Good Time Charley,

1972

This is one in a series of eight lithographs made by Johns in 1971–72 that reproduced his Device paintings from the early 1960s. In the paintings he attached moveable objects, such as a wooden ruler or a broom, to the canvas, dragging it through the wet oil paint to create the composition’s forms, leaving both the gesture of its path and the object itself as part of the final work. In his lithographic versions of the paintings, however, Johns ironically represents the "devices" (here a ruler) as flat images incapable of motion. In the paintings and the subsequent prints, the artist integrated human gesture and mechanical mark-making to explore systems of production and reproduction.