In 1964, Johns wrote in his sketchbook “Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it / [repeat].” This statement perfectly epitomizes the process of making a print. Printmaking frees Johns to experiment. On many occasions he has referred to his affinity for the collaborative nature of the printshop, the economy of trying variations, and the serendipitous accidents related to the printing process. Exploiting these possibilities to the fullest, Johns makes certain that his prints are never simply reproductions.

Conceived as a both a complement and a counterpart to the exhibition in the Dorrance Galleries, this section of the show features a group of prints selected to represent an array Johns’s work in that medium. Out of a selection of sixty-two prints, thirty-four will be on display at any time. In order to emphasize the nonlinear character of Jasper Johns’s art, which complicates a simple chronological approach to his work, the prints are rotated and arranged according to chance operations with the aid of ijRover, an updated version of ROVER, a computer program developed by composer and musician Andrew Culver and musician, artist, and poet John Cage. ROVER was originally used to determine the changing object placements in the main room of Cage’s exhibition Rolywholyover A Circus for Museum, which came to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1995. A dear friend and collaborator of Johns, Cage was one of the most influential musicians and artists of the twentieth century. Using Cage-ian chance operations to dictate the display of Johns’s prints in these galleries highlights the deep friendship between the two artists, as well as their mutual interest in chance as a key component of their work - a fascination also shared by their friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp. Periodic changes will be made to the installation of Johns’s prints during public hours according to the computations of jRover and the availability of the museum staff.

Johns has long shown as much curiosity about the process of creating a print as about the final result. Along the way, he might make dozens of trial proofs, to test the same design in various colors or on different papers, as well as working proofs, on which he makes additions and notes by hand. These proofs are unique impressions, as opposed to final editioned prints, of which a certain number of identical copies are re- produced. “A lot of time is taken to make printmaking reproductive, and that’s not very interesting to me,” Johns once said.

While many artists discard any proofs created in the printmaking process, Johns has signed and carefully archived more than 1,700 of these unique proofs over his career, suggesting that he might consider them not just intermediary steps but also artworks in themselves. The sheer volume of all this material vastly exceeds Johns’s output in every other medium combined, and its playfulness contrasts with his paintings’ and drawings’ sober deliberateness. Yet Johns’s unique prints share with the rest of his work a logic of repetition and difference, and an insistent distrust in con- ceiving of any work as “finished” - each sheet is at once a fragment of a process and itself a whole.