GINSBURG (ALLEN GINSBURG’S AMERICA) ARCHIVAL AUDIO
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
America I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
NARRATOR
Shortly before Allen Ginsburg wrote “America,” Jasper Johns returned home from military service in Korea and made his first flag painting. At the height of the Cold War, being an American—the very concept of America—was a complex and provocative subject.
Almost a decade later, as the Vietnam War reached a boiling point, Jasper Johns made this Flag, its agitated surface built up with encaustic, a pigmented hot liquid wax, and bits of paper.
NARRATOR
Eli Broad.
ELI BROAD
So Jasper Johns' Flag, is it patriotic? Or is there something else going on?
[SOUNDFX: sounds of fireworks, protesters chanting “Hell no, we won’t go!”, whirring helicopter blades overlapping]
NARRATOR
The idea of the flag came to Johns in a dream one night, and in the morning, he gathered the materials to begin it. Encaustic appealed to him because it held its shape and set almost immediately, creating a moment frozen in time.
Johns famously eschewed interpretation. He was interested in the flag not as a meaningful subject, but as something familiar, something that, as he put it, “the mind already knows.”
ELI BROAD
I enjoy how his message is mysterious. There's a lot to think about and it changes over time.