I found myself in the Ray Johnson archive by accident. Last December, I attended a screening of How to Draw a Bunny (2002), Andrew L. Moore and John Walter’s haunting, fascinating documentary about the elusive figure once described as “New York’s most famous unknown artist” (the titular proposition, Johnson explains with characteristic deadpan, is “basically very simple. You draw a circle and add some ears”). I was still thinking about Ray the next afternoon, as I wandered down Sixty-Ninth Street. So it felt like one of his own trademark coincidences when—having entered David Zwirner Gallery to see a selection of Noah Davis’s collages—I spotted a brass plaque directing me up another flight of stairs to the floor where Johnson’s estate headquarters. Shelves are filled with his books; his cut-ups and collages crowd the walls; a bust, half its face covered with Johnson’s signature bunny head, perches precariously in a corner. I couldn’t help but remember a scene at the end of How to Draw a Bunny, in which Johnson’s friends enter his home shortly after his body was discovered off the coast of Sag Harbor, Long Island (he had been spotted, on January 13, 1995, diving off a bridge and backstroking out to sea). They move slowly through a forest of cardboard boxes, neatly arranged in a grid-like maze. Deep among the thickets of archival ephemera—the only artwork left visible—is an enormous photo of a smiling Johnson, propped outwards in greeting, as if to say, “You found me.”
Johnson reveled in chance, in jokes, in surprise, in disappearance. He evaded personal questions, and preferred his work to be discovered by serendipity than by design: perhaps by bumping into him on the street with a box of collages under one arm, or receiving a grubby envelope through the post, name Sharpied under the line “Please send to.” Ellen Levy’s A Book about Ray—in her words, less a “life story” than an “art story”— takes its cue from Johnson’s intuitive way of working, unfolding through association instead of strict chronology. The approach is ideally fitted to her subject: this is not an attempt to pin Johnson down, but a rich portrait shaped by his own repeated self-reinventions.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1927, Johnson studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, and moved to New York in 1949. He focused on abstract painting until 1958, when he took his canvases to his friend Cy Twombly’s home and destroyed them all. Over the rest of his life, destruction became a powerful mode and theme for Johnson: a self-negating impulse which, paradoxically, was vital to his sense of identity. He showed in various exhibitions over the years, but withdrew from the commercial gallery scene altogether in 1980, becoming increasingly, stubbornly reclusive. More than once, he publicly announced his own death—an ambiguous act, like much of his work, revealing a simultaneous desire for publicity and obliteration.
After 1958, Johnson’s media leaned to the ephemeral. His main form was “moticos” (a word he invented): small missives, usually formed of collage and drawings—often featuring cartoon figures, brand advertisements, shapes, pin-ups, puns, and gags—which he posted to friends, sometimes with instructions to embellish or pass on. “Ray Johnson plays the US mail like a harp,” said a friend: the post, to Johnson, was both system and medium, as integral a holding structure for his collages as the box was for Joseph Cornell’s assemblages. He called his network the “New York Correspondance School,” elegantly positing letter-exchange as a choreographed motion. The idea of a network, expanding across time and place, was key to both the form and distribution of Johnson’s work: a favorite style was the grid filled with names, creating visual and social associations between friends (Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage), influences (Gertrude Stein, the Nancy comic strip), and icons (Shelley Duvall, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe). He was fascinated by celebrity, but also by names in the phone book. “Since I cut everything up,” he explained, “they’re all people in a kaleidoscope.”
Johnson’s methods were ad hoc—he enlisted friends with access to mailrooms and photocopiers—and his work, writes Levy, was “at once the output of a systematized network and a satire on such systematization.” He would post small pieces to the MoMA librarians, aware that all correspondence was deposited in the museum’s archive, yet continually thwarted the efforts of dealers who tried to court him. When the curators of a 1970 group exhibition at the Whitney asked how he would like his work installed, Johnson replied that he rather liked how they were packed in the storage room, encased in crates and boxes. “We’ll have Nothing in the show,” he told a prospective gallerist. Ruth Asawa, a fellow student at Black Mountain, once told him about “the Taoist philosophy of nothingness being everything-ness,” an idea which captured Johnson’s imagination. Levy situates his work—which also encompassed enigmatic performances, called “Nothings,” held in spaces around the city—in dialogue with Rauschenberg’s series of “White Paintings” (1951) or Cage’s 4’33 (1952), pieces which embraced the idea of nothing-ness, as well as Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964), work which constantly questioned its own status as art.
It’s an ambivalence that characterized Johnson’s outlook, his way of moving through the world, and his legacy. Johnson was both an insider and an outsider: supremely well-connected in New York’s avant-garde scene, he preferred to keep his audience at a distance; eager for fame, but fiercely private and (after leaving the city for Long Island in 1968) increasingly reclusive; maker of infinitely reproducible work for a broad public, who conspired to keep his pieces out of view; sought-after by collectors, but unwilling to compromise for the market. When one buyer asked for a discount on a collage, he received the piece with the same percentage chopped off. On another occasion, Johnson threatened a collector whose silhouette he had traced that if he didn’t pay up he would add an image of Paloma Picasso to the portrait. “Her head will appear next to yours, or as a larger head containing your head.”
Ray Johnson’s version of the art world, Levy writes, was “an always unstable mix of public sphere and private enterprise.” Problems ensued when those worlds merged. Yet for Johnson, who coined the phrase “flop art,” failure—which is to say, failure to assimilate into the conventional structures of art production, display, or sale—was a kind of success. One friend described him as a “living sculpture”: constantly in motion, alive, witty, contradictory, containing multitudes. Beautifully and copiously illustrated, Levy’s book serves not only as a narrative of this intriguing, still mysterious life but also as a kind of archive of Johnson’s body of work: a treasure trove as surprising, multi-layered and erudite as its trickster subject.
Ellen Levy’s A Book about Ray was published by MIT Press in October 2024.