This Memorial Day, I think it’s appropriate to honor frontline workers for the vital services they have provided during the pandemic. Essential workers across industries have risked their lives to keep our country running: they uphold the basic structure of our healthcare system, food supply chain, postal and delivery services, and the countless other things we consider public goods. They risk their health and safety to care for their families and keep the fundamental systems of our society alive. Following weeks of shelter-in-place, the United States is slowly reopening, and the essential workers we’ve relied on to keep us afloat during quarantine are now on the front lines of a new frontier, life in a cautiously post-isolation world.
Enter Jasper Johns, a celebrated American artist who uses sculpture, painting, and print works to study symbols that are ubiquitous in everyday life. One of his most recognized appropriations is the American flag, Old Glory herself. He paints the Stars and Stripes in textures, colors, and configurations that challenge the ordinariness of the traditional design. Take Flags, for instance. This lithograph contains two flags: Johns renders one with green, black, and orange ink while he prints the other in grayscale. Both banners have a small dot in the middle. This is how the “trick” works: look at the dot in the upper flag for about 30 seconds. Close your eyes, then open them and look at the dot in the bottom flag. You should see the time-honored red, white, and blue, but only as an afterimage. What makes this work so compelling, in my view, is the simultaneous awe and intimacy we get to experience with this shared symbol. In Johns’s print, a commonplace icon only exists in its “true” form when I make it in my mind.
This description of Johns’s Flags sets up a surface-level connection: Memorial Day, the American flag, and Jasper Johns. In our current moment, this loose association sparks a few questions: What does the American flag mean to essential workers who are undocumented, underpaid, underinsured, and underrecognized? What does the American flag mean for communities that are overrepresented in essential positions but under-represented in public discourse?
In a palpable fight against an invisible disease, Johns’s “afterimage” becomes an especially potent metaphor. After-imagery speaks to certain “truths” of this isolated-era that have only been revealed in relief. Like, for example, the vital service of workers who are just now recognized as essential. Or gaps in protections for workers who have lost their jobs. Or disparate access to resources that, now more than ever, become a matter of life or death. Johns’s trick of perception is useful because it demonstrates the mechanics behind the visible world and challenges viewers to question, or to look again.
In Johns’s Flags, I wonder, which is the “true” American flag: the one made of contrast colors, the grayscale impression, or the flag we make in our minds? Maybe the answer isn’t important and, rather than focusing on what we believe to be true, this Memorial Day we honor the flexibility of American symbols and the people they represent.
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