NYTIMES on Ray Johhnson mentioning mail-art
Bill Wilson
NYTIMES on Ray Johhnson mentioning mail-art October 08, 2002 12:41AM |
<HTML>
New York Times [New York, NY
October 6, 2002
[www.nytimes.com]
A Collage in Which Life = Death = Art
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Life itself might be a work of art. That is modern art's most radical
proposition. Art doesn't have to be a painting or drawing. It can be the way
an artist acts and speaks. Andy Warhol was Andy Warhol's masterpiece. Joseph
Beuys played the role of Professor Beuys. There have been more extreme
cases, too: artists who shot or mutilated themselves.
Then there is Ray Johnson, who made no distinction at all between art and
life, or in his case, between art and death. His suicide has become his most
famous work. On Jan. 13, 195, at the age of 67 (6+7=13, Johnson's friends
always note), Johnson jumped off the Sag Harbor bridge on Long Island. "I
like to say I'm the ocean," he once told a friend, "and like the tide, I
mash up everything."
How odd that something so spectacular would come to be associated with
someone like Johnson, who, though by no means a recluse, lived by choice on
the margins, making mischievous little collages and other eccentrically
beautiful, technically brilliant, ironic and zany works he either stored
away or disseminated to friends and strangers via the Postal Service.
But then, he seemed to have calculated everything he did in life, as if all
of life were a game, played by his peculiar rules, understood completely
only by him.
So, who knows? Maybe he wanted to be remembered for how he died, an odd move
in a singular career until you accept that he was, in art and life, a
constant puzzle and sometimes a pain. A film about Johnson, "How to Draw a
Bunny," opening Wednesday at Film Forum in Manhattan, shows the sculptor
Richard Lippold, who was Johnson's lover for many years, saying: "Now that I
think of him after his death, I don't think I really knew who he was. It's
very hard for me to say that. But who was this man? He kept so much of
himself to himself."
He was the stuff of a good mystery, that's clear. And though the film can
hardly indicate this, he was a kind of genius as an artist, too.
The film, by Andrew Moore and John Walter, begins and ends with the death. I
recount the story of it here, even though it is familiar by now to Johnson
aficionados, not to play up the melodrama but to be consistent with this
artist of fastidious and arcane temperament. For him, the world was made up
of amazing coincidences, serendipities and karmic gags. Details mattered.
So: at 3:57 on that January afternoon, Johnson telephoned his old friend
William Wilson. (There are 13 letters in Mr. Wilson's name, by the way.)
Johnson said he was going to perform a "mail event." Mr. Wilson (who
declined to be in the film, unfortunately for the filmmakers) remembered
afterward that Johnson's first letter to him, in 1956, mentioned how Life
Buoy soap floats, and that elsewhere Johnson talked about the drowning of
Hart Crane and how Tennessee Williams had wanted his own corpse dropped into
the sea where Crane drowned.
Johnson was fascinated with messages in bottles, dropped into the ocean like
letters into a mailbox. He sometimes threw bottles with messages into the
waters off Long Island. He also tossed small wrapped packages off the Staten
Island ferry. (Who knows what was in them.) He thought a body floating in
water was beautiful, he told his friend Coco Gordon.
Johnson checked into Room 247 (2+4+7) of the Baron's Cove Inn at Sag Harbor
Cove (both of which also total 13 letters). Maybe he asked for the room
because of its number, or maybe it was the only room available. He wrote
"New York Correspondence School" under company name in the inn's registry.
He stayed about 90 minutes.
He took nothing with him. He made no phone calls. He had already called
people during the previous weeks. No one knew his call was a farewell, until
later.
Shortly before 7 p.m., he drove about one minute from the inn to a 7-Eleven.
He parked his old Volkswagen in the parking lot and climbed onto the
bridge's walkway.
Two teenage girls heard a splash about 7:15. (The numbers add up, but the
girls aren't precise about the time.) After that they saw a man bob to the
surface and calmly backstroke in the frigid waters toward the cove. The
temperature of the water was 39 degrees, so it would have taken between 15
minutes and an hour for hypothermia to set in.
WHO was Ray Johnson? He conceived Pop before Warhol, was a Conceptualist and
performance artist before the terms were invented, although he was also none
of these things, exactly. Early in his career he invented what came to be
called mail art, a modest byway, which consisted mostly of his photocopied
drawings and assemblages of found images stuffed into envelopes, sometimes
customized for particular people, often conceived to be chain letters and
passed on. He sent out thousands of these.
As a young abstract painter studying with Josef Albers at Black Mountain
College in the late 1940's, Johnson realized that by doing pretty much the
same thing over and over, with minute variations, as Albers did, he could
achieve remarkably different effects. He had amazing gifts for color, shape
and design ? he could have stayed an abstract artist ? but he was more
fascinated by mundane materials, pop artifacts and Zen-derived chance
effects, the sort of things that also interested John Cage and Robert
Rauschenberg.
So collage became his principal medium. Shirt cardboard, newspaper clippings
and Elmer's glue became his tools. He delighted in finding puns, anagrams,
palindromes, rhymes, slips of the tongue, visual and verbal jokes. "Keir
Dullea Gone Tomorrow," a line from the film critic Pauline Kael, became the
title of a typical collage.
Warhol and Joseph Cornell were his friends, Gertrude Stein his natural soul
mate. But unlike Warhol, Johnson made art that was not big, deadpan and
hands-off but small, eccentric and open-ended. Impermanence was his mantra.
Over the years, he recycled, chopped up and modified his collages, as if
keeping them in a constant state of possibility and flux. They accumulated
more and more obscure and hermetic meanings along the way. By the end, his
art had become a dense, private code, occasionally morbid and sometimes very
hard to decipher.
THE morning after he jumped off the bridge, Johnson's body was spotted,
drifting face up, arms crossed over his chest. He had $1,600 in his wallet,
which surprised many people who knew him because it was widely assumed he
had no money. In the film, friends describe how they thought he simply ate
air. For years he lived almost on rice alone.
He was both obsessed with money and put off by it. In "How to Draw a Bunny,"
Mort Janklow, the literary agent, tells about the time Johnson made 26
collages based on Mr. Janklow's silhouette (Johnson made ghostly silhouettes
of hundreds of people), then began a negotiation over their price that
dragged on for years and became as comical and byzantine as some of the
collages, which was evidently the point: everything, including wrangling
over money, was fodder for his art. First Johnson asked Mr. Janklow for
$42,200, then halved the price, then offered 18 collages plus an unrelated
work for $13,000, or all 26 for $18,232, with a different work thrown in and
portraits of Paloma Picasso and the King of Denmark added on top of some of
Mr. Janklow's silhouettes.
The negotiations came to nothing, naturally.
One of the Janklow portraits is in a new Johnson show at Richard Feigen's
gallery in Chelsea. Mr. Feigen was Johnson's longtime dealer, although the
relationship seems in some respects not unlike the one with Mr. Janklow.
Johnson once rented a helicopter and dropped 60 foot-long hot dogs over
Riker's Island, then sent the bill to Mr. Feigen. He said that he had been
tracing people's feet, which brought to mind foot-long hot dogs, as if that
explained it. For decades, he hemmed and hawed about an actual show at the
gallery ? until just before his suicide.
He would do nothing, he told Frances Beatty, the gallery's vice president.
Because Johnson called his performances "nothings" (this was his version of
"happenings"), it wasn't clear to Ms. Beatty whether he meant that he would
do a nothing or would do a show that had nothing in it. What was clear was
that nobody was likely to make a dime out of the occasion.
Johnson wouldn't allow money to be a measure of his value, only of somebody
else's character. In the film, the artist Peter Schuyff recounts asking
Johnson the price of a collage. Johnson told him. Mr. Schuyff offered him
three-quarters of the amount. So Johnson sent him three-quarters of the
collage. Years ago, Johnson took some collages to Harry Abrams, the
publisher, who agreed to buy 10 of them for $100 each, a fair price at the
time. Then Abrams asked him to throw in an extra ? not an unheard-of
request. Johnson left feeling humiliated. He wept.
It turned out that he had $400,000 in the bank when he died, an inheritance
from his parents. But he was content for people to think that he led what he
described to Grace Glueck of The New York Times in the 1960's as "a life of
deliberate poverty."
During his later years, that life was spent in Locust Valley, N.Y. In 1968,
Johnson had decided to leave New York City after he had been mugged at
knifepoint and his friend Andy Warhol had been shot. He settled into a
nondescript little suburban house, about as remote from the art world as he
could be.
Or to be precise, exactly as remote as he chose to be. Few people were
allowed to visit him, although he kept in touch with literally hundreds of
people by mail and phone, people who may have seen him rarely or never, and
often did not know one another, or even very much about him. If he was a
recluse, he was a recluse about town, as the saying goes. He loved gossip.
He needed to be in touch. But many of his relationships were oblique and
ephemeral, like his art, because they were his art. When a man in
Philadelphia announced that he had predicted the death of Elvis Presley,
Johnson phoned him and began a correspondence. It lasted until Johnson
decided it was over. It was a performance with a limited run. Like his life.
Even Mr. Wilson, to whom he was as close as anybody for years, visited
Locust Valley only with the policemen investigating Johnson's death. They
found no suicide note. But the house, which consisted of shelves and boxes
meticulously arranged, looked like an elaborate riddle Johnson had left
behind. Beneath a poster protruding from one shelf was a green box
containing collages with texts, including one about Andrea Feldman, who
"plunged to her death."
"No one takes me seriously because they think of me as a joke," the text
quotes her saying. It goes on, citing an unnamed source: "But Andrea was
loved, and you can see this by the shocked expression on the faces of her
friends who cannot believe she came to this."
Upstairs, all the art was turned to the wall, except three portraits of
Johnson, including a large photograph by Chuck Close, leaning on the floor,
not at eye level, but at foot level ? "a feeting, as in the foot-long hot
dogs," Mr. Wilson noted ? creating a kind of shrine and spooky joke. Leave
it to Johnson to get the last laugh.
The film does not try to answer why Johnson killed himself. It has been said
he threw himself off the bridge because he never received the recognition he
wanted ? because he was tired of being famous for being famously unknown,
the phrase always used about him. In the film, Mr. Close repeats a story
about being asked to organize a show of portraits from the Museum of Modern
Art's collection. He noticed that the museum had no portraits by Johnson. He
called Johnson. As Mr. Close puts it, Johnson would "be goddamned if he was
going to put himself in a position where they were going to reject him."
So Johnson found an alternate route: he mailed works to Clive Philpot, the
museum's librarian, who he knew would keep them because Mr. Philpot didn't
throw anything away. Johnson thereby insinuated his portraits into the
museum's collection through a loophole.
It seems unlikely that someone so calculatedly perverse and sneakily
subversive would commit suicide because he didn't fit the standard mold of
the successful artist.
But why, then? Perhaps he was sick, Mr. Wilson speculates. Who knows why
anyone chooses a particular moment to die?
Why may be less interesting than how. All the numerology, the sniffing for
clues, may be silly and pure speculation, but it is the same mindset that
Johnson's art inspires.
Collage, after all, is about piecing things together. It is also about
accretion: elements can forever be added or altered; a collage to which more
and more is done may become turgid and unattractive, or newly beautiful. But
either way it remains a single collage. Elements join and disappear into a
whole. One plus one equals one.
I recently came across a passage by Mr. Wilson in a book about Johnson.
"When Ray dropped himself from a bridge," he wrote, "he was sending a
message as he surrendered himself to oceanic absorptions which would
overwhelm differences, at last losing his consciousness, which was necessary
because consciousness is what kept him from being at one with the cosmos as
he understood it."
Mr. Wilson added, "One drop plus one drop equals one drop."</HTML>
New York Times [New York, NY
October 6, 2002
[www.nytimes.com]
A Collage in Which Life = Death = Art
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Life itself might be a work of art. That is modern art's most radical
proposition. Art doesn't have to be a painting or drawing. It can be the way
an artist acts and speaks. Andy Warhol was Andy Warhol's masterpiece. Joseph
Beuys played the role of Professor Beuys. There have been more extreme
cases, too: artists who shot or mutilated themselves.
Then there is Ray Johnson, who made no distinction at all between art and
life, or in his case, between art and death. His suicide has become his most
famous work. On Jan. 13, 195, at the age of 67 (6+7=13, Johnson's friends
always note), Johnson jumped off the Sag Harbor bridge on Long Island. "I
like to say I'm the ocean," he once told a friend, "and like the tide, I
mash up everything."
How odd that something so spectacular would come to be associated with
someone like Johnson, who, though by no means a recluse, lived by choice on
the margins, making mischievous little collages and other eccentrically
beautiful, technically brilliant, ironic and zany works he either stored
away or disseminated to friends and strangers via the Postal Service.
But then, he seemed to have calculated everything he did in life, as if all
of life were a game, played by his peculiar rules, understood completely
only by him.
So, who knows? Maybe he wanted to be remembered for how he died, an odd move
in a singular career until you accept that he was, in art and life, a
constant puzzle and sometimes a pain. A film about Johnson, "How to Draw a
Bunny," opening Wednesday at Film Forum in Manhattan, shows the sculptor
Richard Lippold, who was Johnson's lover for many years, saying: "Now that I
think of him after his death, I don't think I really knew who he was. It's
very hard for me to say that. But who was this man? He kept so much of
himself to himself."
He was the stuff of a good mystery, that's clear. And though the film can
hardly indicate this, he was a kind of genius as an artist, too.
The film, by Andrew Moore and John Walter, begins and ends with the death. I
recount the story of it here, even though it is familiar by now to Johnson
aficionados, not to play up the melodrama but to be consistent with this
artist of fastidious and arcane temperament. For him, the world was made up
of amazing coincidences, serendipities and karmic gags. Details mattered.
So: at 3:57 on that January afternoon, Johnson telephoned his old friend
William Wilson. (There are 13 letters in Mr. Wilson's name, by the way.)
Johnson said he was going to perform a "mail event." Mr. Wilson (who
declined to be in the film, unfortunately for the filmmakers) remembered
afterward that Johnson's first letter to him, in 1956, mentioned how Life
Buoy soap floats, and that elsewhere Johnson talked about the drowning of
Hart Crane and how Tennessee Williams had wanted his own corpse dropped into
the sea where Crane drowned.
Johnson was fascinated with messages in bottles, dropped into the ocean like
letters into a mailbox. He sometimes threw bottles with messages into the
waters off Long Island. He also tossed small wrapped packages off the Staten
Island ferry. (Who knows what was in them.) He thought a body floating in
water was beautiful, he told his friend Coco Gordon.
Johnson checked into Room 247 (2+4+7) of the Baron's Cove Inn at Sag Harbor
Cove (both of which also total 13 letters). Maybe he asked for the room
because of its number, or maybe it was the only room available. He wrote
"New York Correspondence School" under company name in the inn's registry.
He stayed about 90 minutes.
He took nothing with him. He made no phone calls. He had already called
people during the previous weeks. No one knew his call was a farewell, until
later.
Shortly before 7 p.m., he drove about one minute from the inn to a 7-Eleven.
He parked his old Volkswagen in the parking lot and climbed onto the
bridge's walkway.
Two teenage girls heard a splash about 7:15. (The numbers add up, but the
girls aren't precise about the time.) After that they saw a man bob to the
surface and calmly backstroke in the frigid waters toward the cove. The
temperature of the water was 39 degrees, so it would have taken between 15
minutes and an hour for hypothermia to set in.
WHO was Ray Johnson? He conceived Pop before Warhol, was a Conceptualist and
performance artist before the terms were invented, although he was also none
of these things, exactly. Early in his career he invented what came to be
called mail art, a modest byway, which consisted mostly of his photocopied
drawings and assemblages of found images stuffed into envelopes, sometimes
customized for particular people, often conceived to be chain letters and
passed on. He sent out thousands of these.
As a young abstract painter studying with Josef Albers at Black Mountain
College in the late 1940's, Johnson realized that by doing pretty much the
same thing over and over, with minute variations, as Albers did, he could
achieve remarkably different effects. He had amazing gifts for color, shape
and design ? he could have stayed an abstract artist ? but he was more
fascinated by mundane materials, pop artifacts and Zen-derived chance
effects, the sort of things that also interested John Cage and Robert
Rauschenberg.
So collage became his principal medium. Shirt cardboard, newspaper clippings
and Elmer's glue became his tools. He delighted in finding puns, anagrams,
palindromes, rhymes, slips of the tongue, visual and verbal jokes. "Keir
Dullea Gone Tomorrow," a line from the film critic Pauline Kael, became the
title of a typical collage.
Warhol and Joseph Cornell were his friends, Gertrude Stein his natural soul
mate. But unlike Warhol, Johnson made art that was not big, deadpan and
hands-off but small, eccentric and open-ended. Impermanence was his mantra.
Over the years, he recycled, chopped up and modified his collages, as if
keeping them in a constant state of possibility and flux. They accumulated
more and more obscure and hermetic meanings along the way. By the end, his
art had become a dense, private code, occasionally morbid and sometimes very
hard to decipher.
THE morning after he jumped off the bridge, Johnson's body was spotted,
drifting face up, arms crossed over his chest. He had $1,600 in his wallet,
which surprised many people who knew him because it was widely assumed he
had no money. In the film, friends describe how they thought he simply ate
air. For years he lived almost on rice alone.
He was both obsessed with money and put off by it. In "How to Draw a Bunny,"
Mort Janklow, the literary agent, tells about the time Johnson made 26
collages based on Mr. Janklow's silhouette (Johnson made ghostly silhouettes
of hundreds of people), then began a negotiation over their price that
dragged on for years and became as comical and byzantine as some of the
collages, which was evidently the point: everything, including wrangling
over money, was fodder for his art. First Johnson asked Mr. Janklow for
$42,200, then halved the price, then offered 18 collages plus an unrelated
work for $13,000, or all 26 for $18,232, with a different work thrown in and
portraits of Paloma Picasso and the King of Denmark added on top of some of
Mr. Janklow's silhouettes.
The negotiations came to nothing, naturally.
One of the Janklow portraits is in a new Johnson show at Richard Feigen's
gallery in Chelsea. Mr. Feigen was Johnson's longtime dealer, although the
relationship seems in some respects not unlike the one with Mr. Janklow.
Johnson once rented a helicopter and dropped 60 foot-long hot dogs over
Riker's Island, then sent the bill to Mr. Feigen. He said that he had been
tracing people's feet, which brought to mind foot-long hot dogs, as if that
explained it. For decades, he hemmed and hawed about an actual show at the
gallery ? until just before his suicide.
He would do nothing, he told Frances Beatty, the gallery's vice president.
Because Johnson called his performances "nothings" (this was his version of
"happenings"), it wasn't clear to Ms. Beatty whether he meant that he would
do a nothing or would do a show that had nothing in it. What was clear was
that nobody was likely to make a dime out of the occasion.
Johnson wouldn't allow money to be a measure of his value, only of somebody
else's character. In the film, the artist Peter Schuyff recounts asking
Johnson the price of a collage. Johnson told him. Mr. Schuyff offered him
three-quarters of the amount. So Johnson sent him three-quarters of the
collage. Years ago, Johnson took some collages to Harry Abrams, the
publisher, who agreed to buy 10 of them for $100 each, a fair price at the
time. Then Abrams asked him to throw in an extra ? not an unheard-of
request. Johnson left feeling humiliated. He wept.
It turned out that he had $400,000 in the bank when he died, an inheritance
from his parents. But he was content for people to think that he led what he
described to Grace Glueck of The New York Times in the 1960's as "a life of
deliberate poverty."
During his later years, that life was spent in Locust Valley, N.Y. In 1968,
Johnson had decided to leave New York City after he had been mugged at
knifepoint and his friend Andy Warhol had been shot. He settled into a
nondescript little suburban house, about as remote from the art world as he
could be.
Or to be precise, exactly as remote as he chose to be. Few people were
allowed to visit him, although he kept in touch with literally hundreds of
people by mail and phone, people who may have seen him rarely or never, and
often did not know one another, or even very much about him. If he was a
recluse, he was a recluse about town, as the saying goes. He loved gossip.
He needed to be in touch. But many of his relationships were oblique and
ephemeral, like his art, because they were his art. When a man in
Philadelphia announced that he had predicted the death of Elvis Presley,
Johnson phoned him and began a correspondence. It lasted until Johnson
decided it was over. It was a performance with a limited run. Like his life.
Even Mr. Wilson, to whom he was as close as anybody for years, visited
Locust Valley only with the policemen investigating Johnson's death. They
found no suicide note. But the house, which consisted of shelves and boxes
meticulously arranged, looked like an elaborate riddle Johnson had left
behind. Beneath a poster protruding from one shelf was a green box
containing collages with texts, including one about Andrea Feldman, who
"plunged to her death."
"No one takes me seriously because they think of me as a joke," the text
quotes her saying. It goes on, citing an unnamed source: "But Andrea was
loved, and you can see this by the shocked expression on the faces of her
friends who cannot believe she came to this."
Upstairs, all the art was turned to the wall, except three portraits of
Johnson, including a large photograph by Chuck Close, leaning on the floor,
not at eye level, but at foot level ? "a feeting, as in the foot-long hot
dogs," Mr. Wilson noted ? creating a kind of shrine and spooky joke. Leave
it to Johnson to get the last laugh.
The film does not try to answer why Johnson killed himself. It has been said
he threw himself off the bridge because he never received the recognition he
wanted ? because he was tired of being famous for being famously unknown,
the phrase always used about him. In the film, Mr. Close repeats a story
about being asked to organize a show of portraits from the Museum of Modern
Art's collection. He noticed that the museum had no portraits by Johnson. He
called Johnson. As Mr. Close puts it, Johnson would "be goddamned if he was
going to put himself in a position where they were going to reject him."
So Johnson found an alternate route: he mailed works to Clive Philpot, the
museum's librarian, who he knew would keep them because Mr. Philpot didn't
throw anything away. Johnson thereby insinuated his portraits into the
museum's collection through a loophole.
It seems unlikely that someone so calculatedly perverse and sneakily
subversive would commit suicide because he didn't fit the standard mold of
the successful artist.
But why, then? Perhaps he was sick, Mr. Wilson speculates. Who knows why
anyone chooses a particular moment to die?
Why may be less interesting than how. All the numerology, the sniffing for
clues, may be silly and pure speculation, but it is the same mindset that
Johnson's art inspires.
Collage, after all, is about piecing things together. It is also about
accretion: elements can forever be added or altered; a collage to which more
and more is done may become turgid and unattractive, or newly beautiful. But
either way it remains a single collage. Elements join and disappear into a
whole. One plus one equals one.
I recently came across a passage by Mr. Wilson in a book about Johnson.
"When Ray dropped himself from a bridge," he wrote, "he was sending a
message as he surrendered himself to oceanic absorptions which would
overwhelm differences, at last losing his consciousness, which was necessary
because consciousness is what kept him from being at one with the cosmos as
he understood it."
Mr. Wilson added, "One drop plus one drop equals one drop."</HTML>
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