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A Collage in Which Life = Death = Art
October 6, 2002
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."
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