HANAFUDA/JASPER JOHNS
HANAFUDA / Jasper Johns
by Katy Martin
1979-81, digital transfer (from super-8mm film), 35 minutes
— Newly remastered in 2019, as a digital transfer from the super-8mm film original, by BB Optics and Katy Martin
— Included in the exhibition, Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, September 29, 2021 - February 13, 2022;
Jasper Johns: In Press/The Crosshatch Work and The Logic of Print, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, 2012; and
Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Films, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001
— The soundtrack interview has been published by MoMA, The Walker Art Center, Fergus McCaffrey Gallery and others.
HANAFUDA observes the artist, Jasper Johns, and the master Japanese silkscreen printers at Simca Print Artists, as they created three different images from Johns USUYUKI and CICADA series. For me, the camera was a pretext for an in-depth apprenticeship. The finished film recapitulates my process of learning, gleaned over time, as I observed Johns and the printers at work. What I wanted to know was how one generates a work of art and, for that matter, what is art, what work is involved, and how do ideas as opposed to physical labor drive the decision making process. The film became a meditation on art and craft, as well as on the dialectic of mind and body, concept and actual work.