The Brooklyn Rail

“New York’s most famous unknown artist,” was how Grace Glueck described Ray Johnson in her 1965 review of his exhibition at the Willard Gallery for the New York Times. At the time, Johnson was living an austere life on the Lower East Side, maintaining a studio practice but languishing in anonymity. Johnson was well-connected. He went everywhere and knew everybody in the New York art world, but because his work remained grounded in ephemera, any possibility of recognizable success via transactions in the art market remained elusive.

Ellen Levy brings Johnson’s life and art into a cohesive if somewhat unorthodox form in her biography of the artist, A Book about Ray. Beginning with the premise that not all stories must be told chronologically, Levy approaches Johnson’s life in the form of a fugue, each chapter serving as a repository for variations on a theme, with stories and anecdotes that spiral out from a central examination of the elusive qualities of Johnson’s work. When possible, she weaves Johnson’s words (taken from letters and interviews) directly into her sentences, singling them out in boldface type. Resisting the urge to smooth and hone, Levy allows her writing to follow Johnson’s conviction that the details of biography be used lightly, and only to invite something more complex and vital to emerge.

Johnson was born in Detroit in 1927 and studied art as a teenager, but the most auspicious detail of his early life comes from his experience at Black Mountain College, where he studied from 1945 until 1948, forging his identity as an artist under the instruction of Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, R. Buckminster Fuller, and Richard Lippold. Romantically involved with Lippold, he followed him (along with Lippold’s wife and family) to New York with the hopes of establishing himself as an artist. He began painting what Levy describes as “geometric abstractions in the Albersian style,” eventually extending his practice to include collages and mosaics he dubbed “moticos” and “tesserae,” and mailings he referred to as “mail art.” He performed “Nothings” in response to Happenings. He mimeographed manifestos and mailed them to an ever-growing list of correspondents. In 1958, it is rumored, he burned most of his moticos in Cy Twombly’s fireplace. He was known to carry boxes of the paper moticos around the city, showing them to gallery owners, friends, and people on the street. It was in the mailings that he found his true métier, forming the New York Correspondence School (NYCS), through which he sent small notes, collages, and clippings to recipients, eventually organizing meetings for the group in the late sixties. Although never an art world luminary, he was recognized as an early pioneer of Fluxus and Pop art. After being mugged at knifepoint the same week his friend Andy Warhol was shot and Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, he moved to Long Island, close to where the Lippold family was ensconced. He became somewhat reclusive, but continued his studio practice. He kept up the NYCS, sending mailings to recipients on a daily basis. In January of 1995, he was spotted diving from a bridge in Sag Harbor and swimming backstroke out to sea. Two teenagers who witnessed the dive drove to a local police station only to find it closed. Johnson’s body was found the following day.

As Levy insists, this is only part of the story: for Johnson, art encompassed the intangible as much as it did objects. His way of showing up in the world—or disappearing from it—held as much purpose as his studio work. Johnson was a great connector of people, a networker, a gossip. The luminaries he knew (and who knew him) included Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik—the list is endless. His mailings provided him with audiences of one, a person opening a piece of mail from him, yet each member of NYCS was additionally connected to the other through Johnson’s carefully curated web of recipients. And then there are the specifics of his work: the early collages of found images of Elvis Presley and James Dean over which he painted red squares, the mimeographed pages and cards printed with anagrams of the names of friends, his signature bunny cartoon—small works requiring the viewer to step close, to spend time reading and looking, truly communing with what Johnson offers. Given only a handful of formal exhibitions in his lifetime, including a Whitney show of the NYCS, his legacy is better measured in his fidelity to work, his all-encompassing approach to what it is to be an artist.

More a curated archive of the artist’s words and works than formal biography, A Book about Ray captures the fleeting immediacy of Johnson’s work, processing the enormity of his complex practice yet resisting any urge to codify. Contextualizing Johnson’s realm via tangential explorations of his contemporaries and their work, referencing Walter Benjamin, William Blake, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and diving as deeply as Johnson into his (unrequited) obsessions with Marianne Moore and Joseph Cornell, Levy channels the whirling dervish that was Johnson’s mind, conjuring his wit and charm, but also his ultimately tragic soul. At all times, Levy is keenly aware that for Johnson, art was primarily fugitive, happening in the consciousness of living before giving way to the cessation of being.