Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 2000 | Page 61

Jasper Johns’ P ain ted B ron ze 51 complicated process. ''Parts were done by casting, parts by building up from scratch, parts by molding, breaking and then restoring. I was definitely making it ditficult to tell how it was made,” the artist observed. The sculpture was then cast in bronze, reworked when it came back from the foundry, and finally painted (Johns 192). The procedure followed what would become Johns’ famous dictum, "Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it.” (qtd. in Albrecht 162-63) Roberta Bernstein interviewed the artist for her dissertation and offered this explanation of the media and the subject matter of Painted Bronze: "Johns used the Ballantine Ale Cans most likely because it was a personal favorite, but also because of the simplicity of the can’s label design and because of its bronze colors, which imitates the traditional sculptor’s material Johns used” (Bernstein 122). For Johns, the cans were studio objects as well as commercial forms since he used empty beer cans for mixing painf . In her conversation with the artist Bernstein also learned that one of the original cans remained in Johns’ studio. As she noted: "Johns told me that one of the original ale can models was lost or stolen; he still has the closed one” (Bernstein 45, 223). The fate of the opened can helped illustrate that the two cans in the sculpture, measuring 5 '/: x 4 inches, could be separated because they were cast separately and could be lifted off the base. Pointing to differences between the two, Bernstein observed the open can was hollow and light in weight and contrasted with the solid bronze closed can which was heavy (Bernstein 54). Kozloff commented on the two cans when he noted that the ale "appears to have been emptied from one punctured can and never to have entered its totally solid composition in Painted Bronze, 1960.”^ A similar phenomenological reading of the sculpture was offered by Andrew Forge: We don’t see real cans 'through’ the sculpture. How could we — which beer cans would we choose? Nor do we see an organization of cylinders and cubes. What we see is precisely the thing in front of us, an object which appears incredibly to resemble a beer can, but which is ultimately itself an absurd object, (qtd. in Kozloff 31) Irving Sandler examined the relationship between the art and its popular referent when he argued that Johns was concerned with ".. .the definition of art and not art: 'real’ objects and 'art’ objects; with the connection of verbal and visual images...of what is conceptualized and what is seen, that is, with the complex and ambiguous process of experiencing art.”^