How to [un]do Things with Words, Numbers, Flags, Maps and Signs: A Jasper Johns Retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao

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DATE

06 Jul 2026

AUTHOR

Benedita Salema Roby

How to [un]do Things with Words, Numbers, Flags, Maps and Signs: A Jasper Johns Retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao

AUTHOR

Benedita Salema Roby

On May 29, a solo retrospective of the American painter Jasper Johns opened at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Featuring some 140 works produced over a career spanning nearly 70 years, the exhibition, curated by Enrique Juncosa, chronologically traces the various phases of Johns’s work—deeply marked by radical questioning, emotional openings and closings, and working relationships and friendships among creatives and intellectuals.

In 1962, John Austin’s seminal work, How to Do Things with Words, was published posthumously—based on the transcript of a series of lectures he delivered at Harvard between 1954 and 1955. In this celebrated work, Austin—a philosopher of language—not only introduced his famous theory of speech acts but also put forward another hypothesis in the context of semantics, suggesting that the meaning of words is not intrinsic to linguistic signs, but rather to the performative context (i.e., of use) and to the intention at the time they are spoken or written. Ten years later, in Signature, Événement, Contexte (1972), Jacques Derrida—also a philosopher—while agreeing that the meaning of a sign is not intrinsic to its signifier, challenges Austin´s claim that context and intention are also never fully determinable. Derrida clarifies this situation by drawing on what Austin omitted from his entire investigation: the “non-serious” and “parasitic” uses of language—which involve quotation, fiction, irony, and instances where hermeneutic interpretation of communication fails. While Austin argued that these circumstances constituted deviations, Derrida contended that the “non-serious” was not a deviation but a manifestation of the very nature of language. That is, what Derrida claims language reveals is its condition of iterability—the internal force of displacement and rupture with the context, origin, and intention found in all signs. In other words, to function (that is, to be legible and to communicate), a sign must be iterable, repeatable, quotable, and therefore can be removed from its context—that is, from the set of presences that organized its origin and production; and from the intention-of-meaning behind its production, since it must function in the radical absence of all the subjects involved: the signifier and the addressee.

This decontextualized introduction served to explore the overlap between this latter thesis and what Jasper Johns was beginning to question through his canvases, even before Derrida’s challenge or Austin’s publication—in fact, just during the years when the aforementioned lectures were taking place at Harvard. In his paintings from 1954 onward—after destroying all his earlier works, in which his concerns were different, more aligned with the aesthetic movement in vogue in the United States at the time, Abstract Expressionism—we see reflections on the nature of artistic language and even language in general, operating, like Derrida, as a critique of logocentrism. That is, from 1954 onward, Johns began to iterate common symbols or, in his own words, “things the mind already knows” by removing them from their context and original intended meaning, producing “something resembling truth” but falling short of being so. This ironic iteration of iconic signs (such as the famous flags, maps, numbers, and letters) proves to be “non-serious” by constituting a deviation from the structural system that links a signifier to a meaning, even when represented: is the flag a flag? A painting of a flag? A picture? What color does the word “red”—written in gray on a gray background—represent? Is a broom beneath a canvas a presence or a representation? Do the numbers (0–9), stripped of their function, still refer us to counting and accounting, or can we interpret them without that responsibility? In short, early in his career, Johns set out to explore the separation of icons from their practical function, stripping them of their fixed and designated meaning, seeking to understand how our perception behaves when we conceive of them as visual objects? This is how Johns deconstructs things using words, numbers, flags, maps, and recognizable icons—through iteration upon iteration upon iteration until not only the meaning but also the signifier is exhausted. The flag changes colors, numbers are superimposed, maps change shape and legend, and colors become detached from the words that give them form. These motifs are repeated consecutively in the paintings he creates and in the drawings he later uses to create variations (iterations) of the signs he frequently encounters. That said, Johns’s artistic practice is as much philosophical and poetic as it is visual and formal, as it engages in a radical questioning (from the Latin radix, “root”) at the very heart of the nature of representation and visual perception. Furthermore, this retrospective led me to consider that Johns’s work brought about a certain deconstruction in the visual arts even before Derrida articulated that line of inquiry. This is evident in the first rooms of the exhibition, which showcase the early decades of the painter’s work.

Moving on. The chronological presentation is of little importance for outlining a sequential narrative or highlighting a predominant style; it is, however, important for understanding the shifting directions and the abundance of ideas throughout Jasper Johns’s career. In addition to his reflections on the nature of artistic language—for which the artist is widely recognized and to which he returns repeatedly—we also see small sculptures; the set design for a performance choreographed by Merce Cunningham; woodcuts made in collaboration with Samuel Beckett for a book, in which each artist independently explores the expressiveness of language and where Johns transposes some of his abstract drawings—though, contrary to the trend of the time, with elements meticulously and almost mathematically organized; as well as a series of familiar presences in references or allusions throughout the various decades of his career, ranging from iterations of elements and motifs by Magritte (whose work he avidly collected) to Duchamp (with whom he was friends), along with Frida Kahlo, Edvard Munch, Cézanne, and Picasso—offering us references to the history of modernist art in Europe and Latin America. Iterations aside, the retrospective succeeds in highlighting that the relationships of friendship, closeness, and creative reciprocity he maintained with figures such as John Cage, Frank O’Hara, Hart Crane, Robert Rauschenberg, and others mentioned above were decisive for the painter’s artistic development and maturation, just as the painter himself was decisive for the aforementioned dynamics.

Although I spent some time in the opening paragraphs on philosophical and formal digressions regarding the nature of the visual arts (simply because it aligns with my personal interests)—the curator titled the retrospective Night Driver, the name of a painting that marks the beginning of a phase in which the artist introduces, in a highly controlled manner, “feelings based on memories and experiences that are not always clearly specified or acknowledged”¹. Although this work is not included in the exhibition, it paved the way for many others, which are on display and which, from that point onward, reflect and retain (there is precisely this interplay of sentimental openness and emotional closure) the most melancholic, lucifugous, romantic, and, therefore, autobiographical aspects of his body of work. Grey tones, which have been present from the start, dominate this phase of tension, secrecy, and melancholy, however, it is important to reiterate that the way he handles this emotional realm (whether in gray, black, white, or a tonal variation) is restrained and controlled—what Juncosa calls “frozen expressionism,” as opposed to the warm and spontaneous gestures of Abstract Expressionism.

The retrospective—housed in a complex that challenges the rules of architecture just as Jasper Johns challenges those of painting—sought to go beyond the usual discourse on the painter by revealing his most intimate, emotional side (which could only stem from a philosophical phase, even if formal). Enrico Juncosa informs us about the poetics of Johns’s creative impermanence—acknowledging that a great painter is made up of stylistic and relational constellations.

The exhibition Jasper Johns: Night Driver is on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao through October 12, 2026.

BIOGRAPHY

Benedita Salema Roby (b. Lisbon) has a degree in Art History (2019) and a master's degree in Aesthetics and Artistic Studies (2022) from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of Universidade Nova de Lisboa with the dissertation ‘Graffiti: Considerations on the Aesthetics of Transgression in the Public Space of the City’. She is currently doing her PhD in Artistic Studies - Art and Mediations at the same institution, where she is developing a research, with funding from the FCT, centred on the potential for societal and collective liberation around transgressive (artistic) practices such as graffiti and political graffiti. On this theme, she also participates in the making of documentaries and organises workshops on practice and thought for young people. Her thesis project, entitled ‘The Deconstruction of the (Experience of the) City and the Construction of the Counter-Public Sphere: Transgressive Creative Writing, Aesthetics and Politics’, is supervised by Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro and Joana Cunha Leal. As well as academic publications, he writes about emerging artists and visual and performing arts exhibitions for independent magazines such as Umbigo and Sem Título.

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