RAY JOHNSON’S ANTI-ARCHIVE

Abstract

This essay explores the work of “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” Ray Johnson, contending that his complex relationship to sadomasochism provides a key switch point for Pop’s sexual and racial imaginary. In the register of sex, Johnson’s sadomasochism contests the stability of the relationship between homosexuality and Pop (theorized by Kenneth E. Silver, Jonathan D. Katz, Richard Meyer, and Douglas Crimp), offering instead a queerer object that opens out new models of collaborative artistic production. In the register of race, sadomasochism enables Johnson to articulate a monochrome world (particularly in relation to the blackface of his bunny portraits), attempting to void the binarized color-line’s fissuring force. While this strategy from our contemporary vantage feels politically suspect, I see it is part of a larger project of political and social reparation whereby the explicitly sadomasochistic themes of Johnson’s work imagine a rebuttal to and reconfiguration of the racist exclusionary forces of the art world.

Keywords:

• Pop
• race
• sex
• Ray Johnson
• sadomasochism
• queer
• homosexuality
• closet

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 While it is certainly possible to see Basquiat as a Pop artist as Muñoz does, it is worth mentioning that he is more traditionally classified as a Neo-Expressionist. Taro Nettleton concurs with Muñoz, asserting that “it might very well be that those who were not white were marginalized even within Warhol’s counterpublic space” (Nettleton 77).

2 I am grateful to Jonathan for sharing his work with me.

3 On the association of Ray Johnson in particular with a homosexual Pop coterie, see Ellen Levy’s What’s in a Name? Ray Johnson’s Free Associations, which describes Ray as “landing smack in the midst of a generational cohort of gay male artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol” (Levy 5).

4 Warhol studies strikes me as being more attuned to what Eve Sedgwick calls the “slip-slidy effects” of queerness than other scholarship on Pop Art (Sedgwick 2).

5 Johnson’s relationship to Asianness suggests one possible direction for moving Pop’s focus outside the high-contrast binary of black and white.

6 I retain Johnson’s spelling throughout.

7 For a different view of Johnson’s relation to the archive, see Pistell.

8 This sentence borrows many of its descriptors from Roland Barthes’s The Neutral.

9 © The Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen and Co., Box 150. Hereafter, other archival citations to the Feigen Gallery will be abbreviated RLF. Ray Johnson to Nam June Paik, 30 Nov. 1968, RLF Box 48 Folder 25 (1968).

10 RLF Box 150.

11 Johnson would often describe destroying his own archive either by burning things (most famously in Cy Twombly’s fireplace) or by disposing of them, as described in this letter of 4 May 1981: “Last month, I threw out boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes and bags and bags and bags and bags of the Correspondance School Archive” (RLF Box 119 Binder 39 Number 22). On Twombly’s fireplace, see Johnson, Not Nothing Plate 139.

12 Johnson’s decision to submit his work to the Museum of Modern Art through the museum’s library (because he knew the library’s policy was to keep everything), which is recounted in How to Draw a Bunny, seems characteristic of his ability to circumvent the exclusivity of museum culture and routinized modes of collecting and archiving.

13 Diana Bowers, Assistant Archivist at the Ray Johnson Estate Archive, estimates that the archive is “779 cubic feet, of which only 130 cubic feet has been processed and is available to researchers” (Bowers). Ray Johnson’s collages start selling for around $25,000, as opposed to the multi-million-dollar price tags of his contemporary Pop artists.

14 Johnson’s work often makes reference to Emily Dickinson. The Feigen Gallery has records of at least twenty-three collages referencing Dickinson. Also, Johnson had an “EMILY DICKINSON UNIVERSITY” stamp (Box 150) and often referenced “Emily Dickinson’s underwear” (RLF Box 4 Binder 2 Number 43).

15 RLF Box 154. An earlier form of this practice, one which instructed his correspondents to “Please Send To,” dates at least as early as 1958.

16 These first three are in RLF Box 152. “COLLAGE BY A MAJOR ARTIST” is in RLF Box 151, and “Fake RAY JOHNSON” is in RLF Box 150.

17 “TOILET PAPER” is in RLF Box 154.

18 Frances Beatty echoes this sentiment: “everything that Ray did [ … ] was like a work of art. Everything he wore, everything he touched, everything he said” (How to Draw a Bunny). While Jonathan Flatley has taught us to attend to what it means for two things to be “like” each other, Beatty’s suggestion simultaneously multiplies the objects in Johnson’s oeuvre and underlines the impossibility of archiving them.

19 For another example of such destruction, see Spodarek and Delbeke 7.

20 As if to foreground the impossibility of putting together a Ray Johnson Catalogue Raisonné, Karma Gallery has recently published a mock catalogue raisonné under the title Ray Johnson: Taoist Pop Heart School (Johnson, Ray Johnson).

21 These difficulties of dating are highlighted by the fact sheet’s seeming inability to put the dates in sequence and to encapsulate the dates “correctly,” leaving out the collage’s own “4.15.94” in the summary date range of “1972–1993.” In one collage, Johnson refuses chronology outright writing “No Chrology” in large letters (“United (No Chrology / Chronology),” RLF Collage Number 11569). Similarly, Johnson marks another letter/essay “(undated)” (RLF Box 48 Folder 19 (1964)). In a 1975 letter, Johnson declares that “The New York Correspondance School has no history – only a present” (Johnson, Not Nothing Plate 143).

22 While I think one must recognize a degree of self-consciousness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century practices of minstrelsy, Johnson intensifies these processes enormously and his practice is far less ambivalent.

23 This racial history is also tied to the colonial history with which Primitivism is associated. See, for example, an image of Picasso with his Tête de Femme (1951) in blackface from 13 Feb. 1989 (RLF Box 110 Binder 4 Number 14).

24 Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Box 14 Folder 2.

25 Ray was fascinated by twins – particularly William S. Wilson’s twins – since they represented sameness and difference simultaneously.

26 The image is cross modal and cross sensory, translating “high fidelity” from the world of sound to that of sight. More accurately, they are the heads of stick figures since the “figures” don’t have bodies.

27 Edges are often important in Johnson’s work. A similar use of racialized margins is evident in a Buddha University Meeting invitation which features a field of bunny heads of which only two in the corner are labeled. These bunnies sit atop a black field, while all the others sit on a white field and are labeled “Abraham” and “Lincoln” respectively, summoning Lincoln’s popular reputation as the president who ended slavery (RLF Box 110 Binder 4 Number 112).

28 Private archive of William S. Wilson. Letter to William S. Wilson, Feb. 1984.

29 9 July 1990, Ray Johnson to Clive Phillpot, in Ray Johnson, Book about Modern Art (1990) 1: 12, Museum of Modern Art Library. The book Johnson refers to is Cederholm.

30 Johnson was sometimes mistaken for Raymond Jonson (1891–1982), who is famous for his southwestern landscapes.

31 RLF 13420.

32 The performance took place at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art in 1987.

33 For more on Johnson’s relationship to Mickey Mouse, see Phillpot 236–38. See also RLF Box 119 Binder 3 Number 94.

34 In the case of the untitled image 13420, we might note how the mask frames Johnson’s lips as cartoonishly sexualized into the shape of women’s lipstick. Because the first black Playmate did not appear until 1965, Johnson’s bunnies racialize an image of white sexuality.

35 Figure 6 is RLF Box 110 Binder 4 Number 68; and Fig. 7 is Binder 3 Number 101. See also RLF Box 110 Binder 4 Number 86.

36 Figure 8 is RLF Binder 4 Number 77. For other sexualized bunny heads, see RLF Box 5 Binder 3 Number 30; RLF Binder 3 Number 91; and RLF Binder 3 Number 102.

37 Figure 10 is RLF Collage 11622 and Fig. 11 is in RLF Box 123 Binder 6 Number 16.

38 See also Elizabeth Zuba’s brief mention of sadomasochism in Johnson’s work (Zuba 12).

39 Private archive of William S. Wilson. Letter to William S. Wilson, 15 Mar. 1962.

40 There are several candidates for earlier usages of the concept of the “closet.” Loftin has found a letter from a man named Dwayne dating from 1960: “Perhaps if everyone would take sex out of the dark closet into which the word [sic] has flung it, we would all be better human beings.” Loftin discounts this letter, however, suggesting that it refers “to sex in general, not homosexuality in particular, suggesting that his usage of ‘closet’ lacked the specific meaning and implications that the term later assumed” (Loftin 10). Similarly, Chauncey draws attention to the “similar spatial” logic of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), even as that novel doesn’t use the term “closet” (Chauncey 375). Henry Abelove has found the most compelling precursor in Frank O’Hara’s poem “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets” (1958) which contains the lines: “nothing / inspires us but the love we want upon the frozen face of earth / and utter disparagement turns into praise as generations read the message / of our hearts in adolescent closets who once shot at us in doorways / or kept us from living freely [ … ]” While I remain convincible that this poem refers to the concept of the closet as Abelove suggests, the adjective “adolescent” means that I am not yet convinced that this usage bears a homosexual inflection (even as “adolescent” might refer to the supposed arrested development of the homosexual) (Abelove).

41 Gayle Rubin describes New York’s Mineshaft as “the preeminent on-going leather sex establishment from the time it opened in 1976 until it was closed in 1985” (Rubin 226).

42 Sometimes Johnson’s work is connected to sadomasochism without explicitly containing sadomasochistic iconography. See, for example, S & M (Shirley Temple) in Correspondences 112.

43 RLF Box 77 2i, 2j, 2l.

44 How to Draw a Bunny. Muñoz also offers a reading of this performance (Muñoz, “Utopia’s Seating Chart” 118).

45 The New Yorker 29 Jan. 1990, 10. RLF Box 5 Binder 3 Number 27.

46 See also Box 125 Binder 1 Number 12.

47 “An Artist Finds the Perfect Red,” Wall Street Journal 6 Mar. 2014.

48 William S. Wilson also describes Ray as a “lesson” (though one taught by Norman Solomon) (Wilson 3).

49 My reading here is indebted to Jonathan Flatley (“Warhol Gives Good Face” 101).

50 Warhol has a similarly incorporative network (see Kahan 121–41).