The influences upon Johns' work stem from varied fields of interests, ranging from Leonardo to John Cage, Hart Crane to Duchamp, Marshall McLuhan to Wittgenstein. The role that Wittgenstein's philosophy, plays has never been fully appreciated. What discussion has occurred - namely Max Kozloff's and Rosalind Krauss' - shows an inadequacy either through a lack of understanding or a superficiality towards the philosophical views. An in-depth analysis on this,, subject is invaluable in fully comprehending the ramifications of Johns' painting of the 60's. The intention of this paper is to examine Wittgenstein's influence and assess how his method of seeking out meaning in language is used by Johns in his paintings to explore meaning in art. Johns' early work could perhaps be nutshelled as a reaction against the egocentricism of Abstract-Expressionism. Through the Flags, Targets, Alphabets and Numeral pieces he has suspended the formal issues that were prevalent in the early fifties in an attempt to provide all sides of the argument rather than some facile and unsatisfactory reconciliation. Johns saw that the problems in painting lay not in wrong answers but in the lack of understanding the nature of visual communication. It is impossible to present the artist's self since the 'success' of the art object involves an equally important member, the audience, and it is within this dialogue that meaning lies. The object-paintings of this early phase ask, what is painting? and pose different suggestions with each being feasible and relevant without being conclusive. Johns insists on keeping the situation incapable of any final resolution. In 1959 Johns discovered Duchamp and his broader idea of art that moved away from retinal boundaries into a field where language, thought and vision acted upon one another. False Start, 1959, reflects this interest and can be seen not as any radical change from former work, as Barbara Rose and Sidney Tillim suggest, but as a development of previous ideas, now taking into consideration the role language plays in the reception of a painting. Wittgenstein began to interest Johns in 1961. His analysis of meaning in language set down in the Philosophical Investigations not only shared a close affinity to the 'art is life' maxim of Johns, Rauschenberg and Cage but more importantly presented Johns with a methodology to clarify the definition of art. Like Duchamp, Wittgenstein saw the establishing of meaning lying outside the problematic - there is no solution since there is no problem. The Investigations -a complete reversal of the earlier Tractatus Logico Philosophicus which claimed that language is a logical picturing of facts - essentially poses that the meaning of language lies in its usage, that there is no one authoritative definition of a word but as many as there are uses for it. Wittgenstein saw the role of the philosopher not as one of providing new information but of clearing up misconceptions through reviewing what we have already known. Philosophy is 'a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language'. Johns' paintings from 1961 on become such where he sees the role of the artist as a battle against the bewitchment of our sight by not simply language but more specifically, criticism. The Critic Sees, 1961 and its attack on writers whose motives are very different from extending any visual awareness sets the stage for a collection of paintings that questions the whole aspect of schools of criticism with their polemical discussions as to how we should see. This interest in meaning with a bias towards New York criticism is understandable since it was from here that the most intriguing and muddled ideas of Johns' work came and in addition, he was painting at a period when the artist's aim was becoming more and more prescribed by what the critic proposed. Johns' largest canvas to date, According to What, 1964, is an apologia of the notion of perception that he shares with Wittgenstein rather than a grand homage to Duchamp. A Wittgenstinian analysis of Johns' post-1961 paintings not only gives an explanation of the imagery employed but reveals to us two fundamental issues inherent in them: looking is relative with the only common denominator being life, which in turn shows criticism, in the controversial from Johns was used to experiencing it, as more concerned with reinforcing individual claims rather than any desire to evolve a total awareness. As with Wittgenstein's philosophy of anthropocentrism, Johns does not advance any one theory. He does not, unlike the formalist interest, regard the problems of contemporary painting as empirical but as a blindness to the numerous inherent and unavoidable visual aspects in any one work. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation is intended as an investigation into the art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.The aim of thisinvestigation is to assess the possibility that the art produced by Johns and Rauschenberg during the 1950s and 1960s constitutes a transition from modernism to postmodernism in the visual arts in America. This dissertation is introduced by means of a broad outline of relevent developments within the visual arts during the1950s and 1960s in America. This outline also contains explanations of modernism and postmodernism and looks at how these terms are presented throughout this text. In the outline I describe how Johns and Rauschenberg can be identified with a shift that occurred in the visual arts in America during the mid 1950s away from two prominent modes of painting within modernism, namely' action' painting, as described by Harold Rosenberg (1982:28), and Clement Greenberg's 'American-type' painting (1973:208). Both Johns and Rauschenberg actively produced art during the 1970s and 1980s the period in which postmodernism is generally regarded to have been most prominent. However, in an attempt to assess the possibility that their art is transitional from modernism to postmodernism, this investigation focuses upon a selection of artworks produced during the 1950s and 1960s. I intend to discover whether or not these works signalled a departure from modernism and if they did, at what point this occurred and what the specific nature of this departure was. These works are examined from conceptual, formal, iconographical, stylistic and technical viewpoints. Throughout this dissertation I attempt to describe how Johns and Rauschenberg anticipated and embraced various postmodem tendencies that have subsequently emerged in the arts and other related disciplines. Parallels are drawn between the artworks of Johns and Rauschenberg and the disciplines of architecture and literary theory. These parallels are drawn with the intention of aligning Johns and Rauschenberg's attitude towards making art in the 1950s and 1960s with a relatively widespread mood in literary theory, philosophy and the social sciences concerning the inability of these disciplines to deliver totalising theories and doctrines, or enduring answers to fundamental dilemmas and puzzles posed by objects of inquiry, and a growing feeling, on the contrary, that chronic provisionality, plurality of perspectives and incommensurable appearances of the objects of inquiry in competing discourses make the search for ultimate answers or even answers that can command widespread consensus a futile exercise. (Boyne and Rattansi 1990: 12). / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.