Ray Johnson
Considering his contemptuous rejection of commercial art institutions, it is ironic how settled Ray Johnson's 28 collages look lining the crisp white walls of Feigen Inc. His suicide in 1995 spawned a renewed interest in the artefacts created by a man who is linked to the dawn of American Pop and crowned the father of mail art. A celebrated, albeit cranky, cult hero who continuously promulgated his ideas outside the gentrified venues of the art world has been posthumously set adrift within it. The most bathetic of all actions, Johnson's leap from the Sag Harbor-North Haven bridge sent a lifetime of collages, images and correspondences floating up from the deep, washing ashore marketable souvenirs from a remarkable life.
Like miniature Japanese gardens, Johnson's collages of popular images and text are raked with drawing and carefully dotted with blocks of wearied wood. The formal order he employs is grounded in Modern European abstraction and by calling them 'moticos' (an anagram of the word 'osmotic') Johnson reinforces their slippery location between reality and appearance. His collages remind us how easy it is to make art, and their intelligent juxtapositions of found imagery and fatigued refuse is the essence of every high school art project. They reflect the creativity-of-the-everyday that has come to epitomise the pseudo-democratic look of art education since the late 50s. This is modern art for the layman - familiar yet new, self-parodic yet sanctimonious, decorative yet intelligent - but, most importantly, imaginative.
While lacking Joseph Cornell's obsessive whims and addiction to the material world, Johnson's 'moticos' are also boxed for eternity. Shirley Temple I (1967) attempts to homogenise unrecognisable bits of collage material with a darling postcard of Temple bedecked in a leather flying jacket, corduroy trousers and an aviator's helmet that squeezes out locks of her trademark hair. Johnson's aesthetic evaluations of popular imagery with visionary manipulation of detritus underscores the conceptual and material ease with which art can be made.
If it were not for its text, Mondrian's Comb (1969) would maintain the spare physical equation of its predecessors. A black-and-white photo of a cigarette-smoking Mondrian is oriented above the text: 'It Was An Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini'. The lyrics of this silly anthem refuse to disassociate themselves from their crazed popular source and cannot, like the use of text in the work of Kurt Schwitters, integrate themselves into 'a new artistic context'. It is this inability to give equal footing to his collage components that endows many of Johnson's 'moticos' with an undesirable sentimentality, or melancholy in the case of Mondrian's Comb. However, it also results in an emphasis on his exquisite drawing skills. For example, isolated from the architectural mass of imagery and text in Mondrian's Comb is an elegant ink drawing of a comb-like form whose tines organically pulse like a Bridget Riley painting.
One collage not clouded by the triviality of popular matter is Fingernail Table (1973). This minimal drawing comprising clumsily cut pieces of white illustration board depicts a spatially distorted table on which rests a collection of animated crescent marks (fingernails). Perhaps because Johnson's drawings look like quirky, faux-naive doodles, this piece appears simple-minded when juxtaposed with its littered yet labyrinthine counterparts. However, the opposite is true. Johnson's reluctance to acknowledge his formal talents, and his profound understanding of material, ripened much of his work while diluting its contemporaneity. His search for a democratic visual language obscured the unremitting quality of his Klee-like line and cryptic gestures. Unfortunately, compared to the drawings, the 'moticos' amount to little more than clever bits of modishly arranged ephemera that hold little contemporary value as autonomous works.
Apart from their historical significance, the smartly shadow-boxed collages are poor reminders of Johnson's mutiny from the official system of distribution. These works can never compete with his carefully constructed life of mistrusting art's authority and privilege. Yet, with all the openings, performances, phone calls, letters, photocopy and fax art, Johnson's underground engagements in marginalised systems could never completely melt the rind between art and life. And as a result, he took it personally if you didn't write back.
