Even if you can’t name a single work by the late artist Ray Johnson—even if you can’t picture one—you may have heard some variation on his pranks. They’ve become something of art-world lore.
Like the time a client asked for a 25 percent discount and he obliged, and delivered the work with a quarter of it sliced off. There was the time when a different Ray Johnson streaked through the Vatican, and our Ray Johnson appeared nude at his next opening and did the same. Then there was the time he dropped hot dogs from the sky over an East River island.
As Johnson’s dealer, Richard Feigen, recalls in John Walter and Andre Moore’s 2002 documentary about the artist, How to Draw a Bunny, “I got a bill from a company for the aeroplane and the hot dogs.” Feigen, who has the countenance of a Hoover-era F.B.I. agent, seems to be the one person in the world exasperated, rather than entertained, by Johnson’s antics.
Many of Johnson’s interactions in the art world carried this same madcap, convoluted spirit of his hot-dog airdrop. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Johnson was a consummate prankster, a deadpan court jester of New York’s avant-garde whose tricks allowed him to embrace and send-up an industry that kept his mainstream success at bay. He’s often called the greatest artist you’ve never heard of.
This month marks two decades since his mysterious suicide, and Johnson’s work remains just enigmatic and totally alluring 20 years after his death. In fact, Johnson seems to be having something of a moment, buoyed by Elizabeth Zuba’s Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson, 1954–1994, published last year, and Richard L. Feigen & Co.’s recently wrapped show, “Ray Johnson’s Art World,” a collection of the artist’s cryptogram-like collages and correspondence paired with works by his peers and pen pals John Baldessari, Chuck Close, Ed Ruscha, and others.
Johnson’s rascal routine is particularly appealing at a moment when the art world takes itself so seriously. Curiously, few contemporary artists seem eager to take up this pomposity, instead working with subjects that look more comfortable hanging over a George Nakashima settee in the million-dollar penthouse in the Manhattan needle tower of your choosing. The industry’s self-important attitude has launched a thousand think pieces, but perhaps worse, it goes mostly un-mocked.
Fittingly, Johnson’s work is a source of curiosity and mystery for his acolytes, a group that is only growing in number. While recently wearing a Ray Johnson bunny pin in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—which passes for social experiment today—three Johnsonites stopped me on the street to enthuse over his hold on them. His use of clipped phrases, scrawls of wordplay, and flat, otherworldly doodles are the kinds of codes that might be at home in a zany scavenger hunt; a complete reading always remains delightfully out of reach. Everything of Johnson’s rewards repeated viewing, or further investigation.
Take that sausage-dropping plane by way of example. In 1969, at age 41, Johnson was invited to contribute to topless cellist Charlotte Moorman’s Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York. Johnson had moved to New York in the late 40s after attending art school in North Carolina, and had lately been working on a series of foot silhouettes—flattened tracings of subjects’ lowest extremities he called “feetings.” Playing off the dual meaning of the word “foot” as a measurement, Johnson decided that the festival’s location, on Mills and Ward Rock Islands in the East River, provided the perfect venue to drop 60 foot-long hot dogs from a helicopter.
“Our flight over Long Island was thrilling and I enjoyed seeing the hundreds of backyard swimming pools,” Johnson writes in a letter quoted in How to Draw a Bunny. “We zoomed in over the East River Island and saw below avant-garde people waving at us. We finally hovered at a spot where I was to drop the dogs. Like bombs away, I pushed the foot-long hot dogs through the round hole in the plastic helicopter bubble, and they fell.” In a twist that seems impossible to imagine happening in today’s art scene, many of the eccentric attendees began eating the hot dogs (they don’t call them starving artists for nothing).
Ultimately, Johnson became best known for another form of distribution: mail. His correspondence art arrived at the homes of friends, fellow artists, and occasionally strangers, with a drawing or Delphic phrase and instructions to forward or return to him. In one such project, he asked members of his collective, the New York Correspondance [sic] School, to mail valentines to Time magazine’s bizarrely named Behavior Department, whose goings-on today remain shrouded in myth. The resulting notes of affection included envelopes stuffed with sand and microscopic paper hearts, a bean bag, and photographs of Jim Morrison (way dreamy!).
Time’s “behaviorists” were understandably perplexed. “It’s a friendly kind of put-down,” said one staffer, according to a memo in Johnson’s estate. Johnson was thrilled. “We present deliberate enigmatic situations to make people wonder why,” he said. “We do it solely for the aesthetic logic—the marvelous surprise when a person opens these packages.”
At least one artist was game to play ball with Johnson. Christo, known for his epic-in-scale landscape projects with partner Jeanne-Claude, received a letter from Johnson in 1962 asking if he might buy one of Christo’s works. Christo photographed a recent sculpture, wrapped it in a package, and mailed it to him, including a note remarking that he had sent Johnson a piece that he had just destroyed in opening, but that he should keep the photograph as a souvenir.
Some of Johnson’s hijinks were less playful, hinting perhaps at frustration that greater success had somehow eluded him. When MoMA invited Chuck Close to curate a group exhibition of portraits in 1991, Close wanted to include Johnson’s work, none of which belonged to the museum. Johnson learned that any correspondence mailed to the museum’s library became a part of its collection, so he began mailing the librarian a series of Xeroxed drawings rather than face the daunting and potentially demoralizing curatorial process. In the resulting show, Close used a Xeroxed copy of Johnson’s bunny drawing of Bill de Kooning, which hung among works by van Gogh, Chagall, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso.
Johnson’s salty trickster suggests he may have been less than satisfied with his position there. That he killed himself bolsters that claim, and almost certainly speaks to a deeper depression. The circumstances surrounding his death have invited further investigation. Like his artwork, it contained hundreds of clues, multitudes of possible meaning.
A few days after Johnson’s body was discovered floating in Sag Harbor Cove, where he had been spotted jumping off a bridge and backstroking out to the sunset, the Sag Harbor Police and his friends entered his home with a video camera. In the film of the encounter, which is shown in Walter and Moore’s documentary, the artist’s countless drawings, letters, and collages are seen methodically organized on shelves; his workroom looks less like an artist’s studio than the back closet of a law firm entangled in an endless toxic contamination lawsuit. The works that didn’t fit in these legal-size folders were stacked neatly against the walls, backs facing outward. Only three works were spared this ominous arrangement: one was a portrait of Johnson by his friend Close, which was perched in a room at the top of the stairs, Johnson’s arresting, rectangular gaze locking your eyes to his.
A few days prior, Johnson had told his friend, the artist Coco Gordon, that he was working on “the biggest work he’d ever done in his life,” but refused to give more details.
As Frances Beatty Adler, director of the Ray Johnson Estate, recalls in How to Draw a Bunny, “He wouldn’t leave you a note—he’d leave you a work of art that contained within it meaning.”
But if his death was a part of his work, then was it also a prank? In the documentary, his friends seem divided on the topic. Jeanne-Claude asks, “Was that the last joke he played on the art world? To die without a whim?”
“It was not a joke,” Christo responds firmly.
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