Ray Johnson
Ray Johnson | |
---|---|
Detroit, Michigan, U.S. | |
Died | January 13, 1995 Sag Harbor, New York, U.S. | (aged 67)
Known for | Intermedia, conceptual art, collage |
Movement | Mail art, Fluxus, neo-Dada, pop art |
Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as [1][2] "New York's most famous unknown artist".[1][3] Johnson also staged and participated in early performance art events as the founder of a far-ranging mail art network – the New York Correspondence School –[1][2][4] which picked up momentum in the 1960s and is still active today. He is occasionally associated with members of the Fluxus movement but was never a member. He lived in New York City from 1949 to 1968, when he moved to a small town in Long Island and remained there until his suicide.[4][5]
Early years and education
Born in Detroit, Michigan, on October 16, 1927,[1][4] Ray Johnson grew up in a working-class neighborhood and attended Cass Technical High School where he was enrolled in the advertising art program. He took weekly classes at the Detroit Art Institute and spent a summer drawing at Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan, affiliated with the Art Institute of Chicago.
Johnson left Detroit after high school in the summer of 1945 to attend the progressive
In the documentary How to Draw a Bunny, Richard Lippold delicately but candidly confesses to carrying on a love affair with Johnson for many years which began at Black Mountain College.
I risk to say, [that at Black Mountain College] 'anything went'—between the students and the faculty ... As I said to my wife the other day, 'I think I'm a good old man now, but I was a very bad boy.' ... She agreed. We had a little house, my family and me, and he would arrive every morning with a little bouquet of wild flowers, and singing. Eventually our relationship became very intimate, so I brought him back to New York ... and obviously, we didn't live together, steadily, because I had my family. We were quite close together until 1974, so that's a long period of time. From '48 to '74, twenty some years. Because it was a very intimate relationship, a loving relationship. And it would be very hard for me to separate him as a person from his work. I don't think I could do that.[8]
New York years
Johnson moved with Richard Lippold to New York City by early 1949,
A friend of Johnson's, art critic
Johnson worked part-time at the Orientalia Bookstore in the Lower East Side as he began to deepen his understanding of Zen philosophy and to employ "chance" in his work. Both of these interests increasingly informed his collages, performances, and mail art. Johnson also found occasional work as a graphic designer. He had met Andy Warhol by 1956; both designed several book covers for New Directions and other publishers. Johnson had a series of whimsical flyers advertising his design services printed via offset lithography, and began mailing these out. These were joined in 1956-7 by two small promotional artists' books, BOO/K/OF/THE/MO/NTH and P/EEK/A/BOO/K/OFTHE/WEE/K, self-published in editions of 500.
Johnson participated in about a dozen performance art events between 1957 and 1963 – in his own short pieces (Funeral Music for Elvis Presley and Lecture on Modern Music), in those of others (by
Johnson's first known piece of mail directing a recipient to "please send to..." someone else dates from 1958; the phrases "please add to and return", "please add and send to", and even "please do not send to" followed. Johnson's mail art activities became more systematic with the help of several friends, particularly Bill Wilson and his mother, assemblage artist
Johnson produced 13 known unbound pages of his enigmatic A Book About Death from 1963 to 1965. Consisting of cryptic texts and drawings (mostly) by Johnson, they were mailed a few at a time, randomly, and offered for sale via a classified ad in The Village Voice.,[18] thus very few people ever received all the pages. Something Else Press published Johnson's The Paper Snake for a wider audience in 1965. Remarking about himself and the book, Johnson said:
I'm an artist and a, well, I shouldn't call myself a poet but other people have. What I do is classify the words as poetry. ... The Paper Snake ... is all my writings, rubbings, plays, things that I had given to the publisher, Dick Higgins, editor and publisher, which I mailed to him or brought to him in cardboard boxes or shoved under his door, or left in his sink, or whatever, over a period of years. He saved all these things, designed and published a book, and I simply as an artist did what I did without classification. So when the book appeared the book stated, "Ray Johnson is a poet", but I never said, "this is a poem", I simply wrote what I wrote and it later became classified.[19]
Long out of print, The Paper Snake was re-printed by Siglio Press in 2014.[20]
On June 3, 1968 – the same day that Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas with a gun she'd stored under May Wilson's bed – Johnson was mugged at knifepoint.[21] Two days later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Severely shaken, Johnson moved to Glen Cove, Long Island, and the next year bought a house in nearby Locust Valley, where Richard Lippold and his family resided. He began to live in a state of increasing reclusion in what he called a "small white farmhouse with a Joseph Cornell attic."
Johnson appeared twice in the Art in Process series, described by blogger Greg Allen as "a series of topical, process-oriented, teaching exhibitions organized by Finch College Museum director Elayne Varian. They included sketches, models and studies to show how the artist did what he was doing."[22]
Locust Valley years
From 1966 into the mid-1970s, Johnson's work was shown at the Willard Gallery (New York) and Feigen Gallery (Chicago and New York), as well as by Angela Flowers in London and Arturo Schwarz in Milan. In 1970, mail from 107 participants to curator Marcia Tucker was exhibited in a Ray Johnson – New York Correspondence School exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York – a significant moment of cultural validation for Johnson.[1][4] Another notable exhibition followed – Correspondence: An Exhibition of the Letters of Ray Johnson at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, 1976, organized by Richard Craven: 81 lenders' works, 35 years of Johnson's outgoing mail. Around that time, Johnson began his silhouette project, creating approximately 200 profiles of personal friends, artists, and celebrities which became the basis for many of his later collages. His subjects included Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Edward Albee, Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers, Lynda Benglis, Nam Jume Paik, David Hockney, David Bowie, Christo, Peter Hujar, Roy Lichtenstein, Paloma Picasso, James Rosenquist, Richard Feigen, among others – a who's who of the New York arts and letters scene.
During the 1980s Johnson purposefully receded from view, cultivating his role as outsider, maintaining personal connections via mail art and telephone largely in place of physical interaction. In 1981, he began a longstanding correspondence with librarian and artists' book specialist,
Death
On January 13, 1995, Johnson was seen diving off a bridge in
Film, television and music
Over seven hours of videos with Ray were created by Nicholas Maravell in the late 1980's. Ray greatly enjoyed the creative process of making them and liked viewing them. Ray had wanted the videos to be played at his final scheduled gallery exhibition but at the last minute he had reason to cancel that show and he asked that the videos not be shown. These wishes were honored after Ray's death even when the gallery owner tried repeatedly to have Maravell show them. Portions of the videos have been used by several filmmakers. A Sampler of them played at Ray's Whitney Museum retrospective after Ray's death. Robert Rodger created a website to honor and help share these videos.
Following his suicide, filmmakers Andrew Moore and John Walter (in conjunction with Frances Beatty of Richard L. Feigen & Co.) spent six years probing the mysteries of Johnson's life and art. Their collaboration yielded the award-winning documentary How to Draw a Bunny, released in 2002. The film includes interviews with artists Chuck Close, James Rosenquist, Billy Name, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Judith Malina, and many others.[29]
The Manic Street Preachers wrote and recorded a song about Johnson, titled "Locust Valley." Released as a B-side on the "Found That Soul" single (2001), "Locust Valley" describes Johnson as "famously unknown/elusive and dismantled".
John Cale's song "Hey Ray" from the Extra Playful EP (2011) is about Cale's encounters with Johnson in New York during the 1960s.[30][31]
Canadian art rock band Women's 2010 album Public Strain includes two songs that directly reference Ray Johnson. Locust Valley is the town where Johnson lived in New York State. Venice Lockjaw is a phrase Johnson incorporated in pins that he made to be given away at the Ubi Fluxus ibi Motus exhibit in 1990 at the Venice Biennale. Their 2008 album Women also featured a song called Sag Harbor Bridge, referencing the place of Johnson's death.
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j "Artpool's Ray Johnson Space". artpool.hu.
- ^ a b c "Ray Johnson, 67, Pop Artist Known for His Work in Collage", by Carol Vogel, The New York Times, January 19, 1995
- ^ Glueck, Grace. "What Happened? Nothing", The New York Times, April 11, 1965
- ^ a b c d e f g h Bloch, Mark. "An Illustrated Introduction to Ray Johnson 1927-1995", 1995
- ^ "I Is an Other: The Mail Art of Ray Johnson". Hyperallergic. August 22, 2015. Retrieved July 4, 2017.
- ^ Whitford Fine Art - Ray Johnson
- ^ Duberman, Martin. Black Mountain – An Experiment in Community, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1972 (reprinted)
- ^ Walter, John (2002). How to Draw a Bunny. Palm Pictures. Event occurs at 22–24 mins.
- ^ Wilcock, John. "The Village Square" column, The Village Voice, October 26, 1955
- ^ Suzi Gablik, in the introduction to Gablik, S. and John Russell, Pop Art Redefined, London: Thames & Hudson, 1969. Note: Elisabeth Novick's photos in Pop Art Redefined are incorrectly captioned (it reads "Moticos, 1949–1963")
- ^ Geldzahler, Henry in Pop Art: 1955–1970 catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1985
- ^ Lippard, Lucy in Correspondences catalogue, Wexner Center/Whitney Museum, 2000
- ^ no author stated. "(untitled note about Johns cover image)", Art News, vol. 56, no. 9, January 1958
- ^ Plunkett, Ed. unpublished typescript
- ^ Maidman Playhouse, The New York Poet's Theatre Presents "Variety" (March 24, 1962), offset-printed black-and-white program, n.p.
- ^ David Bourdon, “The Robin Gallery,” Village Voice, April 8, 1965, 14, 19.
- Gruen, John. "Art in New York: A Mysterious NYCS Meeting", New Yorkmagazine, June 24, 1968
- ^ Johnson, Ray. "Send 96 Cents Postage for 8 Pages of A Book About Death..." classified ad, The Village Voice, autumn? 1964?
- ^ Johnson, Ray with Diane Spodarek and Randy Delbeke. "Ray Johnson interview", Detroit Artists Monthly, February 1968, via jpallas.com
- ^ The Paper Snake Siglio Press
- ^ Bloch, Mark. "Leap of Faith", ABCnews.com. 1999. via panmodern.com.
- ^ Allen, Greg, "Art In Process: Reading Finch College Museum", January 26, 2011
- ^ Zuba, Elizabeth. "Clive Phillpot". BOMB Magazine. Retrieved November 29, 2015.
- ^ Honolulu Museum of Art, wall label, Untitled (Seven Black Feet with Eyelashes), accession 2016-12-01
- ^ "Ray Johnson Estate". www.rayjohnsonestate.com.
- ^ Ray Johnson, rlfeigen.com
- ^ Tashjian, Rachel (January 21, 2015). "Meet Ray Johnson, the Greatest Artist You've Never Heard Of". Vanity Fair. Retrieved July 4, 2017.
- ^ "About Us". Adler Beatty. Archived from the original on April 16, 2024. Retrieved April 16, 2024.
Frances Beatty is Managing Director of The Ray Johnson Estate and has been the steward of Ray Johnson's work, legacy, and archive since his death in 1995.
- ^ "How to draw a bunny by John Walter and Andrew Moore".
- ^ John Cale (February 9, 2011). "Hey Ray". YouTube.com. Retrieved March 13, 2012.
- ^ "The Quietus | Features | A Quietus Interview | A Will Of Iron: John Cale Interviewed". The Quietus.
External links
- Media related to Ray Johnson at Wikimedia Commons
- Ray Johnson's Estate
- Ray Johnson Resources
- How to Draw a Bunny at IMDb
- Ray Johnson and New York Correspondance [sic] School by William S. Wilson 1966
- The Ray Johnson Videos
- Introduction to Not Nothing by Elizabeth Zuba
- Essay by Ina Blom Archived July 16, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- R A Y J O H N S O N
- The Paper Snake, Siglio Press
- Not Nothing, Siglio Press
- Ray Johnson mail art collection held by Special Collections, University of Delaware
- Ray Johnson Mail Art Collection at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario