The Target: Alain Robbe-grillet, Jasper Johns

The Target is an interarts study of Pop art and metafiction. It highlights the relationship between Alain Robbe-Grillet, an internationally acclaimed French new novelist and cinematographer, and Jasper Johns, an internationally renowned artist. Robbe-Grillet wrote “The Target,” an introduction to the catalog for the Johns 1978 exhibition in Paris–an introduction in the guise of fiction–that was generated by the works in the show. Fifty-six of the works illustrate the translation of Robbe-Grillet’s narrative. Eight additional illustrations in color accompany the essay that analyzes Johns’s targets and numbers and Robbe-Grillet’s “target.” The accompanying essay addresses topics such as self-reflexivity, topologies, chaos theory, and the social function of art. The book shows how Johns’s targets and Robbe-Grillet’s writing subvert social codes and the observer’s expectations in order to produce new and unexpected perceptions of reality.