Ray Johnson as Remembered by Richard L. Feigen
I have only known three truly strange artists in my life: Victor Brauner, Joseph
Cornell and Ray Johnson. All three inhabited a different planet from the rest of us. As I
reflect over almost forty years, I think more and more all three of them may have been
from the same planet. Particularly Cornell and Johnson.
Both artists were essentially poets, weaving words and ellipses into a delicate
aesthetic statement. They lived more in their own minds than in our world. Many artists
have acted strange – from Salvador Dali backward and forward – but really weren’t. Ray
Johnson and Joseph Cornell were among the few who really were. Ray came in one day
- I think it was around 1964 – and instructed me to hire an airplane to drop 100 pounds of
link sausages – all connected – over Rikers Island. I didn’t ask why, and Ray probably
couldn’t or wouldn’t have told me. It was just a piece of his mysterious poetry.
Ray had a quite a cast of characters in his Correspondance (sic) School. Names
were added and deleted over the years, but there was a constant core, like James Dean
and Elvis Presley and a lot of others. Ray’s work consisted of two kinds of art. One was
his whole persona, largely the Correspondance School, in which he enveloped people all
over the world. Funny little rabbit-studded messages kept coming in the mail and things
kept coming back to Ray – like some kind of fantasy chain letter. In respect of this first
kind of art – the persona – he was a bit like his friend Andy Warhol.
But in the other, I submit that he was not. What he made were really not collages,
though particularly in the early works from the late ‘50’s and beginning of the ‘60’s he
used in the images collaged portraits of popular idols like Dean and Elvis, and very early
on, around 1954, Shirley Temple. It was these that caused him to be singled out as an
American precursor, along with the Englishman Richard Hamilton, of what Lawrence
Alloway – more and more superficially as I think about it – dubbed “POP ART”. The
bulk of his work consisted of beautiful little constructions of paper glued together to
various thicknesses, covered with words and images, worried and rubbed to a lovely
pastel finish in such as roses and greys. All a very elusive poetry that made you wonder
what it meant but left you in no doubt that this is what art is all about.
Ray never made it easy. He would put you off if you wanted to have a show, or
he would want a show with nothing in it. He didn’t want to sell anything. A lot like
Cornell. When the artists of the generation of Johns, Rosenquist and Rauschenberg
arrived in New York in the mid ‘50’s, they found this shaved-headed colleague living
down in an antiseptic room in Suffolk Street making these little paper constructions and
selling them in the street for a few dollars a pack.
Ray was a gentle elusive spirit, not given to problems of this world like politics
and causes and protests. So though he didn’t go shoulder-to-shoulder with them to the
barricades all those years of McCarthy and Vietnam, they knew where he would be were
he on our own planet, and it is the artists who knew him best – though, like Cornell, none
could get very close to him – and who mourn him most.
R.L.F, March 1995
For Ray
For over fifteen years, off and on, since Richard Feigen introduced me to Ray
Johnson we have periodically tried to organize a Ray Johnson exhibition for here, for
Chicago, for anywhere. Somehow something, usually Ray, made it impossible. He
seemed to want a show, he would send emissaries, I would get excited, then he would
withdraw or somehow make it too difficult. I wrote to Ray, he sent me things, I kept on
hoping. The Ray Johnson Show idea would ebb and flow. On January 6, 1995 Ray
called me and said: “Well, I think you’ll really be able to do your show now, Frances.” I
was very surprised, excited and, knowing Ray, suspicious at his seeming enthusiasm. I
said “Nothing would please me more Ray, you know how important I think the work is.”
I did feel like this was possibly the beginning of the show. They Ray said “Yes, I’m
finished with the nothings which I have been doing for years and I think I’m going to
do,” he laughed, “something.” We talked a bit more and hung up. Ten days later he
swam out to sea.
I cannot help thinking that Ray, if he had thought about it, knew that if he died,
we would certainly do a show. I have tried hard to do a show which he would have liked,
I would have preferred to still be doing a dance with him. This is a modest memorial to a
great artist. I hope it gives those who didn’t know Ray a small idea of how much and
why he will be missed. If you knew him it is clear to you.
Frances Beatty, April 1995