ion. And with Scent, as with Weeping Women, the title works as a reference to the culmination of a particular historical development. For Scent the name of one of the last (or perhaps the last) pictures by Jackson Pollock. It a work in which Pollock tried to resurrect the shimmering, compressed space of the earlier drip paintings, using however strokes rather than spills and drips of color. The drag of these strokes, hue against hue, the sense of flickering, shallow space perceived between their interstices, recapitulates the late Monet. But in Scent the result turgid, labored, overpainted. It a picture through which one feels the closing-off of possibility. History painting tied to the condition of narrative. No matter how compressed the moment rendered, the historical narrative surrounds the image, creating for it a temporal milieu. The actuality of depicted gesture swells with the knowledge of the gestures that preceded this one, leading up to it, and the ones that will lead away. The works by Johns, in their evocation of several momentsand monuments-central to the development of modern art, are engaged with the enterprise of history painting. But their subject failure, promising beginnings that lead to convulsive or ineffectual ends. Their subject 'growth' as stasis. It in this sense that Johns maintains the ironic attitude. For the works convey a deep scepticism about the significance imputed to the historical process. Johns has always, of course, been extremely canny about the subject of history, and of historical styles. The structure of his early work was based on synthesizing modalities or categories which had proved, historically, to be distinct. The categories 'painterly' and 'linear' which had formed the historian's key to differentiating schools of art (Venice as opposed to Rome in the 16th Century) or whole period styles (the Baroque as against the Renaissance) were oppositions Johns took delight in collapsing. So the stringently linear flag would be executed through a bravura performance of painterliness. Or again, the natural antithesis between abstraction and representation would be nullified in work that played representation itself as a game of abstraction. Everything that usually serves representation and illusion, Greenberg wrote about the Flags and Targets, is left to serve nothing but itself, that abstraction; while everything that usually connotes the abstract or the decorative-flatness, bare outlines, all-over or symmetrical design-is put to the service of representation. 5 But in the new pictures there a different attitude to history. Before, though the historical categories were toyed with and reversed, they were nonetheless a source of energy. In the new works they are simply leveled out, negated. In being so treated they are much more deeply challenged as a source of value. What left as always the performative voice: Johns creating, patiently, this scenario of negation. For the pictures are extremely beautiful; and they convey an extraordinary sense of the autonomy of the visual. The autonomy of the voice 5. Clement Greenberg, After Abstract Expressionism, Art International (1963), reprinted in Henry Geldzahler, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1969, p. 365. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:29:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Jasper Johns: The Functions of Irony 99 the ironist's last source of value. There a section of a dialogue between Beckett and Georges Duthuit that bears repeating: B. The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat a certain order on the plane of the feasible. D. What other plane can there be for the maker? B. Logically none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road. D. And preferring what? B. The expression that there nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.' 6. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett, a Critical Study, London, 1962, p. 30. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:29:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms