Ray Johnson - New York Years

New York Years

Johnson moved with Richard Lippold to New York City by early 1949, rejoining Cage and Cunningham and befriending, within the next couple of years, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Ad Reinhardt, Stanley Vanderbeek, Norman Solomon, Lucy Lippard, Sonja Sekula, Carolyn Brown and Earle Brown, Judith Malina, Diane Di Prima, Julian Beck, Remy Charlip, James Waring, and innumerable others. With the American Abstract Artists group, Johnson painted geometric abstractions that, in part, reflected the influence of Albers. But by 1953 he turned to collage and left the American Abstract Artists, rejecting his early paintings, which he would later burn in Cy Twombly’s fireplace. Johnson began to create small, irregularly shaped works incorporating fragments from popular culture, most notably the Lucky Strikes logo and images from fan magazines of such movie stars as Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Shirley Temple. In the summer of 1955, he coined a term for these small collages: “moticos”. He carried boxes of moticos around New York, showing them on sidewalks, at cafes, in Grand Central Station and other public places; he asked passersby what they thought of them, and recorded some of their responses. He began mailing collages to friends and strangers, along with a series of manifestos, mimeographed for distribution, including “What is a Moticos?”, excerpts of which were published in an article by John Wilcock in the inaugural issue of the Village Voice.

A friend of Ray’s, art critic Suzi Gablik, brought photographer Elisabeth Novick to document an installation of dozens Johnson’s moticos in autumn of 1955. (Most of these were destroyed or recycled by the artist.) “The random arrangement … on a dilapidated cellar door in Lower Manhattan may even have been the first informal Happening,” she recalled later. According to Henry Geldzahler, “ collages ‘Elvis Presley No. 1’ and ‘James Dean’ stand as the Plymouth Rock of the Pop movement.”. Ray’s friend Lucy Lippard would later write that “The Elvis … and Marilyn Monroe … heralded Warholian Pop.” Johnson was quickly recognized as part of the nascent Pop generation. A note about the cover image in January 1958’s Art News pointed out that “ Johns’ first one-man show … places him with such better-known colleagues as Rauschenberg, Twombly, Kaprow and Ray Johnson”.

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 in 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 James Waring and Susan Kaufman), and via his own compositions performed by his colleagues at The Living Theatre and during the Fluxus Yam Festival of 1963. From 1961 on, Johnson periodically staged events he called "Nothings", described to his friend William Wilson as “an attitude as opposed to a happening”, which would parallel the “Happenings” of Allan Kaprow and later Fluxus events. The first of these, "Nothing by Ray Johnson", was part of a weekly series of events in July 1961 at AG, a venue in New York operated by George Maciunas and Almus Salcius; Yoko Ono’s first solo show was on view in the gallery at the time. Ed Plunkett later recalled entering an empty room. “… Visitors began to enter the premises. Most of them looked quite dismayed that nothing was going on … Well, finally Ray arrived … and he brought with him a large corrugated cardboard box of wooden spools. Soon after arriving Ray emptied this box of spools down the staircase … with these … one had to step cautiously to avoid slipping … I was delighted with this gesture.” Johnson’s Second Nothing took place at Maidman Playhouse, New York, in 1962.

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 May Wilson, along with Marie Tavroges Stilkind and Toby Spiselman. In 1962, Ed Plunkett named Johnson’s endeavors ‘the New York Correspondence School’. On April 1, 1968, the first of the meeting of the NYSC was held at the Society of Friends Meeting House on Rutherford Place in New York City. Two more meetings were called by Johnson in the following weeks, including the Seating-Meeting at New York’s Finch College, about which John Gruen reported: “It was … attended by many artists and ‘members’ … all of whom sat around wondering when the meeting would start. It never did … people wrote things on bits of paper, on a blackboard, or simply talked. It was all strangely meaningless – and strangely meaningful.” Johnson staged such events regularly, often following them up with witty typed reports, photocopied for wide distribution via the post. Such gatherings continued to be held in various guises into the mid-1980s.

Johnson produced the 12 known unbound pages of his enigmatic BOOK ABOUT DEATH in 1963-5. 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., 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.

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. 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.”