching, hemming, and embroidering flour-sack sides to turn them into dish towels; Johns, according to a studio assistant, has actually read all the major works of Sigmund Freud; Johns was "reportedly intimate" in the mid '70s with a Japanese woman (named in the book) whose heart was broken because he wouldn't marry her. But there's nothing earthshaking enough to elaborate upon here.

Instead (and, again, inadvertently?), it's Johnston who's more on display - although not in a very salutary way. She's condescending in that manner that makes half the population west of the Hudson hate New Yorkers. "Bill Johns's word for Montez [Jasper Johns' step-grandmother]," she writes, "was 'different' - pronounced 'diffrunt.'" Come on. (Even New Yorkers say the word that way.) "It seems strange perhaps that as yet Johns's use of the Grunewald Altarpiece has not engaged the art critics (other than myself)," she claims, in the classic move of breaking one's arm while patting oneself on the back. The hammer-lock: "I had no memory of [the altar-piece] whatsoever." Jeez, it's one of the favorite old masterpieces of the high school cartoonist - you know, the Jesus with the acid-trip glow, and all that.

Loath as I am to employ a cliche thought hip-by-stump politicians, Johnston just doesn't get it. Art, I mean. She quotes Griselda Pollock's jaw-dropping revelation that to make a mark in the avant-garde community, an artist must first relate his or her work to what's currently going on ("reference"), defer to the existing leader ("deference"), and then make an original move ("difference"). Can anybody tell me of a human endeavor where said procedure, express or implied, is not the way to make one's mark? But this is news to Johnston, who on her text's final page sums up, "Pursuing his inner life under cover, Johns conforms to postmodernist expectations of the artist. His responsibility is to keep looking aesthetically like himself, in order to maintain his market value, and while doing this to introduce something new at every showing." As if, say, any painter from Elizabeth Murray to Donald Baechler does it differently.

Enough, you say. But there's more: Johnston's writing is at best serviceable and frequently horrible. For instance, untangle this:

He mentioned the loss of friends, but it seems unlikely that what was probably the most meaningful loss in his life, that of the father whose name and namesake he shared and who had been so absent from his life from the very start, was far from his mind as he approached the age his father had been at his death in 1957.

Or this:

For Johns, once he also fell under Picasso's spell, judging from a picture he made in 1988, he felt some pressure to unite the two men [Picasso and Duchamp], to bridge their different masculinities, and by extension the different traditions they represented.

Then there's the small stuff, such as repeated references to Duchamp as "the Frenchman" (when they make Privileged Information - The Movie, the poster will have a credit reading, " . . . and Harry Dean Stanton as 'The Frenchman'").

All of my complaints and (admittedly) cavils are prompted, in the end, by Johnston's failure to raise one authorial finger toward accomplishing any critical biography's minimum purpose: to explain why the work of the artist in question is interesting enough to merit all this explaining. After all, most halfway-decent studio-art graduate students have laundry lists of this-visual-device-equals-that-autobiographical-fact (often that's all their work has going for it). Some have been to Europe, and make allusions to old-master works considerably more arcane than the Isenheim Altarpiece; some have clawed their way into the art world from pinier woods than South Carolina; and some have sexual histories that'd raise Krafft-Ebing from the grave. But Johns is a great artist and they re not. And I still want to know - in Johnston's view - why.

Peter Plagens is a painter and the art critic for Newsweek magazine.