“Ray Johnson tells parables. He finds a use for coincidence. He pounces on and proclaims a day-by-day order and meanings in events… Since Ray Johnson lives a life that is a continuous revelation of pure and radiant design, the image of that life is art. Since the life itself is designed of coincidences, like a walk taking a line, the aesthetic reciprocal of that life is a Ray Johnson collage… It happens that his life is a collage. At least it happens that he works at his life until it is a work of art, and he works at his art until life catches up with it.” – William S. Wilson (front flap of The Paper Snake, by Ray Johnson, Something Else Press, 1965).
There is something perverse and impossible about reading Ray Johnson's work, like trying to decipher the cast-off of a lobotomy. Both courting and disavowing the art world, he deconstructed its reified hierarchies into a web of arbitrary associations whose "density [was] more the point than the various specific things he referred to." (Henry Martin). Not half-man, half-art but whole-man-whole-art, Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a "living sculpture" (James Rosenquist), and his art works are like cells: as partial compositions and individual manifestations of the whole body, they compose a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. While naïve, marginal and somewhat arbitrary, his work was the product of dedication, tenacity and an all-encompassing aesthetic creation, blurring the lines between art and life, mixing randomness and intentionality. Today, his works are celebrated as intricate instances of artistic draftsmanship, signpostings of pop culture transience, manifestations of a subject position wholly subordinate to its aesthetic cause, and archeological troves of the fervent activity of New York's avant-garde.“I’m classifiable as a Pop artist, as a Conceptualist, as a Surrealist,” he said in 1993.
Coming to age in 1950s, as Madison Avenue America pulled the wool over its eyes, Johnson would tap into the deep underlying anxieties of the Golden Age's surreal dream, such as isolationist guilt and the difficulties of private/public reconciliation that were compounded by the social rejection of homosexuality (Ron Lippard).
Attending Black Mountain college, he studied under Joseph Albers and Robert Motherwell, with classmates such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Richard Lippold, with whom he would live upon first moving to New York, in the same building as the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham, who first introduced him to the theories on chance that, with his readings in Zen, would greatly impact his move towards mail art. Joining the downtown art scene, he befriended Andy Warhol while they worked commercially designing book covers, and was introduced to Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. In Twombly's fireplace, he burned all his previous work, and began a life-long practice of "moticos", collages and "tesserae".
A Dedicated Naiveté
“Ray detects personalities in all sorts of animals and inanimate things, such strong personalities, in fact, that he makes little distinction between persons and things.” – David Bourdon, a critic and his close friend.
Painting from a young age, Ray Johnson retained a naiveté in his work and his social interactions, channeling a dreamworld of game-like associations through his aesthetic “play drive” (Schiller) that resulted in the childlike minutia of his collages. With the past world of art as much an object of study as the present, Johnson’s sentimental disengagement allowed him to comb their imagery into a rhyming and disagreeing network of associations. His studies under Albers provided the focus on form, line and order that would reappear in the classical elements and architecture of Johnson's collages, often abstracted but in grids that directed their textual reading.
“My secret vice is making collages by Joseph Cornell”
His decorated building blocks of layered cardboard he called "tesserae" revealed a concern with boundaries that kept him symbolically connected to the idea of identity and home. He created "surrealist" maps of his analogical perception with Dada-ist spatial organization and Symbolist associations where color became thought and letters can remain allusive in seas of color. Johnson was fascinated by interpersonal communication, correspondences and associations, visual, linguistic, social. His art mapped a stream of consciousness where temporality flattened out into simultaneous past lived, imagined and learned experiences of art history, social interactions and imagined worlds. Here emerges a Surrealist influence that parallels the work of Jean Dubuffet: also employing a childish articulation of imagery and spontaneous language, as well as gouging and engraving the surfaces of his work like graffiti, both had a general disdain for institutions.
Interlude
In the 19th century, as modern city life became an increasingly noxious grid of deprivation and disenfranchisement, and rising capitalism was turning private life inside out, Baudelaire’s painters of modern life became intoxicated with the crumbling arcades and social fabric of Europe’s metropoles. Strolling the urban landscape they captured what was truly modern, “fugitive”, “contingent”, “ephemeral” – contained in its “gaits, glances, gestures, fashions, morals, emotions”, to be violently transformed by their “tortured genius” into a horizontal palimpsest of the icons and transience of modern life.
In bohemian Paris where the romantic idea of the lone artist had taken hold by the turn of the century, Gertrude Stein’s “unsentimental exploration of dis/connection” and the Structuralists’ textual deconstruction of art, society and language ushered in a new century of thoughts on connection. The exploration of memory and experience as a stream of consciousness rather than separate formations exposed an “intuitive apprehension of existence” underlying chronological memory, and became a bookend of Modernism’s concern with parts and wholes. Cubist collages and Surrealist Cornell boxes related the elements of the quotidian to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts, by virtue of their connections, while from disjoined assemblages of found objects and merz emerged instances of disconnection in the web of modern life The Situationists’ derives turned the city into a field of “psychogeography” (Guy Debord) where the wandering artist’s mind could open to the “unconsciousness of the urban space”. By showing that no system can be complete or consistent, Kurt Godel made way for the indeterminacy and humor that marked the flâneur incarnations in Pop, Fluxus and the tongue-in-cheek Correspondence art of Ray Johnson.
Conceptual Trajectories
Sharing the conceptual roots of Fluxus, launched by his friends and contemporaries like the chance composer John Cage and George Brecht with the “desire to work in the gap between art and life” (Donna de Salvo, Walker Art Center), Johnson let his work be carried away in the mail, incorporating the "noise" and chance of the real world on its path, and he often encouraged its performance to be carried out by its recipient or incorporated quirks to ensure its extended trajectory (with multiple addresses, strange shapes and instructions to send the piece on, destroy it, or do otherwise). As soon as a piece was sent out, it accumulated the effects of the “third person” postal worker and its physical travels – a source of meaning that has not gone untouched by young artists today, such as Walead Beshty.
Johnson’s choices valued artistic collaboration and viewer participation as integral components of his work thus transforming the medium of communication into an event in ways precursory and contemporary to the highly performative 60s and 70s. Incorporating this marginality with the change of his Fluxus leanings, he arbitrarily deconstructed the chance encounters and sightings of the art world flâneur into the visual and linguistic correspondences ordering his mind, ignoring existing layers of meaning and creating new ones in their place. By mailing his works directly and with a naïve generosity, he created a network of his own, and notoriously rejected the art world's institutional structure, avoiding rejection as well as setting his own terms for the exhibition of his work (never submitting his own, for example, instead soliciting that his correspondents compose the bulk of the Whitney's 1970 Show, Ray Johnson: New York Correspondence School).
“Dear Whitney Museum, I hate you. Love, Ray Johnson”
Unconcerned with classical concepts of value, pop culture ephemera was layered and chopped, recycled, destroyed and recreated "so any one picture plan has the possibility of various years of layerings and archaelologies and things added to it or things that get built up. Chop it in half and sign it 1982 to depict the act of the decapitation of the work, for whatever reason. So 1982 will document areas of removal of debris from things that were, conceptually, already pictures. But then, in blank spaces, I simply grind away to back to the basic brown masonite and stick a 1982 onto a 1978." - Ray JohnsonThese mosaics became poems across the body of his work, repeating themes, altering its source material to create a new whole, each as subject to change as Johnson was averse to entropy. Constantly remixing, rehashing, Johnson stole and wrote on everything, defacing and re-facing the surface of all he came in touch with. With an early fascination with [graffiti] in the Latin sense of “graffito”, to write or scratch on a surface, his playfulness and the completeness of his dreamworld allowed him to appropriate every object and make it his own, adding new layers to his environment. The egalitarian sense of this “massive appropriation” (Wendy Steiner, Correspondences, Walker Art Center, 1999) was based in a free association within and between past and present styles and movements.
“Well, these collages are really like playing cards, so every time they’re shown, they’re reshuffled and become a different story, a different tape. It’s constantly and kaleidoscopically different.” – to Mrs. Levy, the widow of Joseph Cornell’s lifetime art dealer.
The endless Fordian reproducibility offered by Xeroxing often employed by Johnson to chronicle the endless chances in a single work allows for multiple translation of a single piece or even a single association, reveals his thought process into a temporal collage where images are textually interwoven, and text can act visually (e.g. anneagrams). Mixing English and French, mixing images and words, and remixing the stuff of symbols (tesserae), he creates his own vocabulary, alphabet, semantics. He developed several motifs and series in his collages, including silhouettes of artists and acquaintances, "Lucky Strike" symbols, Cupids, "Tit girls," Dollar bills, Potato Mashers, and "Fingernails." Often using word games, remixed portraits, with the superimposition of outlined objects over face of celebrities, the star becomes a vehicle for the moticos; “moticos love moving”. Johnson also calls for their destruction, underlining their ephemerality: “Destroy this writing. Paste the ashes on the side of your automobile and if anyone asks you why you have ashes on the side of your car, tell them”.
Although he called his collages, "Chop art, not Pop art", Johnson usually let others try to fit him into their conception of the art world. "I'm a Cubist," he one said to James Rosenquist, "because I put things in the mail and they get spread all over the place." It was this persona, and only tangentially his use of the postal service as a medium that contributed in greatest part to the impact of his work and the effectiveness of his humor. Despite having worked as a commercial artist upon first arriving in New York (after working as a New York City Library page and in a Zen bookshop), Johnson worked to de-commoditize the creation and reception of art, and his avant-garde practices soon garnered him the attention, mystery and reputation as “New York’s most famous unknown artist” (Grace Glueck). The intentionality and intimacy of his mailings breached the separation between the producer and the viewer, and between known and unknown artists, as his direct address made him a “fan” of everyone and (almost) anyone without (explicitly) making the distinctions of critical reputation or location. Ironically, his lifelong practice of recycling materials led him to pioneer Pop art, transforming popular culture references into aesthetic tableaux and appropriating and abstracting the ephemera of the visual world. With a host of ironic celebrity obsessions apparent in his work, and a “indefinable presence” ubiquitous in the New York scene, he helped found Pop art’s concern with the public persona by incorporating allusions to the art world’s intricate social performance.
Correspondences
Like the simultaneity that took all of Johnson’s references and associated them out of context, he himself touched on many parts of the New York art world, either in person or through the wide distribution of his work, yet had a lack of real connection to the world, and to individuals. In the web of crisscrossing moticos, tesserae and collages, Johnson let the wholeness fail: more correspondence than communication, his work was more about formal connection than a “meeting of the minds” (W. Steiner). With a deadpan humor, he maintained a distance in which there was “nothing”.
One of the first performance artists, Johnson began staging what he called “Nothings” in 1960. These performances paralleled Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings” and later Fluxus events. Johnson described his “Nothings” to William S. Wilson as “an attitude as opposed to a happening,” and he staged numerous performances throughout his life, including his “Throwaway Gesture Performances,” which have been paralleled with the generous compulsion of his seemingly endless stream of mailed collages. As acts of symbolic exchange, they were meant to override the urge to keep and covet, and acted as signpostings of transience, gone before they could perish and asking to be altered by time, travel and chance.
"With the loss of the original I, or we, gained an implication: Conserve this! Restore this! What are the consequences of trying to resist perishing? When I declined to mail that beautiful object, planning to wait for a curator to visit, Ray mailed another film-still in an envelope with loose sand, some of which was irretrievably lost even as I opened the envelope. So I mailed both envelopes to London, exposing them to experiences very like the course of ordinary life, a course that can be hurtful if resisted, yet can become radiant if it is assented to. Ray thought of mail-art as more like fireworks than precious objects in a sanctuary of art. And if his mail-art evaporated or disappeared, its vanishing made a gap that could call forth newer mail-art, fitting seamlessly into a later event. He didn't keep fresh eggs around until they were old.” – William S. Wilson
While Duchamp questioned why art can’t be an object, and Warhol questioned why an object couldn’t be art, Ray Johnson made his life the object of art and art the object of life. Similar in many ways to Duchamp, Johnson also constantly reinvented himself, defied classification, questioned perception with ambiguous spatial organization and eschewed teleological biographical narratives and hierarchies: “leveling of death”, Duchamp called it. Johnson would refer to Duchamp explicitly and implicitly several hundred times in his body of work (Mason Klein), and even used his motif from Etant Donnés over 130 times. De Sassure said: “there are only differences, no positive terms”, and both Duchamp and Johnson took this up in their art by democratizing the source of their materials and information, with arbitrary differences to define space and meaning in the latter’s collages. By taking the modern refusal of historical narrative a step further, Johnson enters postmodern modes of communication with his ephemeral universe of intermedia of the late American 20th century. Creating “new objects for new subjects”, mail art guaranteed activity of the avant-garde mixed with the unpredictability of aesthetic formation, searching for new models of behavior and forming an active and adequate relationship with a new medium.
“New York’s Most Famous Unknown Artist”
Untitled, (Andy on Dotted Ground) 1957-85-87 -- Untitled, (Chuck Close with Buttons), 1974-87-93+ -- Untitled (Joe Namuth), 1976-85-87-88-89 -- Untitled, (May Wilson with Andy Warhol)
Ray Johnson operated within the exclusive space that was New York’s avant-garde art world, carrying with him the habitus of his Black Mountain acquaintances and cultivating further associations by attending the events of this exclusive sphere – although many renown artists admit they had no idea he was actually making art himself (e.g. Dorothy Lichtenstein) – at the same time he broke the patterns of this exclusive sphere. He did not fight for power and recognition within it: he may have challenged previous ways of thinking about art, its distribution, but did not challenge the artists who engaged in their strategies. Rather, he invited them to participate in his alternative operations, and depended on their participation (much like the system itself). Nonetheless, he articulated a strong distaste for artistic institutions, never allowing the formal display of his work, perhaps simply because he couldn’t reconcile their practices with the persona he had created, billowed by the value of his disavowing stance (though the formal and historical appreciation of his work may have been greater than the value of his disavowal – but then disavowal was a function of his production). He was legitimized by the personal hand of his art-world participants, making him indeed the arch-insider Grace Glueck named him. Ultimately, Johnson shared the same capital as those whose field he disavowed, including an understanding and practiced allusion to the art history canon and an understanding of the network and social “presence” even if he never actually let anyone in on who he was personally. Perhaps this was an even greater source of value, as his persona could therefore never be denied or rebutted as fake.
Until his final sighting in 1995, swimming backstroke in Sag Harbor Cove, before his body was found floating, face up, arms crossed, Johnson’s elusive identity, his loss of origins in the endless flow of collages, his merging of myth and everyday experience and his kaleidoscopic consciousness aligned him with the literary and visual model of transgressive modernism from Baudelaire to Duchamp. But his refusal of narrative in favor of dislocated time and space, endlessly altering, fragmenting and combining works, his global embracing of high and low culture; and his arbitrarily recycled and distributed information also aligned him with the vicissitudes of modern and postmodern modes of visual communication. It placed him squarely within a universe constructed through the ephemeral fields of movies, radio, television and Internet that would come to characterize the look, sensibility and philosophy of the US at the end of the 20th century.
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The appropriations and blendings of the music world, beginning with sampling, one of hip-hop’s four elements, speaks to the continued relevance of the Johnsonian network, in which the hybridity of work amidst a pluralism of cultural narratives encourages us to reconsider our concept of authorship and authenticity. Wayneandwax.com. The multiplication of copyright lawsuits is evidence of art breaking the boundaries of previous theories, creating the need for a reconsideration of legally embedded conventions in the current state of “always already” information saturation. “Far from the Bohemian vision of the starving artist working alone in an unheated garret, leading contemporary artists like Koons, Murakami, Zhang Yuan or Olafur Eliasson, often work out of factory-like studios and employ large numbers of assistants” In Adbusters,The End of Aesthetics, May 2009, it was argued that the large-scale, hands-off production, extreme technical proficiency and businesslike approach to art-making have “contributed to the defining aspects of the postmodern aesthetic”, making contemporary artists “the new bourgeois” and sidelining the movement’s early concerns with social and environmental issues, including overconsumption. These so seemingly well-adjusted artist-celebrities, selling their “branded” designs as untouched by craft as Creation itself, clashed considerably with the ongoing 18th century idea that artistic genius is associated with the problem of spiritual estrangement. Even recently Melvin Rader argued in The Artist as Outsider that "As a means of spiritual communication, art breaks down the barriers between man and man, and thus provides a defense against estrangement. Many an artist would be an Outsider if he were not an artist." Paul Klee described the artist as the “trunk of the tree, with inspirations coming from the roots [of society] and channelling through the artist to the crown”, creating not reification but humility – and disunity or alienation from the “larger spiritual whole” when cut off from the community. Reassured by the renewed agency of those “outside” the system to subvert what had become an irrelevant institutional structure of a dead-end modernist narrative, i.e. artists deconstructing its hidden sociopolitical agenda (Joseph Kosuth, Play of the Unmentionable, or Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills]), the growing political insularity of those like Hirst and the commercial orientations of Murakami’s fashion-world collaborations may be disquieting to Melvin Rader. The “excessive presence” of the artist in performative trends of the 60s and 70s probably would have upset Klee. And although the outsider artist may not enjoy the monopoly on artistic merit in the pluralism of postmodern aesthetics, especially when society’s romantic vision of the artist has become slick under the glossy patina of marketing, the tributaries of those like Ray Johnson can be assured of the continued relevance of his work, and theirs. The street art movement, for instance, oversteps these artist-function anxieties by its (relatively) anonymous nature, and it would be difficult to argue its sociopolitical relevance. Perhaps the “true” contemporary artists, by continuing to blur the line between life and art, street artists reincarnate the Baudelarian flâneur that may have last been seen with the likes of Johnson, while currently enjoying an “outsider-insider” status simultaneously that keeps their feet on the ground and their works in the dailies.
“Are there any artists whom you particularly respect, or whom you feel to have a particular relationship to your owr, or who are involved in the same kind of total activity that you’re involved in?” asked Henry Martin. Yes,” replied Johnson, “All the graffiti artists.”
References and Bibliography
Ray Johnson, Correspondences, Walker Art Center, 1999
Aaron Rose et al., Beautiful Losers, D.A.P./Iconoclast; 2nd edition (October 15, 2005)
Clement Greenberg, Modernism and Postmodernism, 1979
Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997)
Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol 1928-1987: Commerce into Art. Rev. edition. Taschen, 2000.
David Hopkins, Art after Modern Art, 1945-2000. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2000
Michel Foucault, The Author-Function, 1970
Jeanne Marie Kusina, The Evolution and Revolutions of the Networked Art Aesthetic, 2005
Melvin Rader, The Artist As Outsider, 1958
Adbusters, The End of Aesthetics, May 2009
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993)
Picasso English trans. From Stein’s french version by Alice B. Toklas (New York: Scribners, 1939).
Wayne Marshall, Giving Up Hip-Hop's Firstborn, A Quest for the Real after the Death of Sampling, 2006
James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001)
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