In the years leading up to his death, Ray Johnson took up photography. Now, this body of work is shedding light on his final days.
RAY JOHNSON ARRIVED in New York City in 1949, still in his early 20s, and lived there for a two-decade span in which the dominant artists in town — abstract painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still — came to be regarded, especially by themselves, as seers. Johnson, however, was a prankster. Like the bunny head he adopted as his trademark — a cartoonish line drawing that appeared in much of his work, often bearing the name of a key figure in 20th-century art — he hopped lightly, merrily across this playing field. Reveling in puns and irreverence (an untitled 1973 collage known as “Jackson Pollock Fillets” includes cut-out recipes for Pollock Fillets Amandine and Barbecued Pollock Burgers), conducting his life as a nonstop performance, he revived the Dada tradition embodied by his hero Marcel Duchamp. In contrast to the grandiosity of Minimal art, land art, Pop Art and other macho midcentury movements, he offered something much humbler: collages or drawings of portable size and wry wit. As a response to Happenings, a term coined by Allan Kaprow to describe the participatory performances that flourished in New York in the early ’60s, Johnson staged Nothings, in which a befuddled audience was sometimes greeted with an empty room. He decamped to Long Island in 1968 — residing eventually in a sanctuary in Locust Valley he called the Pink House, though it wasn’t pink — and over the years his ties to his New York friends weakened.
What remained unknown until recently was that, three years before his suicide in 1995 at the age of 67, Johnson had taken up a new medium, photography, to which he dedicated himself with his characteristic blend of modesty and ambition. His instrument was the disposable camera, a point-and-shoot preloaded gadget that had become popular as an inexpensive party favor. Beginning in the early ’90s, he would fill his Volkswagen Golf with props and drive around the North Shore of Long Island, scouting locations to set up shots. He never allowed anyone to come with him on these trips, nor did he like to share the resulting images: a self-portrait on the beach, with the artist’s bald head resting next to the exoskeleton of a horseshoe crab; an old shed, with a black-and-white image of Jasper Johns pasted to its facade; a shadow cast by a two-car parking meter that resembled the ears of a bunny or (another Johnson favorite) Mickey Mouse.
Several hundred photographs — of more than 3,000 in total, some of which are being published here for the first time — will be exhibited in summer 2022 at the Morgan Library & Museum, in a selection chosen by Joel Smith, the museum’s curator and head of photography. (An exhibition of Johnson’s collages and other works will be on view next month at David Zwirner in New York.) After Johnson died, the art dealer Frances Beatty, who is the managing director of the Ray Johnson Estate, gained access to the Pink House but didn’t discover the photos for years. Johnson was prolific, and it was easy to overlook the cartons holding his negatives and images, most of them still stored in the original packets from Living Color, the shop in Glen Cove where Johnson had his cameras’ film developed and printed.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is an entire body of work. I don’t know what to do with these. I can’t even wrap my head around it,’” Beatty said. “For a long time I essentially hid them and didn’t show them to anybody.” But a few years ago, she changed her mind; for an artist so enigmatic that his own suicide has been interpreted as a last performance, the photographs go a long way in illuminating one of contemporary American art’s most elusive figures. “I felt it was a hidden treasure, and at some point it would be revealed,” Beatty continued. “If you know Ray Johnson, you know that he never did anything casually and without intention. It was all of a piece.”
JOHNSON WAS AN INVETERATE rhymer, finding assonances in the shapes he saw and the words he heard, then composing works through juxtapositions that, after a beat or two, made droll sense. The cut-and-paste of collage suited him perfectly. One of his best-known pieces is a magazine photograph of Elvis Presley that he doctored with blood-red tears dripping from one eye and a cryptic collection of red shapes alongside the mouth. Presley, known as the King, madly loved his mother, Gladys. In Johnson’s quirkily associative mind, the connection to the self-blinding, incestuous King Oedipus would have been as clear as a bell. The collage, which has been variously dated between 1956 and 1958, predates Andy Warhol’s photo-based series of Elvis paintings by about five years, and remains a pioneering work of proto-Pop.
Another characteristic mash-up, “Untitled (Jasper Johns, James Dean With Coca-Cola),” circa 1993, seems to chart the development of Pop Art — with a subtly gay subtext — by placing an image of Jasper Johns next to an enlarged photo of James Dean overlaid with prominent Ben-Day dots. But Johnson never approached the level of celebrity or commercial success of his Pop artist friends: Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist. In part, this was due to his ambivalence about exhibiting his work — and, even more fundamentally, to a temperamental tendency toward self-concealment. Johnson was raised in Detroit, the only child of a Ford factory worker and a homemaker. (Like Elvis, he adored his mother.) In 1945, he went off to the avant-garde seedbed of Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, where he was mentored by Josef Albers, the founder of the college’s art department, and met John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who were instructors. Most consequentially, he embarked there on a romance with the sculptor Richard Lippold, a married father based in New York who remained a close friend for much of Johnson’s life.
After moving to New York, Johnson freelanced as a designer of book covers and theater sets. He also developed his practice, renouncing the geometrically patterned paintings of his youth, which were heavily influenced by Albers’s rigorous studies of color with rectilinear shapes, by either destroying them or incorporating them into other works. These were the waning years of Abstract Expressionism, and collage was gaining favor in the art world. Johnson’s collages shared a sensibility with the found-object agglomerations, or combines, of his contemporary Robert Rauschenberg, who attended Black Mountain just after he did. But whereas Rauschenberg’s imposing assemblages would contain a mattress or a taxidermied eagle, Johnson’s were typically constructed on the cardboard inserts found in laundered shirts, as humble a material as the disposable cameras he later employed.
Johnson didn’t much like the term “collage” applied to his pieces, which he painted, sanded and built into low reliefs. He called them moticos, a neologism that, like its author, can’t be pinned down. Sometimes the word refers to the cut-out silhouettes he glued to the cardboard, at other times to inked versions of those shapes and, in still other instances, to the entire piece. To confuse matters further, the word could be singular or plural.
More unconventional than the moticos was his preferred method of disseminating huge quantities of his art: through mailings to friends, acquaintances and strangers, in what was called by a friend, Edward M. Plunkett, the New York Correspondence (sometimes styled Correspondance) School, riffing on the grandiosity of the Abstract Expressionists, who were known as the New York School. Although Johnson exhibited his highly crafted pieces in museums and galleries, he could dispense art freely through the mail. Urination is a recurring trope in his drawings and collages — not as a sexual fetish but as a metaphor for natural, effortless production and dissemination.
All this helps explain why Johnson chose photography as his primary practice in his last years. He had relocated to Long Island after a particularly horrific day, June 3, 1968, on which Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas, and Johnson himself, buying a newspaper, was jumped by muggers. On the North Shore, he encountered a neighborly art scene centered on Sea Cliff, close to the hamlet in which he settled. Although some of his New York friends came to believe he had gone into seclusion, Johnson attended art openings, walked indefatigably, habituated cemeteries, visited beaches and nature preserves and cultivated a new circle of friends.
“When you met him, he was obsessed with you, and you would get lots of stuff in the mail, and then it would blow over,” said Joan Harrison, an artist and educator whom he befriended in the ’80s. She photographed him half a dozen times. One of the pictures, taken at the Bayville beach, in which he leans against the juncture of two walls with his legs stretched out, became part of his repertory, an appropriated self-portrait that he could modify and inflect. When Harrison learned that he had taken up photography, she was curious. “I would say, ‘Can I photograph with you?’” she recalled. “And then I would say, ‘What are you going to do with these photographs?’ And typical of Ray, he changed the topic and got off the phone.”
The contents of Johnson’s pictures fall into several categories. At times, he chopped up the photos and used them to form a collage. Usually, though, and more interestingly, he found or created a collagelike pattern within the photographic frame. He made corrugated cardboard pieces that he called movie stars, and carried them to places where he could photograph them. Sometimes they incorporated images of celebrities: Marilyn Monroe, Jack Kerouac, Johns. Often they were renditions of his signature creation, a bunny with long, erect ears and a pendulous nose that, like a “Kilroy was here” graffiti drawing from World War II, feels both childlike and sexualized. He would inscribe a bunny with a name, thereby transforming it into a standardized personal portrait. And then he would drive his movie stars to a picturesque setting and shoot them with his camera.
IN DECEMBER 1994, at a point when Johnson had not publicly exhibited his work in over three years, a Sea Cliff gallery that was vacant over the holidays offered him a show. For three days, he left a variety of items in the window of the closed storefront: foam core collaged with photographs and personalized bunny heads, photocopied fliers, two boxes wrapped in brown paper. He called the show “Ray Johnson: Nothing.”
In this period, just weeks before he died, he was taking photographs of packages that he left in different settings. Portentously, one image shows two wrapped boxes — the same ones that he removed from the window once the “Nothing” show had concluded — on a pier, positioned like a couple gazing at the horizon. Then, even more ominously, he tossed one into the water and snapped a picture of it floating, its string unraveling. In another poignant shot, a brown box with a rag tied around it is attached to a gaily patterned yellow balloon decorated with a bunny head, which flies aslant in what appears to be a futile effort to bear the earthbound package aloft.
His North Shore friends noticed that he was behaving oddly. “He sent me this very dark drawing, ‘Who killed my jimsonweed?,’ and he drew himself in a prone position,” said Sheila Sporer, a local artist to whom Johnson was close in his last years. “I called him up and said, ‘Ray, what is this all about?’ He said, ‘You’ll read about it in The New York Times.’ And he hung up. That was unusual. And I called him and said, ‘Ray, is everything OK?’ He said, ‘You’ll read about it in The New York Times.’ And he hung up. I thought it was holiday blues.” He distressed another artist friend, Katie Seiden, by lying down on the sidewalk, crossing his arms over his chest and gazing up at the sky, as if he were in a coffin.
On Friday, January 13, Johnson traveled east to Sag Harbor. After checking into a motel, he drove his car to a 7-Eleven parking lot, walked to a nearby highway bridge and jumped. He was last seen backstroking away in the icy water.
Before his death was reported in The New York Times, Seiden stopped by the Living Color shop and said she was picking up photographs for Ray Johnson. She thought his final frames might contain a last testament. “I knew I was doing something a little illegal, but I knew he hadn’t left a will,” she said. “I thought it was something special that I would have and nobody else would.” With foreboding, she opened the envelope containing the processed film, dropped off by Johnson on the afternoon of December 28. “I felt that he was somehow communicating about his death,” she said.
The packet contained four 5-by-7 prints of two related scenes. Three of the prints were from a negative shot outside a secondhand dress shop across the street from the gallery where Johnson had staged the “Nothing” show. They depict a large white envelope, inscribed “Sheila,” resting between two pillars. In a fourth print, the envelope is lying on a sidewalk marked by a grid. Johnson’s feet, in shiny black shoes, are positioned next to the envelope at the edge of the grid.
For Sporer, the discovery of Johnson’s vast trove of photographs is “like receiving a love letter 25 years later.” As was so typical of her mysterious friend, she can’t be sure about the motivations for his suicide. “I think Ray had been thinking about this for a very long time,” she said. “The feeling I have is maybe he was just done.” Perhaps that helps explain his late-life attraction to disposable cameras. Life is disposable. And while the prints have endured, a photograph, like a gravestone, marks something that is gone.
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