Vol. 3 | Ray Johnson’s History of the Detroit Art World | Ellen Levy

Ray Johnson's History of the Detroit Art World
/ Ellen Levy
Prelude
Here is a flyer that artist Ray Johnson sent to some of his many (many) correspondents in the summer of 1987 (Fig. 1). At least some of the names scattered across the pieces of the shattered plate (or is it a broken record?) overlaid here on the image of Johnson’s own face will be familiar to long-time Detroiters with an interest in visual art, belonging as they do to curators, collectors, artists, and critics who played prominent roles in the city’s late-twentieth-century art scene. The flyer is thus a portrait of the artist and, at the same time, a portrait of an art world. The two portraits, however, do not occupy the same pictorial plane; as I have said, one has been superimposed, in fragments, on the other, collage-style. Is that right? No, not quite. There is a hole in the middle of the face that seems to expose another surface below it, inscribed in the same writing that decorates the plate. So, which comes first, image or writing, artist or art world? Complicating matters further, one fragment of the plate rests in the hole, and another, bearing the name of art historian Ellen Johnson, teeters on its edge. It’s a mise en abyme, a chicken-and-egg conundrum, this relation between artist and art world, and Ray Johnson knows it. This essay is about what Ray Johnson (1927-1995) came to know about the art world, a knowledge, I think, that was rooted in Detroit, where the artist was born and raised, although the adult Johnson made his name in New York, the presumptive center of the American art world, then as now. “The New York Correspondence Academy/ Detroit May 23-June 4 1987,” read the words in the hole in the flyer, encapsulating, with nice ambiguity, Johnson’s tale of two cities.
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Fig. 1.
Ray Johnson, untitled mailing (The New York Correspondence Academy Detroit), May, 1987. © The Ray Johnson Estate.

The names on the flyer, in alphabetical order: Andy [no last name; see also Figs. 21 & 22], Florence Barron, Charlton Burch, Cathy Constanides, Robert Crise, Jr., Bill Dobbs, Ellen Johnson, Robert Marklewitz, Ken Mikolowski, Ann Mikolowski, Evan Maurer, Gilbert Silverman, Lila Silverman, Roy Slade, Toby Spiselman, Diane Spodarek, Jan Van Der Marck, Ingeborg Van Der Marck.

I.

But before I get to the details of Ray Johnson’s story, including the occasion for this flyer, I want to linger for a while on that phrase, “art world.” If you’re reading this, it’s a term you likely know and use. It could be that you also know something of the extended debate among philosophers and sociologists about the meaning of the term, a debate provoked by a 1964 article by philosopher Arthur Danto (1924-2013; born and raised in Detroit, made his name in New York) titled, simply, “The Artworld.”1Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61.19 (1964): 571-584. All subsequent references will be in-text. Of course, Danto didn’t coin the term; he picked it up in his wandering through New York galleries, in one of which he had a fateful encounter with Andy Warhol’s then newly minted Brillo Boxes. I feel this is art, he thought, but I can’t say why. The philosopher’s feeling set off a lifetime of speculation, centered on the critical insight that “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” (Danto, “The Artworld,” 580) For Danto, that is, “the artworld” is an intangible, an atmosphere composed of diffused particles of theory and knowledge about art; to breathe in that atmosphere enables one to see things differently than those who breathe the ordinary air, to see, for instance, objects that are indiscernible from commonly available commercial packaging as art.

Warhol’s Brillo Boxes heralded the onset of a Duchampian era in the visual arts, when the question of what does and doesn’t count as art came to dominate art practice. During this period, which has not yet ended, Danto’s insight, that “the artworld” can be defined as the horizon of an idea, has proven indispensable. At the same time, the lofty atmospherics of “The Artworld” practically begged to be brought back down to earth. In his 1974 essay, “What Is Art? An Institutional Analysis,” another philosopher, George Dickie, claims that “Danto points to the rich structure in which particular works of art are imbedded: he indicates the institutional nature of art.”2George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), 29. Italics in original. All … In fact, though, Dickie knew that Danto had never taken much philosophical interest in actually existing art institutions, and therefore took it upon himself to list the “bundle of systems” that constitute the artworld-as-institution - “theater, painting, sculpture, music, literature, and so on” (Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, 33) - as well as some of the institution’s “core personnel,” “a loosely organized, but nevertheless related, set of persons including artists (understood to refer to painters, writers, composers); producers, museum directors; museum-goers, theatergoers, reporters for newspapers, critics for publications of all sorts, art historians, philosophers of art, and others” (Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, 35-36). “And so on,” “and others”: Dickie’s descriptions of the artworld are more concrete than Danto’s, but still, as sociologist Howard Becker put it, “Philosophers tend to argue from hypothetical examples, and the ‘artworld’ Dickie and Danto refer to does not have much meat on its bones.”3Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 149. Becker himself made an effective start at fleshing out the aestheticians’ theories in his 1982 book, Art Worlds. He also corrects, thereby, the philosophers’ professional bias toward top-down thinking about social structures, suggesting that instead of privileging the roles played in the construction of art worlds by theorists and historians (Danto) or artists and museum directors (Dickie), we “think of an art world” in lateral terms, “as an established network of cooperative links among participants” (Becker, Art Worlds, 34-5).

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Fig. 2.
Ray Johnson, please-send-to included in mailing to Helen Jacobson. 1963 03-06, 63 03 06A, 2018.802.27.2, The William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson, Ryerson & Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.
©The Ray Johnson Estate.

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Fig. 3.
Ray Johnson, envelope included in mailing to John Willenbecher, 1967.
© The Ray Johnson Estate

A network of cooperative links among participants, an institution, an atmosphere of theory and history: these are not mutually exclusive ways of defining the art world, but rather, equally valid perspectives from which to view this elusive phenomenon. What’s more, the more adept one is at shifting from one perspective to another, as the art world itself shifts its aspect before one’s eyes, the better one may become at bringing the thing into focus. Strange to say, while philosophers and sociologists have worked to amplify and refine the perspectives on the art world opened by Danto, Dickie, and Becker, no art historian has written an essay or book comparable to theirs, that is, a focused attempt to define “the art world” in art historical terms.4I have looked in vain for definitions of “art world” in published dictionaries of art terminology, although Wikipedia now offers one, and The … It is especially strange because, as you who are reading this know, “the art world,” as it is commonly used, refers to the world of visual art, and not, as Dickie and Becker seem to think, to the sphere of all the arts bundled up in one. Why this should be, how the art world came to acquire its singular status, is, however, matter for another discussion. The present discussion will now turn back to Ray Johnson, who is, among other things, one of our great historians of the art world, precisely because he is such a wily shape-shifter.
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Fig. 4.
Ray Johnson, flyer for New York Correspondence School David Letterman Fan Club Meeting, 1983.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

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Fig. 5.
Ray Johnson, mailing (Meeting Seating), 1968.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

For instance, to some art world observers, Johnson is best known as the “father,” “the grandfather,” or “even the sugar dada” of the practice called “mail art.”5Clive Phillpot, “The Mailed Art of Ray Johnson,” in Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology, ed. Chuck Welch (Calgary, Alberta: University of … Many artists paint, draw, or collage on their mailings, but what distinguishes mail art from other such kinds of aesthetic play are its practitioners’ efforts to develop - to borrow Becker’s phrase - “an established network of cooperative links among participants,” and to foreground those efforts in their mailings. Mail art networks, in other words, are microcosmic art worlds shaped by an egalitarian ethos. Johnson, a playful and prodigious penpal from high school on, began consciously to shape his network in the late nineteen-fifties, circulating variously altered missives among what began as a small circle of friends and acquaintances, but rapidly expanded into a worldwide web of mailers that Johnson dubbed, at the joking suggestion of one participant, “The New York Correspondence School.” NYCS mailings moved along choreographed paths from person to person, paths marked by Johnson’s instructions to “please send to” this or that participant (see Fig. 2). Sometimes, perhaps to keep track, Johnson scattered the names of current correspondents across spare envelopes in patterns that mimicked the zigzagging of the mailings themselves. On this one (Fig. 3), no doubt you recognize at least one name, “Warhol.” Perhaps you also know Sam Wagstaff, pioneering photography collector and, briefly, curator of contemporary art at the Detroit Institute of Arts; and if you’re very interested in the mid-century avant-garde, maybe beat poet Diane di Prima, or Fluxus artist George Brecht, or choreographer James Waring. Drill down yet another layer, and there’s Johnson’s wild friend Dorothy Podber, famed mainly for the time she pulled out a pistol and put a bullet through a stack of Warhol’s Marilyns. And down and down, from the undeniably famous to the hopelessly obscure. As members of the NYCS, though, they were all on a level: to participate in the network made all Johnson’s correspondents artists, of a kind, and the boxes of mail they inevitably accumulated made them collectors.
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Fig. 6.
Ray Johnson stamp imprints, ca. 1984
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

Unlike some of the mail artists who followed in his wake, however, Johnson never quite believed that the radical democracy of the correspondence network might serve as an out-and-out substitute for the art world per se. For Johnson was as attentive as any sociologist to the structure and function of institutions; he knew that to make art, in any context, at any level, is to be a constituent of “the” art world. The artist even shared the sociologists’ penchant for charts (Figs. 4, 5), but, as an artist, his most effective critical tools were tonal and formal rather than cognitive. Johnson’s preferred tone was humorous, whether lightly witty, scathingly sarcastic, or out-there wacky, and his preferred form was collage, the shoring-up of fragments in the aftermath of the break-up of coherent structures. Many observers have remarked that the Correspondence School itself, along with the series of performance-art-style “meetings” of members that Johnson orchestrated, can be seen as a kind of living collage; or, as Johnson once put it, with characteristic schadenfreude, “Since I cut everything up, they’re all like people in a kaleidoscope.”6Ray Johnson, quoted in Richard Bernstein, “Ray Johnson’s World.” Andy Warhol’s Interview, August 1972, 40. At the same time, the NYCS was a veritable institution, in Dickie’s sense as well as Becker’s, a fact that Johnson at once underscored and undercut through the invention of a host of parodic successor institutions, “universities,” and “fan clubs” that existed for the most part in name only (Fig. 6). Johnson’s pseudo-institutions were also meant, of course, as parodies of real ones, though when he took direct aim at the art world as institution, the artist’s tone could assume a bitter tinge (Figs. 7, 8).
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Fig. 7.
Ray Johnson, undated mailing (Dear Whitney Museum, i hate you. Love, Ray Johnson). Johnson sent out versions of this photocopy piece beginning in 1970, when the Whitney mounted a show of work by the members of Johnson’s New York Correspondence School.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

So: Ray Johnson sometimes dreamed that the art world was a network open to all comers, a kind of worldwide web avant la lettre, and sometimes saw it as the kind of all-powerful institution that one loves and hates and can never escape. Then again, sometimes, especially when engaged in his more formal collage-work, the artist took the philosopher’s view, the historian’s view, clear-eyed but distanced, a view in which the institution of the art world shades off into its atmosphere (Fig. 9). In Untitled (Max Ernst with Toothbrush), Johnson is still sending letters, but they’ve landed this time in a Danto-esque realm of art history and aesthetic theory. With “DEAR JACQUES DERRIDA DIARY,” the artist salutes the philosopher he knew best as the author of The Post Card (1987), a well-thumbed copy of which was found on Johnson’s bookshelf after his death. Directly beneath the address to Derrida are two photos of the elderly Max Ernst, and below them, the salutation for an imaginary missive to this artist, who was seminal both as a practitioner and a theorist of collage. And held as in a vise between these two greetings, never to be sent to their addressees, is Johnson’s profile. Unlike the we-know-but-won’t-say assumptions hanging in the rarified air of Danto’s galleries, Johnson’s element is dense with explicit cultural references and in-jokes. One of Derrida’s signal gestures, for instance, was to strike through words, rendering them sous rature, there and yet not there. Not content with simply slashing out the philosopher’s own name, Johnson washes the whole image in black paint that thickens and thins, drips and describes, veils and reveals. The word “osmotic” pops from a rare patch of white space; years earlier, Johnson had anagrammatized it to form moticos, his term for the jewel-like mini-collages with which he first made his name, one of which, in tones of shocking pink, has been affixed to the center of the Ernst piece. The encroaching darkness and the X-ings-out are features of the work of Johnson’s last years, when his never-too-sanguine mood grew more despairing. But the complex layering of word and image, built up into a bas-relief surface, is typical of Johnson’s collage-work overall, as is the treatment of recycled fragments of Johnson’s own art as “found” material - the recycling explains the kite-tail string of dates on the work, indicating the birthdate of each fragment.
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Fig. 8.
Ray Johnson, untitled mailing (The New York Correspondence School does not have fifteen cents), 1979.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

Here’s a question that may not seem immediately relevant, but bear with me. Why does Ray Johnson typically work in bas-relief? A collector once told me that Johnson told him that “he felt more real about things that were - and this is a word he used - semi-three-dimensional.”7Werner Kramarsky, interview with the author, April 5, 2017. In the context of the present discussion, that remark makes me think again of the collage-like image on the Detroit flyer with which we began. There, the art world bursts, Athena-like, from the artist’s brain - or is it that the artist’s image is generated from the art world matrix? The Ernst collage raises the same equivocal question; although, as I suggest above, in the collage, the art world appears as a creature of art theory and art history, whereas the art world of the Detroit flyer is half-way between institution (the grander-than-usual New York Correspondence Academy) and the leveling network of mailers. Then again, the semi-three-dimensional fragment balanced on the edge of the “hole” in the flyer does bear the name of Ellen Johnson, an art historian friend of the artist with whom Ray happens to share a surname. One might say that Johnson’s spatial ambiguities situate his work in what Robert Rauschenberg (another Johnson friend and correspondent) called the gap between art and life, “neither” of which, Rauschenberg says, somewhat strangely, “can be made.” But if that is the case, what work is left for the artist?
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Fig. 9.
Ray Johnson, Untitled (Max Ernst with Toothbrush)
(Nov. 7, 1974-8.30.92-10.30.91-9.4.92-12.28.92-8.15.91).
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

Rauschenberg’s answer, “I try to act in the gap between the two,” has a slightly desperate ring: if he is right, that art is a given reality just as life is, then the gap between them is a strictly notional place, reinvented by the artist each time he acts. The thought that art can’t be made drove Rauschenberg to expand his collage-work ever farther into three-dimensional space, on one hand, or, on the other, to dissolve it onto the immaterial surface of the silkscreen. For him, the gap between art and life is either an otherworld or a no-place. Johnson’s collage, however, holds to the confines of “the semi-three-dimensional,” which seemed to him somehow “more real.” For him, the bas-relief is a kind of materialized dialectic in which art presses outward from the ideal flats of painting only to be met by life’s immense counterpressure. Or, if we are using art-world terms, we might say that bas-relief is produced by the tension between Danto’s artworld-as-concept and Dickie’s art-world-as-institution. In any case, bas-relief may be said to be “more real” than art that is either ultra-flat or fully three-dimensional in that it is visibly a space of conflict: the artist’s room for maneuver is seen to be excruciatingly narrow. And yet, within the narrow confines of his chosen form, in the inch or so between the surface of the support and the protecting glass, Johnson managed to produce, in fact, delighted in producing, an astonishing variety of sculptural and painterly effects (Figs. 10, 11).

Again, in this kind of finely finished exhibition work, Johnson hewed closer to the dialectical pole of artworld-as-concept, while in his mail art, he engaged more directly with the pressure exerted by art-world institutions. In artists’ lives, such pressure manifests itself chiefly as a struggle for money and fame - a struggle that the radical democrats of mail art seek to evade through the free distribution of art, and the equal distribution of fame, throughout their networks. Johnson himself was in part this kind of utopian thinker, and in part a sociologist, a mordant analyst of “the rich structure in which particular works of art are imbedded.” Still, even at his most theoretical, or satirical, Johnson remained committed to art’s sensuous materiality, the formal, palpable manifestation of what Wallace Stevens called “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.”8Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), 37. A violence from within - for all their technical refinement, Johnson’s exhibition collages stubbornly fail to satisfy at least one of the art world’s most exigent demands: the rich variety of their bas-relief surfaces is almost impossible to capture in photographs. And Ray Johnson, the maestro of the Xerox machine, fully understood the implications of this fact, understood that modern art lives on and in photographic reproduction, or not at all; whereas Johnson’s art, even at its most sensuously palpable, remains oddly ephemeral. “ROBIN RICHMAN SAID PEOPLE IN HOUSTON CALL THEIR CHATEAUS SHADOWS,” reads a bas-relief placard in one collage (Fig. 12), which, together with the piece’s other semi-three-dimensional elements, casts a house-shaped shade on the support surface. My art lives, Johnson tells us, on and in shadows.

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Fig. 10.
Ray Johnson, detail from Ice (1966).
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

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Fig. 11.
Ray Johnson, detail from 24 Pork Chops (1969).
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

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Fig. 12.
Ray Johnson, detail from Chateaus Shadows (1967).
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

II.

I have described the social dynamic that mirrors the spatial dynamic in Ray Johnson’s art as a dialectical relation between artist and art world. Another way to phrase it might be that, for Johnson, personal history and art history are inextricably intertwined (hence Ray’s frequent references to Ellen Johnson, his art-historian doppelganger). Meanwhile, to speak of the artist’s personal history brings us back, at last, to Detroit, where Johnson first decided that he wanted to live for art. In 1945, his senior year at Cass Technical Institute, an article in the student newspaper described Johnson as “Outstanding in the Art Department,” high praise indeed in a school full of talented and competitive creative types. But while the teenaged Johnson was clearly devoted to creation, in this article, at least, he seemed ambivalent about competition. ‘“My greatest ambition,’ offered Ray wistfully, ‘is to buy a farm and live on it, and paint for the rest of my life.’”9A clipping of this story appears in Lightworks magazine’s Ray Johnson issue. Lightworks #22 (2000), 6. Instead, Johnson went directly from Cass Tech to Black Mountain College, where he was again surrounded by ambitious artists, and from there to New York City, where he became a fixture in the art world, a well-known character and gimlet-eyed observer, until 1968, when he withdrew to the Manhattanite’s equivalent of a farm, a house on suburban Long Island, and stayed there, making art, to the end of his life.

This nutshell biography points to a paradox. In some sense, the wistful would-be recluse of the high school paper could be said to be the “real” Ray Johnson, a person of whom everyone, including his closest friends, said, “No one really knew him,” who lived alone for most of his life, and in his last years saw few people day to day, other than his baffled but obliging postman. And yet, Johnson’s art is nothing if not social: the mailings incessantly circulated among hundreds of correspondents, from lifelong friends to distant strangers; the NYCS meetings and other participatory performances; the collages teeming with the names and images of people Johnson knew, or admired, or just found curious or funny or fascinating for some reason. By way of contrast, consider two artists in Johnson’s New York circle that he particularly admired, Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin, whose art, in Johns’ case deadpan-enigmatic, in Martin’s mystical-abstract, clearly reflects their reclusive tendencies. Johnson could have followed in their path - at Black Mountain, his favorite teacher was Josef Albers, and in college and just after, he painted geometric abstractions in the vein of Albers - but by the mid-nineteen-fifties, his work had taken its ineluctably social turn. Or perhaps, I should say, Johnson returned at this point to an aspect of his practice that he had never quite abandoned, but that he had not previously considered central to his work: correspondence.

When Johnson’s high-school friend and fellow artist, Arthur Secunda, moved with his family to New York City in 1943, Ray began sending him daily letters that mixed images and words, drawing and collage. In later years, when asked about the origins of his Correspondence School, Johnson often cited these letters, and, certainly, the young Ray’s daily practice of corresponding, mixing of media, and antic humor would also come to characterize his mature work. But what made Johnson’s NYCS a notably innovative enterprise was the artist’s emphasis on correspondence as a means of networking; and the outlines of this project, too, I think, can be discerned as early as Johnson’s high school years, along with his dawning sense of the network’s complex relation to an art world. Take, for instance, the following passages from one of his letters to Secunda, undated but likely from the autumn of 1943:

Today is Friday and we have another art class at the institute tonight. I go to a sculpture class tomorrow morning.…We have a teacher, Mr. Smith from Wayne. He sure is a sharp guy - all the girls think so, too. Pete is in the class.

* * *

Please send me something that you did in your life class. Please send a drawing, not a cartoon. Your cartoons are swell, but you also can draw. Please follow my advice, son.

* * *

There is a Michigan Artist Show in the gallerys [sic] of the Institute now. I plan on seeing it tonight. On opening night, there were high class gents and dames in evening dress and George T. says that it was a classy affair.10A facsimile of this letter, along with other mail from Johnson to Secunda, is included in the loose-leaf catalogue, Correspondence: an exhibition of …

The “institute” is the Detroit Institute of Arts, which offered a robust educational program of which Johnson, together with artist friends from Cass Tech like Pete and George T., took full advantage: “There are lectures on Monday night, movies on Tuesday, art class on Friday, art class on Saturday, lecture on Sunday. I lead a very busy life,” a breathless Ray reports (Figs. 14, 15). The museum also made efforts to support local artists, including an annual juried show (the “Michigan Artist Show” referred to in the letter) presented in conjunction with the Detroit Artists Market, a non-profit gallery which is still in operation. The letters to Secunda register Johnson’s excitement as he begins to grasp the way high school connects to the museum which connects to the gallery which connects, somehow, to the world of “high class gents and dames in evening dress”; he is also beginning to sense how these institutional connections may help to solidify and extend the aspiring artist’s personal-professional relationships. “Please send a drawing, not a cartoon,” Johnson urges his friend. Even for goofballs like these two, art is turning into a serious business, and serious artists depend on one another for support and critique.

My sense is that Johnson learned the latter lesson when he began to move beyond his high school circle and connect with working artists in the community. You can see him striving to make the link between his social and proto-professional lives in a note preserved by Johnson’s closest friend at Cass Tech, Pete Di Cresce: “Pete - next Sat. nite [sic], I get out of work at 6 - I have to eat my supper downtown - why don’t we both go to the Russian Bear and have a good time and then go from there. Why don’t you bring something for Stan and Zubel to criticize. It’ll be a good criticism.”11DI CRESCE, Undated, 2018.802.12, The William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson, Ryerson & Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, Art Institute … The Russian Bear, a restaurant and nightclub, was a hangout for established artists on the Detroit scene like Sarkis Sarkisian, Zoltan Sepeshy, and Chico Lopez;12See Gordon and Elizabeth Orear, Sarkis (Detroit: Center for Creative Studies and Wayne State University Press, 1995), 73. the younger painters Zubel Kachadoorian and Stan Twardowicz (“my friend,” Ray calls him, proudly, in another note to Pete) were rising stars who would go on to have significant careers. Other traces of Johnson’s expanding world-view can be found in his high-school scrapbook: reviews of exhibitions at the DIA, curated by its cosmopolitan director, William Valentiner; clips chronicling shows by local luminaries like Kachadoorian, Twardowicz, Lopez, and Edgar Yaeger at Detroit Artists Market and two other pillars of the burgeoning Detroit art scene, the Scarab Club and the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (now - as you may know - the College for Creative Studies); a receipt for one of Johnson’s own drawings, submitted to the Artist’s Market; a newspaper story about the Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan from the summer of 1944, when Johnson attended, along with several of his Cass Tech friends, and Twardowicz and Kachadoorian were among the teachers. That summer at Ox-Bow, Johnson also made a fateful new connection, befriending Elaine Schmitt, whose sister Elizabeth had enrolled the previous year at Black Mountain College, and who ultimately convinced Elaine and Ray that they should apply there, too (Fig. 16).

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Fig. 13.
Ray Johnson, collage-letter to Arthur Secunda, 1943.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

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Fig. 14.
Ray Johnson, detail from letter to Arthur Secunda.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

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Fig. 15.
Ray Johnson, page from a high school sketchbook.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

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Fig. 16.
Ray Johnson (r., in Cass Tech sweater) in Josef Albers’ class, Black Mountain College.
Courtesy Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

Black Mountain introduced Ray Johnson to “the” art world, and by the early fifties, he and sculptor Richard Lippold were sharing an apartment on the Lower East Side, just across the hall from their Black Mountain friends John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In some respects, it was an unlikely trajectory. Johnson’s parents were the children of Finnish immigrants who came to the U.S. to work in the copper mines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; when the copper ran out, the Finns migrated in waves down to Detroit, where the jobs were. Eino Johnson worked in the Ford factory; he and his wife, Lorraine, had high school educations. But they were proud and supportive of their only child, whose artistic talent, evident from childhood, was noticed by a junior high school art teacher who encouraged Ray to apply to Cass Tech, a selective public prep school that has served as the incubator of many notable careers in the arts. Cass Tech is part of the answer to the question of how the reclusive son of factory workers could become, not just a significant player in the New York art world, but also its artist-historian. It took more than a good school, though, to set Johnson on his peculiar path: the artist’s formative years also coincided, with uncanny exactness, with the period when the kinds of institutions and networks that make an art world first developed in Detroit. The Scarab Club was founded in 1907, the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts was founded in 1906, the art school of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts in 1926, and the Detroit Artists Market, in 1932. Johnson was born in 1927, the year that the Detroit Institute of Arts opened in the building it now occupies, under the directorship of the William (Wilhelm) Valentiner. The German-born Valentiner studied under some of his country’s most prominent art historians, acquiring a deep knowledge and wide taste that encompassed the art of an extraordinary range of periods and places; by the time he left the DIA, in 1945 (the same year Johnson left Detroit for Black Mountain), it had become one of the country’s great encyclopedic museums. Hosting the Michigan Artists Show in the museum was Valentiner’s idea.13See Margaret Sterne, The Passionate Eye: The Life of William R. Valentiner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980), 233. To cite just a few … This specialist in seventeenth-century Dutch painting was committed to maintaining the connection between past and present, as well as between the museum and the community, and alternated blockbuster shows of Old Masters with often dubiously received selections of new work. Johnson’s high school scrapbook includes reviews of two shows curated by Valentiner, Advanced Trends in Contemporary Art and “the confusing and controversial” (according to the reviewer) Art of Our Own Day; and, decades later, in 1965, we find the artist addressing an inquiry to the DIA regarding the last show “Dr. Valentiner” oversaw at the Institute. “In 1945-1946 you had a sculpture exhibit at your museum,” Johnson recalls, “with La Chaise’s portrait of John Marin, his floating woman, a prehistoric goddess of fertility and perhaps R. Lippolds’ Hills Are Not Empty. Is it possible to obtain a catalogue of this exhibit organized by Dr. Valentiner?”14Ray Johnson to please-send-to for James Harvey via William S. Wilson. 1965 06-12, Around 65 07 15?, 2018.802.42.5, The William S. Wilson Collection …
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Fig. 17.
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Fig. 18.
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Fig. 19.

Fig. 17, 18, & 19.
Ray Johnson, three pages from a please-send-to for James Harvey via William S. Wilson. 1965 06-12, Around 65 07 15?, 2018.802.42.5, The William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson, Ryerson & Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

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Fig. 20.
Ray Johnson, Jan/Feb (1966). The Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Elinor Kushner Memorial Fund.
© The Ray Johnson Estate

Johnson’s shortlist of works here perfectly encapsulates Valentiner’s values, representing art derived from near and far, past and present, institution and community—this last embodied, for Johnson, by Richard Lippold, Johnson’s longtime lover, whose art world connections helped ease shy Ray’s transition to life in New York. The “Dr. Valentiner” letter is part of a “please send to” packet directed to Johnson’s high school classmate and fellow Manhattanite James Harvey, an abstract painter and graphic artist who is best remembered as the designer of the original—that is, Brillo’s own—Brillo Box.15Ray Johnson please-send-to for James Harvey via William S. Wilson. 1965 06-12, Around 65 07 15?, 2018.802.42.5, The William S. Wilson Collection of … The mailing includes two clippings about a Cass Tech art teacher, Miss Green, a fragment of a note in Johnson’s hand from 1946, a yearbook page with the teenaged Harvey’s signature, and two images of a portrait from the DIA’s collection (Figs. 17, 18, 19). This mailing, as Johnson knew, would never reach Harvey, who died of cancer in July of 1965; it was a kind of memorial, both for Harvey himself and for their shared childhoods.

1965 was also the year that Johnson had his first solo show at a New York gallery, at the somewhat belated age of thirty-seven. (He achieved a certain cult success rather quickly, but the institutions of the art world were slow to recognize him.) Within a few years after this first flash of public recognition, Johnson’s sense that the art world, in all its aspects, was his true subject had crystallized, as had his artistic style. The collages that appeared in the spate of solo shows that came Johnson’s way after 1965 were, as one of his friends wrote to another in 1966, “freer than last year, and less dependent on a single major shape.”16Letter from George Ashley to May Wilson, 1966 01-07, 66 04 27, 2018.802.43, The William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson, Ryerson & Burnham … Johnson, in other words, had abandoned the principle of gestalt composition and reconceived collage as a fundamentally mobile medium, in which semi-three-dimensional parts could be subject, in theory at least, to perpetual re-arrangement. The space of the image became a field of free associations, where networks could form and reform, “like people in a kaleidoscope.” One of Johnson’s first successful works in this new kaleidoscopic mode was January/February, dated 1966 (Fig. 20). The first real-world Meeting of the New York Correspondence School took place two years later, in 1968; and, while the art world had been front and center in his work for some time, Johnson staked his first public claim to be its official historian with a 1973 show titled, “Ray Johnson’s History of the Betty Parsons Gallery,” which legendary gallerist Betty Parsons herself had the wit to host (Fig. 21).

As I have mentioned, though, Johnson moved away from New York City in 1968, which is to say, just as its art world had begun to come into focus in his art. One needs some distance to see things whole. This distance must be internal as well as external: it may be that only a born recluse like Ray Johnson would take the ever-shifting social landscape of the art world as his Mont Sainte-Victoire; and it may be that only provincials, like Johnson and Arthur Danto, would devote their lives to developing a theory of the New York art world. Or, perhaps, not just any provincials, but those who hailed from some place with an art world of its own - not “the” art world, just enough of one, a small but vital version still in its formative phase, when the would-be theorist could take in all the significant people and institutions and events at a glance.17Thanks to Gregg Horowitz for this crucial insight.

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Fig. 21.
Ray Johnson André Breton (1972); with note to Betty Parsons and Parsons Gallery announcement. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Bequest of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1986.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

Coda
As you may have noticed, one of the Johnson mail pieces I include above reads, “The New York Correspondence School does not have fifteen cents/THE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ART DOES NOT HAVE A RAY JOHNSON.S.” That was 1979. What is it they say? A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown. In 1986, Jan Van Der Marck, a curator who had solicited work from Johnson for shows when he was at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, started his nine-year tenure as director of the DIA, and in 1987, the museum acquired its first Johnson collage, the breakthrough piece January/February. The names of Van Der Marck and his then wife, Ingeborg, are on the “New York Correspondence Academy/Detroit” flyer, just above those of Gilbert and Lila Silverman, who included Johnson’s art in their collection of work by the Fluxus group (Johnson wasn’t a member but had many Fluxus penpals). A few other signs of hometown appreciation came Johnson’s way during his lifetime: a solo show of collages at Gertrude Kasle Gallery in 1975; a performance of one of Johnson’s Throwaway Gestures at the DIA in 1978; also in 1978, a much-cited interview with Diane Spodarek (her name is on the Correspondence Academy flyer) in Detroit Artists Monthly. And after Johnson’s death, Charlton Burch (also on the flyer), who had previously published pieces on Johnson in his Birmingham, Michigan-based journal Lightworks, edited a terrific special issue on the artist. But a second solo show of Johnson’s exhibition collages has yet to take place at any Detroit art institution, and it took the DIA almost thirty years to add a second major Johnson to its collection, thanks this time to a gift from Jan Van Der Marck’s widow, Sheila.18In the Fall of 2016, the College for Creative Studies did hold a Johnson show, an exhibition of The Bob Boxes, mailings from Ray Johnson to his …
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Fig. 22.
Ray Johnson, untitled mailing (The Ray Johnson Show Detroit), May 1987.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

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Fig. 23.
Ray Johnson, untitled mailing (The New York Correspondence Academy Detroit), June 1987.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

And what about the flyer? It was one of a series of linked images Johnson sent to various correspondents from Michigan during the months he spent there moving his aged mother out of her house - built by Silverman’s company - and into a nursing home (Figs. 22, 23). Although these images seem like they might commemorate a public event, they are in fact a strange Johnsonian memorial for his friend, painter Brian Buczak, who had died earlier that year of AIDS, at the age of 33. As Buczak’s life partner, Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, recounts in a memoir included in the Lightworks Ray Johnson issue, Buczak began corresponding with Johnson when he was still in high school in Detroit. He went on to get a degree at the College for Creative Studies, where he won a prize that came with cash attached, and “to his parents’ dismay,” says Hendricks, “he went and spent the money on a Ray Johnson collage which included a Duchamp silhouette.”19Geoffrey Hendricks, “Memories, Salt, Portraits, and Nothing,” in Lightworks #22 (2000), 39. This is the opposite of a throwaway gesture, instantly promoting Buczak from mere (mere?) amasser of mail art to collector of art-art, via the acquisition of a piece that explicitly marks its owner as a sharer in “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” The old story: an ambitious young artist from Detroit tests his powers, first, in the alternative institution of the postal network, then, in the transitional institution of art school, before finally moving up and out into “the” art world.
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Fig. 24.
Ray Johnson, untitled mailing (The New York Correspondence Academy Detroit), detail.
© The Ray Johnson Estate.

Only, that’s not quite how Ray Johnson sees it. The Ray Johnson Show, Detroit edition, Spring-Summer 1987, honors the tragically balked ambition of Johnson’s friend, along with a whole range of figures from their natal art world, from the well-known to the just-barely-known, from institutional insiders to hoverers on the periphery. It even welcomes some art-historical visitors, notably the painter and collagist Joan Miro, whose silhouetted figure aims his pointer across the outline of a Dutch clay pipe straight out of a Joseph Cornell at a photo captioned “Brian Buczak, Chinese Museum Chicken” (Fig. 24). (As Burch observes in a sidebar to Hendricks’ memoir, the Spanish artist here “stands apart from Marcia Miro, a local arts journalist.” [38]) But the “show” takes place entirely within the correspondence network, and Johnson’s memorial is made of paper, ephemeral, preserved by chance - or by an atmosphere of theory, which is sometimes hard to tell from mere air.

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