The Brooklyn Rail

In November 1947, encouraged by his Black Mountain College mentor Josef Albers, Ray Johnson illustrated an Interiors magazine cover. By 1950, John Cage met zen master D. T. Suzuki, who by 1952 was lecturing at Columbia University with Cage, and Johnson, now a New Yorker, in attendance. In late summer 1951, Johnson moved into a building between the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges overlooking the East River with Cage, Merce Cunningham, and others, including Morton Feldman, about to embark on his most significant compositions while Cage worked on his Music of Changes and the following year completed his famous “silent” 4’33. In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg moved nearby and erased a de Kooning drawing. In 1956, yet to burn his paintings with dozens of more recent collage works in Cy Twombly’s fireplace, Johnson wrote a letter to the founder of Gutai in Japan, expressing interest in the movement whose name meant “embodiment” or “concrete”. Johnson, like his friend Andy Warhol, closed out the decade hustling graphics jobs for New Directions, City Lights Books, and Harper's Bazaar.

In these years of profound change in the downtown art world coagulating below Grand Street and beyond, Ray Johnson’s fine art made its own transition; an about-face, even, though certain fundamentals remained. I’ve often said that what my two favorite iconoclasts, Frank Zappa and Ray Johnson had in common was, despite careers built of pee pee, poo poo and dick jokes, both were deadly serious, mega-technicians who knew exactly what they were doing with no need to reveal why. This show reveals a disciplined methodology, formally affirming the origins of Johnson’s obsessive, almost scientific disposition that he carried forth into later work. Johnson could have become a Minimalist, and the art world would be much lesser for it.

The fresh arrival from Asheville began the 1950s painting away, happy to express himself with meticulous geometric compositions painstakingly applied by palette knife. He joined the American Abstract Artists group, even becoming their treasurer. By 1965 he was making the quirky collages he became known for, radically different from these early pieces, yet hinted at here with four restrained examples. Also in ’65 he was wrapping up a full decade of inserting work into envelopes—starting with loose elements but eventually glued down—to be mailed around the art world in his social art experiment dubbed The New York Correspondence School.

The earliest painting here, Ladder World (1949–51) endured several Johnsonian transformations. What’s in the gallery now began as a taller work, floating between two voids, 27-inch black squares once hovering above and below it. Johnson hacked those off, revealed by some recent photo research by the Ray Johnson Estate which also revealed a new, significant title for this work, previously “Untitled”.

In each of eight horizontal rows separated by long horizontal lines there are approximately seven squares, hard to make out where one ends and the next begins. At each row’s outer extremes, loose but stiff woven threads of horizontal color float randomly against the dark brown margins, easier to see without the vertical interference dominating the rest of the painting, pulsating, vibrant and very chaotic. A strong element of randomness in this scintillating composition, despite Johnson’s strict adherence to the twin axes, makes it read like a Mondrian in the particle accelerator. Also resembling a complex twenty-first century bar graph, I contemplate some genius who could generate an algorithm with the rigid freshness and attention to detail churned out by the young Johnson who concealed all compositional methods.

Another takeaway here is that each ultrathin edge on the painting, and there are thousands of them, was sculpted by palette knife. Photos exist of Johnson working on other paintings from this period with metal tools, not brushes, hunched over his work.

Next to Ladder World is Ladder Whirled (1952–65), a transitional work to stretch the next thirteen years. Here Johnson’s astonishing precision takes the form of tiny specks of tempera and glued paper cascading purposefully around an iffy central focal point. Floating in unlikely browns with rune elements near the edges, lower lefts push into upper rights in battles within negative space as radical exactitude and reluctant but dominant chance elements collide.

The titles of another 1950 “ladder” work, Seven Centers of a Ladder, and another “whirled” work from ca. 1953–58, Untitled (Strips Whirled) continue the wor(l)d play that engulfed Johnson in ensuing decades. Both works advance Johnson’s trajectory away from paint (in the former), toward glue (in the latter), as does every work in this exhibit, each more revelatory, prescient and chocked full of detail than the next.

In the post-1954 examples, what I call Ray’s “picket fence” motif emerged, rising out of the early paintings: long strips of recycled collage elements, seemingly shuffled, randomized and pushed scrupulously together to merge into rich abstract fields. His impeccable placement creates pleasing parallel lines, often jagged or choppy at the edges. These reworked and re-reworked early fragments peek through later collages. This show has stripped them bare.