letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
some
assembly required In
the spring of 1990 Ray Johnson visited my house in Port Washington, New York.
By then, he had been living in nearby Locust Valley for twenty-two years in self-imposed
exile from New York City. He left shortly after Andy Warhol was shot, Robert Kennedy
was assassinated and he himself was mugged. The afternoon he came had been preceded
by several days of mail --articles, drawings and photocopies of works he had asked
me to send along to people I'd never heard of before.
Dressed
in a navy T-shirt and dungarees, bald and smiling, Ray Johnson was not what I'd
expected. He appeared with a rose vase as a gift, stoppered with a Tatinger champagne
cork. Extremely curious--but purposeful, and, as I was to learn, deadpan by design.
It was, after all, a vase for a Rose. Ray wanted only black coffee and we sat
drinking cups of the stuff in my kitchen. Our conversation roamed from his exegesis
on synchronicity, the Dadaists, and an oral history on the "exquisite corpse,"
to a meeting with art critic Robert Pincus-Witten at Gagosian Gallery. Ray showed
a group of collages to Pincus-Witten, on the floor of the gallery, beneath one
of Warhol's Elvis silkscreens then showing at Gagosian. Ray told me: "Andy
gave me that." I don't know if Ray felt the Warhol silkscreen was stolen
from him, or if he wanted it back. I had my doubts about both. I couldn't imagine
a legal battle. I was to find out Ray was more interested in the social geometry,
the correspondance of this one-on-one exhibition of his work and Warhol's, than
in possessions.
Ray
Johnson. Detail of A mysterious New York Correspondence School meeting June
1st Finch College 62E. 78 ST 3-5pm.
We talked
on about the New York Correspondence School, the waters around Long Island, writing
(he typed on an old manual), his house--I imagined a warehouse of sorts--and death.
I ventured to ask: "What happens to all your stuff when you die?"
"Matthew,"
he said, "I don't know."
The
question "Why suicide?" is very much at the heart of How to Draw a Bunny
(2001), John Walter's engaging documentary film about this idiosyncratic American
artist. Death, in fact, slipped into his most casual remarks such as the one he
left on my answering machine before I left for France in 1992: "Hi. This
is Andy Warhol calling from heaven. Please call me back."
"The
most well-known unknown American artist" died in a suicide drowning 13 January
1995, after a lifetime as unique and perplexing as his art. His suicide, the film
proposes, was perhaps his greatest and most mysterious artwork. Can suicide become
an artwork? A performance? The idea was troubling. When I'd first heard about
it (a call from a friend on the 14 January), I was stunned and saddened. I didn't
understand how someone I knew and adored, who had intrigued me with his words
and keen intelligence, and seduced me with his friendship, would or could take
his life.
How
to Draw a Bunny, like most of Johnson's collages, is a cryptogram wrapped inside
a conundrum. The title is taken from one of Ray's diagrammatic drawings of his
iconic rabbit/duck, a stand-in alter ego. In the film, we learn the "how,"
of Johnson's suicide but not exactly "why," although we are offered
dozens of clues.
Walter
brackets his narrative with the recovery of Johnson's body in the chilly waters
of Sag Harbor, New York by local police chief Iliacci, and video footage entering
his home on 44 West 7th Street in Locust Valley. We see, at least in this video,
an immaculate storehouse of packed boxes of his art: all artworks are turned against
the wall, save for one, a full-on Polaroid portrait by Chuck Close. There were
in fact other images of Ray in that room we don't see. According to Bill Wilson,
Johnson's longtime friend who entered the house and witnessed the same scene on
19 January 1995, "The works of art in that small room looked like an installation,
and surely functioned as one, for when I entered that room, I found myself standing
between Ray Johnson and Ray Johnson." Wilson adds that "several arrangements
in the house were legible, some like haiku conveying a fugitive impression …
like library books neatly stacked near the door to be returned to the library."
For the writer of thousands of letters, it is more than ironic there is no single
suicide note. Instead there are many notes, including a work in progress, according
to Wilson: "In plain view on a table was a small piece of paper with the
word 'murder' put through permutations, being written as REDRUM, and divided into
syllables, with an eye on possible anagrams. That wasn't a note, it was an oblique
clue." (1)
Raymond
E. Johnson was born in Detroit, 16 October 1927, an only child. He drew obsessively
from an early age, illustrating letters to friends with pictures of girls and
Hollywood starlets. In 1946 Ray left home for the then-experimental Black Mountain
College of Art in North Carolina, where he met Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly,
Merce Cunningham, Joseph Albers, John Cage and artist Richard Lippold, who would
be his lover for decades. In the early 1950s he joined the burgeoning art world
of New York and began to produce what are now considered to be among the first
pop art works--his Elvis and James Dean collages--prefiguring Warhol's celebrity
portraits. Also at that time he began sending out pieces of his collage work to
friends or acquaintances, passing on bits that "corresponded" to Ray
and that particular recipient.
It
was in this vein that I received a "corrected" version of my collage
I Stand Corrected--a pair of Chinese/English flash cards of a little boy (standing)
and a banana. Ray rearranged the words to say: "I stand erected." A
half dozen erections followed, then several on the theme of "yellow urinalism,"
riffing off my journalist career. The images were funny, and followed Johnson's
unique logic. After the spate of penises in the mail, a phone call from Ray redirected
the correspondence. We talked about strange things he'd received in the mail.
He told me someone had sent him a fetal goat. "Do you want to come over and
see it?" he asked. I said hesitatingly, "Sure," but never did.
Ray
Johnson's puns, anagrams and wordplays were overwhelming, but they struck a chord
with me, and have influenced much of my own activity since. I was enlisted to
forward items (words in Hebrew, drawings of bunnies, the word "nothing"
spelled backwards "gnihton") with the polite imperative of "please
send to" written on the works, often photocopies, to people Ray designated.
While I could not precisely ferret out why, I complied.
Ray
Johnson's New York Correspondence School (NYCS) was an enormous human collage
of paper, objects and ideas. The NYCS launched the phenomenon known as mail art,
although Ray Johnson as its "father" insisted that "the school
taught Nothing." Ray sent Lucky Strike logo collages to Gerry Ayres who once
wrote him a poem about Lucky Lindbergh. After a lobster dinner with writer Henry
Martin in 1962, Ray sent images of the crustacean to him for years. Ray found
my driver's registration in a biography of Joseph Cornell in the Port Washington
Public Library, and sent that to me, as well as half a dozen other "bookmarks"
over the next year. His letters were like elaborate, timed dances, and gave fullness
to the correspondance he found and exploited in his life. Names, addresses were
punned upon; sometimes he rubberstamped "Collage by Ray Johnson," or
"Collage by Sherrie Levine." Sometimes he'd include an odd picture and
write: "This was the guy I was telling you about." Ray's gestures were
poetic, confusing, beautiful, and met with joy and fascination, at least when
they came my way in the mail. Nicolas and Elena Calas in their 1971 book, Icons
and Images of the Sixties, wrote: "Ray Johnson is to the letter what Cornell
is to the box."
While
Ray exhibited occasionally, notably in 1984, Works by Ray Johnson at the Nassau
County Museum of Fine Arts on Long Island, and More Works by Ray Johnson 1951-1990
at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, he repeatedly shunned
the art world. He often refused to exhibit and/or threatened to cancel exhibitions.
He told me once he replaced an exhibit in Vancouver with two drops of his blood.
For the Philadelphia show he told me he considered "cancelling" it,
replacing the work with "two dimes." He sent curator Elsa Longhauser
the postal pun as explanation: "I live in cancellation."
Johnson
was the consummate insider who preferred outsider status. He was an artist's artist,
sending out his gifts in a poetic profusion that danced from one idea to another.
He combined exquisite draftsmanship with a rich personal iconography, rhyming
words with objects, and his puns, verbal and visual, cascaded into the world in
a deadpan that could often be funny and infuriating but struck a magic bell for
his fans. Johnson was, in a word, challenging. In Walter's documentary, Richard
Feigen (Johnson's longtime New York dealer) claims that Ray was "impossible."
Warhol Factory hand Billy Name said, "Ray Johnson wasn't a person, he was
a collage, a sculpture." Richard Lippold described Ray as "indifferent
to all of the machinations of life, a totally honest man, incorruptible, and in
this sense, unmanageable."
John
Walter's film becomes yet another collage by Ray Johnson, the film's cast and
story oddly orchestrated by Johnson himself. Frances Beatty (vice president at
Richard Feigen Gallery), holding up the last mailing he sent her--a puzzle in
a film box, acknowledges this: "He'd leave you a work of art that contained
within it meaning. He is like the prophet. I mean, I thought about the film canister
when he gave it to me. But I hadn't really thought a lot about Ray and this film
till right now." Beatty shows the camera the film box, and opens it up to
reveal its contents. The viewer grasps in an eerie moment how Johnson could play
for the camera and insert meaning--even from death.
"I'm
telling a detective story," says Walter of his film. "And the art works
are clues, and contain within them more clues."
But
clues, elaborate and beautiful as they are, are really what we are left with.
The late artist Buster Cleveland tells us a Ray Johnson story that is particularly
apt. "The Philadelphia police had called [Ray] up and said they found this
guy floating in the water," said Cleveland. "The only identification
on the guy was a letter from Ray Johnson."
###
Matthew
Rose is a writer and artist based in Paris.
Mail Art Paris, opens 22 September
at Espace Beauregard, 2, rue Beauregard 75002 Paris.
His e-mail: mistahrose@yahoo.com.
Notes
1. Note
from William Wilson: "Ray had made those notes on murder, I think, during
our long phone-call about the word 'murder' on Wednesday the 11th, maybe Tuesday."
How
to Draw a Bunny (2001, 90 min, USA) debuted at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival
(earned a Special Jury Prize). Showed in November, 2002 at Rencontres internationales
du cinéma, Paris (won the Prix du Public).
Dear
Jackson Pollock, Collages and Objects by Ray Johnson, Pollock-Krasner House and
Study Center, 830 Fireplace Road, East Hampton, NY, May 1 - August 3, 2003. Helen
Harrison, Director. Edvard Lieber, Guest Curator. With essays by Phyllis Stigliano,
Muffet Jones and William S. Willson. And photos of Ray Johnson by Edvard Lieber.
Color catalog.
The
Name of the Game: Ray Johnson's Postal Performance, Jan. 11 - March 9, 2003, The
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway. Organized by Ina Bloom from
private collections and longtime Johnson confidant William S. Wilson. Catalog
in color with Johnson correspondence and essays; 120 pages.
affiliates
