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      Interestingly, Johns’s reading of Wittgenstein reinforced this shift in his thinking, for the philosopher himself had undergone similar changes in his thoughts about language. In Wittgenstein’s early works, such as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he examined the logical structure of language, taking it as the basis of what we can know, but in his later Philosophical Investigations, he rejected the idea of a language that reliably pictures reality in favor of an understanding of language as a tool with many uses that can vary from one situation to the next.

      Far from causing Johns to retreat from the inclusion of objects in his art, his experiences seem to have led him to use objects more intensively; only now he attempted to allow them simply to assert themselves, rather than some idea he had about them. He secured them to his canvases, often in assemblages, with hinges, wires, or by other means that permitted them to move (or that at least implied the possibility of movement), as in Studio, Slow Field, and Painting with Ruler and “Gray.” As he explained to a Japanese critic, “I have begun to want an object to be free from the way I see it.”[49] Thus instead of a target, there were circles generated by slats of wood, and Johns’s use of stencils called attention to the physical identities of the stencilled names of colours: which took priority – what these names said, or their material presence in paint of a different colour altogether? The materiality of the names of colours became pronounced in some works. In Periscope (Hart Crane) and Land’s End, the letters comprising the names jumble together, becoming almost unreadable. In According to What, some of the metal letters spelling out the word “BLUE” have been bent, and in Passage II, the letters tumble forward from the painting’s lower edge.

      The potential confusions between objects, art and language yielded the possibility for visual and verbal puns, not to mention more ambiguous plays of meaning. For example, Johns made two sculptures, one with two cans of ale and the other representing a can of Savarin coffee used as a container for his paintbrushes, rendering both with such an uncanny degree of realism that these objects’ true identities are discerned only when a viewer lifts the cast-bronze sculptures and realises that they’re far heavier than the mass-produced objects they painstakingly replicate. In an apparent response to the onslaught of critical attention Johns’s work received – and the fact that some critics seemed more interested in voicing their own pre-formulated ideas than in looking at artworks with an open mind – Johns also created two trenchantly humourous sculptures. In one, The Critic Smiles, a toothbrush has molars where its bristles should be, while in The Critic Sees, a pair of eyeglasses frame not eyes but mouths, lips parted as if in conversation. More subtle plays of humor involving objects are at work in Fool’s House and Untitled (1964–65), which both contain a broom. The attendant painterly sweeping marks make the household implement into a giant paintbrush, while suspending it from a hook suggests that it too could be used to inscribe a circle like one of Johns’s devices.

      Along with brooms and devices that scrape paint, Johns’s paintings of the early 1960s, such as In Memory of My Feelings, Good Time Charley, and Water Freezes, began to include such objects as rulers, cups, forks, spoons, and thermometers. When he compared the paintings in which these items appear with his earlier work, he explained the difference in a distinctive way:

      Exploring the nature of various technical devices may seem distant from the emotional or erotic content that Johns characterised as the result of this process, but it’s worth noting that most of the objects that appear in these paintings are scaled to the human body in some way: eating utensils, household items such as coat hangers, and even the rulers, with twelve inches making a foot. The degree of physical intimacy suggested by this network of associations, however, also alludes to another change in Johns’s art during this period. Although some of his previous works could be thought of in terms of a sort of subtle expressive content – the vulnerability of Target with Plaster Casts, a sense of emotional withdrawal in Canvas, the stolid melancholy of Tennyson – around 1961, much of Johns’s art for a time struck an undeniably bleak emotional tone. Johns himself recognised this charged expressive element but declined to specify it, saying only that at this point in his work, “the mood changes.”[51]

      Out the Window, 1959. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 139.7 × 101.6 cm. Collection of David Geffen, Los Angeles. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

      Thermometer, 1959. Oil on canvas with thermometer, 131.4 × 97.8 cm. Seattle Art Museum and Collection of Bagley and Virginia Wright, Seattle. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed

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