In conjunction with Jasper Johns: Eyes in the Persistence of Form at Fergus McCaffrey Tokyo, we are delighted to offer a special week-long screening of filmmaker and artist Katy Martin’s seminal film, HANAFUDA / JASPER JOHNS (1978-81)—featuring Japanese subtitles.
The film is currently included in Jasper Johns: Mind / Mirror at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as part of Johns’s dual-venue retrospective also on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, through February 13, 2022.
Now streaming online through Saturday, October 16th—click here to watch.
About the Film—A Note from Katy Martin
“HANAFUDA observes the artist, Jasper Johns, and the master Japanese silkscreen printers at Simca Print Artists, [New York], as they created three different images from Johns’s 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.”
