ilovetolurk@hotmail.com. Ray Johnson would have, I think, liked my first email account. (Still active!) It combines humorous low-stakes wordplay with an ever-so-slight sinisterness. That I cribbed ilovetolurk@hotmail.com’s language from an old ad by the skateboard company Antihero is also fitting, in that as both a thinker and artist Ray Johnson was decidedly acerbic—and yet he was also a leading visionary of sorts. Antiheroic, in a word. One of Johnson’s most well-known collages depicts a sport coat-wearing adolescent boy, handsome in spite of his two missing front teeth, grinning malevolently while below him a cut-out caption reads “A 2-YEAR-OLD GIRL CHOKED TO DEATH TODAY ON AN EASTER EGG.” This is anti- something, to be sure, but is it also heroic in some way? Vis-à-vis Ray Johnson’s idiosyncratic worldview, the answer is yes.
For those unfamiliar with said worldview Ray Johnson c/o, the artist’s recent retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, is an ideal place to start. Johnson, who was born in 1927 and committed suicide in 1995, aged 67, was a collagist, portraitist, performance artist and artist’s artist. For years the same tagline followed him around, one bestowed upon him by the New York Times in 1965— “New York’s most famous unknown artist.” Born in Detroit, Johnson studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina—he began the most meaningful romantic relationship of his life while there, with the sculptor Richard Lippold— and after his Black Mountain sojourn lived in New York state for the rest of his life. (First New York City then, later, an hour outside of NYC in Locust Valley.) Far from unknown, he was chums and frenemies during his lifetime with a number of big names: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, among others. Johnson was a needy iconoclast (an insidiously dangerous pairing)— he desperately wanted their success, but only on his own terms. Although by the end of his life he was certainly celebrated, particularly by younger artists, Johnson never reached heights comparable to his coterie, at least not while he was alive.
That being said, for all intents and purposes Johnson was the creator of a versatile genre of art that is still flourishing to this day: mail art. Mail art is synonymous with Johnson in the same way that pop art is with Warhol or the combine painting is with Rauschenberg. For better or worse, it’s his. He occasionally pushed back against the title (someone else named it), but as founder of the New York School of Correspondence, he was known for using the United States Postal Service as an exclusive conduit to his own creative ends. Ray Johnson c/o showcases how restless Johnson was as an artist, within and beyond his mail-based work. One sentiment or emotion was never enough. The goal of mail art was and is to keep things moving, ideally from one artist to another. Regardless of the work or its form, Johnson leaned into that motion.
The pieces that Johnson sent to the writer and archivist William S. Wilson and dozens of others frequently combined collage, portraiture, poetry and drawing. They are intricate, detailed, discursive and frequently beautiful. Johnson dubbed his own collage-based practice to be an act of motico (or moticos), which scholar Johanna Gosse characterizes as consisting of
…a bit of everything (a scrap, a clipping, a void) and part of everything…[moticos] are fragments of meaning severed—quite literally—from their original context, a cut that unleashes their potential and renders them mobile and fungible but also fundamentally unstable. Physically, moticos are complete collages as well as their component materials, often consisting of everyday ephemera intricately arranged in small-scale compositions.[1]
As this review will show, Johnson’s moticos were an extension of his own wildly variegated, mysterious self. By dint of their contrast and chaos, Johnson’s moticos conceal their own secrets in plain sight. There is there there. There is there is there.
In a lot of Johnson’s artworks, both mail-related and not, there’s almost too much to focus on, which is the point. The viewer can nevertheless admire the organizing principle of (scenic) disarray without feeling burdened by having to “get” “it.” Johnson wasn’t concerned with meaning or understanding in his work, at least not directly. Linearity, the precision of the line or figure, even overall pictorial coherence—it didn’t matter much to the artist. Immediacy’s engagement was his focus, and if a visitor to Ray Johnson c/o rushes through the exhibition mindlessly, cracking a quick smile on the way out at, say, a slightly altered photo of a stern H.L. Mencken on his 75th birthday standing next to his woodpile, with the caption below it reading “Who’ll chop your suey when I’m gone?,” then that would likely have represented a success for Johnson.
Ray Johnson c/o abounds with funny wordplay and juxtaposition like this, some of it delicately nuanced, most of it not. In 1955 Johnson met the poet Marianne Moore—she became one of his correspondents, albeit a bewildered one— and for years afterward Moore and her trademark tricorn hat were fascinations for Johnson. In part this was no doubt due to Moore’s preferred fashion piece; Johnson used Moore’s tricorn as an icon to be assembled and broken down, then reassembled again. He motico’d Moore’s hat in a variety of different contexts and situations, also making clear, in a letter to a friend, that despite all their apparent similarities “Marianne Moore is definitely not Marilyn Monroe.”[2] Moore’s eccentric sense of self, however, surely also enticed him. At the time of their meeting Moore was the preeminent Modernist poet living in the United States. To the wider public, however, she was known less for her poems and more for her persona, a typical predicament for women writers. Moore was a huge baseball fan—the Brooklyn Dodgers were her team—and an itinerant copywriter for the Ford Motor Co. Having never married, she lived with her mother, who often appeared in interviews with the poet. Moore was an outspoken suffragist and habitually wore a black cape and the notorious tricorn hat—a shield of a kind. One of a kind himself, Johnson likely felt a kindred spirit in Moore.
Johnson’s sense of humor filigreed itself throughout his entire artistic practice. Besides the New York School of Correspondence (which was an actual thing), Johnson “founded” Buddha University and the Peanut Butter Festival (neither of which were). He additionally was the originator of numerous tongue-in-cheek fan clubs, centering everyone from Shelley Duvall to Marcel Duchamp to Paloma Picasso. As a creator, Johnson of course staked out his own territory. In the “Tender Buttons” section of Ray Johnson c/o (buttons and Gertrude Stein were other points of Johnsonian interest) there’s a funny postcard wherein Johnson derides pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg, he of the oversized hamburgers and bowling pins. Next to a photo of Oldenburg and his wife fondling an oversized button, Johnson has written “Where does Mr. Oldenburg get his ideas?” The invective is snide, if understated: Oldenburg is stepping on my turf.
Johnson knew he was a unique artist. The fact that his uniqueness was not deeply or lucratively embraced by the wider world was certainly a source of frustration, although he never would have admitted it. Bitterness was not interesting to Johnson. Still, in so many of the works in the exhibition—and particularly the funniest ones—a low-key desperation seeps through, one that doesn’t announce itself so much as plaintively exist. In one piece in c/o, Johnson appropriates a 1970 letter that William S. Wilson had written to the art critic and historian Marcia Tucker, one in which Wilson calls Johnson “charmingly destructive” and “damnably elusive” as a collaborator. In thick red marker someone (Wilson? Johnson?) has twice written the word SLUSH in the borders around the letter. The specific meaning of that word within the context of the letter is unclear, but in many ways Johnson was indeed a slush pile artist, perhaps the quintessential one. When he was actually solicited and fêted, though, he tended to run the other way—an I wouldn’t want to be a part of any club that would have me situation.“I never quite got out of childhood” is how Johnson put it in the aforementioned 1968 interview and that impasse comes through strongly in his work.[3] This is oftentimes a happy circumstance for the viewer, but for the actual human being who created the work it may not have been.
Part of Johnson’s appeal as an artist is his refusal to be emblematic. The aforementioned William S. Wilson was an early and fervent champion of Johnson—the bulk of Ray Johnson c/o is taken from work that Johnson initially sent to Wilson (now officially known as the William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson)—and in Wilson’s view:
For Ray, incompleteness is the truth of objects and events under construction in this incomplete existence, wherein we don’t know the purposes which will be served by anything we do. That is, Ray works with the fact that we do not know our complete story.[4]
This seems to me like a highfalutin way of saying that what interested Johnson most was his inability to articulate a centralized, marketable vision, at least one that was as simple as “Roy Lichtenstein is a pop artist” or “Allen Kaprow is a performance artist.” (Johnson danced around the circles of both of those groups, while never being a card-carrying member of either.) In a 1968 interview Johnson declared, “I don’t know if I really have time to understand my work. I think about it a great deal but—.”[5] He then trailed off and the interview quickly went elsewhere. This assertion by Johnson is possibly the mark of a good artist—one exploratory, incessant, and ever creatively roving. But it’s not the position of most financially successful artists, those who are attuned to the market and its tides and the dozens of glad-handy artistic networks. Occasionally in spite of himself—no matter the game, he made up the rules—during his lifetime Johnson made his lacks his strengths, and by the time of his death he did have some small measure of financial security, along with a few reverent acolytes. But as the 2002 documentary How To Draw a Bunny makes clear, Johnson was a minor artist who had come up in an era with a hard distinction between major and minor, and his shrouded-in-secrecy-while-simultaneously-carefully-planned suicide might have been his ultimate bid to make the jump.[6] Whether it worked or not is debatable, although what is known is that it arrived too late. Ways of thinking about the “canon” have shifted in the past twenty-five years, but Johnson sadly didn’t live to see that shift.
***
What I really relish in Ray Johnson’s art is its strident lack of purchase. It is simultaneously one thing and many things and this facet can, admittedly, be maddening; obscurity can and will reign supreme in any Johnson piece. This willfully unordered multiplicity gives me a deep comfort, though. Johnson’s life and work were orchestrated to their own internal song, and it was an arrhythmic one. If this made his actual life hard to live—he was not, I don’t think, a very contented man—his art’s eventual capture by major institutions made up for it. Aggressively suspicious of success while aggressively desirous of it, Johnson was a determined underdog. It’s his artistic inability to commit to a definitive brand, though, that draws me in. Though it now circulates widely, Johnson’s work still testifies to his unyielding insistence on being himself, solely and utterly himself.
Walking slowly out of Ray Johnson c/o I overheard one attendee in front of me say to her companion, “It really wasn’t that funny,” while simultaneously across the room someone else, staring at one of the exhibition’s pieces, sniggered. If he’d been there to witness it, Ray Johnson would have approved.
[1] Johanna Gosse, “Moticos,” in Ray Johnson c/o, ed. Caitlin Haskell and Jordan Carter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 160-176.
[2] Ray Johnson, to William S. Wilson, November 2, 1966.
[3] Ray Johnson, Interview by Sevim Fesci, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, April 17, 1968.
[4] William Wilson, A Book About A Book About Death (Amsterdam: Kunstverein, 2009), 18.
[5] Ray Johnson, Interview by Sevim Fesci, 1968.
[6] John Walter and Andrew Moore, How to Draw a Bunny (Palm Productions, 2002), 90 min.