The flags of Jasper Johns: Reflecting a new world era

“There’s an undertow to this whole thing,” he said. “I’m concerned about cultural nihilism. I don’t know how to think about blowing away 5-year-olds in a school. Being a parent and thinking about sending my 5-year-old kids off to school have them blown away with a weapon of war just boggles my mind.

“When I was dealing with the flag, which is this a secular iconic thing, which is what I pledge my allegiance to, when all of a sudden people think of killing five children.”

“The Jasper Johns Installation, 1954-59” will close with a reception, 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 15, including a discussion with Ramage. The exhibit is the second part of Ramage’s three-part 1949-64 survey installation series: The first concerned Jackson Pollock and “Part Three: Andy Warhol, 1959-64” is coming in February.

The B&G Gallery, with its storefront windows on Merchants Row, is filled with Ramage’s re-imaginings of works by Johns with complementary commentary. Dominant is a large three-dimensional flag painting largely mirroring the Johns original.

“The middle stripe is (photos of) all the children killed in the two school shootings, the one in Texas and the one at Sandy Hook,” he said.

Next to the painting are the words of the children’s song, “Jesus Loves Me.”

The author of the poem, Anna Warner, was the sister of the Susan Warner, who wrote the book “Say and Seal.”

“The book is about this child who was dying, and she asked her sister if she could write a poem that was appropriate to recite to a dying child,” Ramage said. “That’s why the poem to a dying child is part of it.”

Also very large, at the end of the room a work modeled directly after Johns, but with an added background.

“Behind the ‘Three Flags’ painting is this piece I did for the Jackson Pollock show,” Ramage said. “It’s layered so you have Pollock then Jasper Johns.”

For Ramage, Johns is the transitional artist between Pollock and Warhol. From 1949 to 1953, Pollock was dominant. And from 1954 to 1959, Johns painted mostly American flags, hundreds of American flag paintings.

Johns’ American flags, “like the ‘Three Flags,’ that became sort of the tacit bookmark separating modernism from post-modernism, was maybe one of the most significant pieces of art historically because it was that transitional thing,” Ramage said. “He thought of himself as a painter. And when he painted flags, he didn’t just paint a flag, he painted them with encaustics and newspaper.”

In fact, Johns was rejecting formalism.

“The abstract expressionists would talk endlessly about composition, about visual dynamics, about the use of color and so on, and so forth. When they were expressing themselves, they used formalism a sort of a road map,” Ramage said.

“Johns said, ‘screw that,’” Ramage said. “The American flag is iconic. There’s no formalism there whatsoever.”

Ramage says he thinks of himself as more a historian about art than as an artist.

“For the most part, I avoid calling myself an artist. I use art because it’s my first language,” he said. “For 45 years, I dealt with this issue about perception. I’d never thought it as art, I just thought of it as experiments trying to understand the difference between the visual world we think we see and the actual world.”

“I really do believe that between 1949 and 1964 the world switched ‘roller wave’ thinking,” Ramage said. “We went from modern humanism to a thing called now called postmodernism. And it’s been postmodernism for, say, 60 years.”

“Sometimes I literally choke up when I come in here and look at this thing,” Ramage said. “It’s crazy.”

Editor's note: Incorrect credit to Betsy Ross for the design of the American flag was removed.

jim.lowe @timesargus.com / jim.lowe @rutlandherald.com