JASPER JOHNS

"Untitled (Shit), 1971 by Johns was an experiment. Ordinarily when an image is put on a lithographic stone, the stone is treated with all the solutions so it will take ink. The image is then fixed--it's frozen and short of grinding that 1000th of an inch off, it's unchangeable. That's not exactly true, but in essence there's no easy and convenient way to reopen the stone. Ken Tyler was always very experimental and he wanted to try some techniques to reopen it, and so this image is really a collection of techniques that you can put on the stone. There's a crayon line, the ruler is put on by a photographic process and it says upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right. Both the image and the background have a color spectrum and I think perhaps they chose that because that was a technically demanding use of color and they thought that if they could do that, that would show any imperfections in the process. I happened to be hanging around Gemini at the time this was made." (Michael Crichton, quoted in I. Wasserman, 'Notes from An Interview', Selections from the Michael Crichton Collection, San Diego, 1980, p. 6)