----
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
John Suiter: When Ray Johnson committed suicide from eastern Long Island's Sag Harbor bridge in January 1995, he had been known as "the most famous unknown artist in New York" for 30 years. He had first been called that in the New York Times, on the occasion of an exhibition of his work in Manhattan in 1965. For another artist, such a review, in such a publication, might have heralded his entrance into the mainstream. But Johnson embraced the role of "famously unknown", with all its contradictions, and deftly maintained it for the rest of his life.
Even now, he remains an underground figure. But that may be changing. His posthumous career, no longer encumbered by the actual presence of his unpredictable genius, is beginning to take shape "behind glass", as curators like to say. The recent and extraordinary documentary about his art and life, 'How to Draw a Bunny', has been an international success. He is being categorized as a precursor of the post-modernists for his richly allusive collages ("moticos" he named them); also as the inventor of Mail Art (art circulated using the post); as a Pop Art pioneer (see his mid-1950s Elvises and Lucky Strike logos); and as a life artist and master of the throwaway gesture in performance events he liked to call "nothings" (as opposed to "happenings"). And a following that is almost a cult has developed around Johnson on the Internet and in wannabe mail-art networks in the wake of his "Friday the 13th" suicide - or "Rayocide," as it has been called.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Even his closest friends and associates agree that Johnson carefully planned his death, performed it as his final "nothing", and that it was, in retrospect, a long time in the making. The legend of Johnson, who was born in Detroit in 1927, goes back a long way - at least as far as Black Mountain College in North Carolina, matrix of the post-war American avant- garde, where Johnson arrived in 1945 and soaked up the influences of Merce Cunningham, Jean Varda, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller and, particularly, Joseph Albers, John Cage, and sculptor Richard Lippold (who became his lover, and with whom he later lived in New York with Cage and Cunningham). But Bill Wilson, writer, collector and long- term friend, insists: "Ray was already on his way to drowning when I met him in 1956." Johnson was then living in Dover Street, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, and Wilson remembers seeing an early drawing of Johnson's "with dotted lines leading from the shore out on to the Brooklyn Bridge and then down into the water."
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
On Johnson's last afternoon, he drove from his home in Locust Valley, Long Island - where he had lived for the previous 25 years - to the village of Orient, far out on the island's North Fork. Johnson had moved from Manhattan to Long Island in the summer of 1968, after a traumatic 48-hour period which included the shooting of his friend Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanas, his own mugging at knifepoint later the same night, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy the next morning. He never moved back to the city. Instead, from Locust Valley, he conducted his ever-expanding "New York Correspondence School".
Johnson had been a creative and prolific correspondent from high school, when he first included drawings and collages along with written words in his letters. As his network of friends grew to include other artists - and eventually everybody who was anybody on the New York art scene - he began to orchestrate paths for his correspondences. He sent off drawings with instructions to add something to the work then mail it on to someone else. Eventually, the piece would return to Johnson. By 1968, when the activity first acquired its New York Correspondence School tag, his hundreds of correspondents included Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, James Rosenquist, John Cage and the de Koonings.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
At 4pm on the day of his suicide, Johnson arrived in Orient and called his old friend Bill Wilson. "Tell Toby this is a mail event," he said to Wilson. "Toby" is Toby Spiselman, Johnson's closest female friend, another old comrade from the mid-1950s in New York. Spiselman was for years the "acting secretary" of the Correspondence School. Johnson himself had spoken to Toby the night before, and although he did not mention suicide, she sensed that "something was wrong". Mostly, Ray had been intent on conveying his deep feeling for her in what he apparently knew were his parting words. "Toby," he had told her as he hung up, "remember you are loved."
Wilson, too, had the feeling on the phone that he might be talking to his friend for the last time. "This was not a sudden eruption of melancholy," said Wilson shortly after Johnson's suicide. "Ray planned this carefully as a rational adult." Wilson is convinced that "from at least a year before the act. . . Ray Johnson intended to die on a Friday the 13th in his 67th year."
With his call to Wilson complete, and his pieces to Spiselman mailed, Johnson left Orient and drove five miles west to Greenport, where he took a ferry to Shelter Island, a 10-minute ride across Greenport harbour. Shelter Island is not huge; by car, it can be crossed in 15 minutes. At Sag Harbor, Johnson checked into the Baron's Cove Inn. The motel's records show that he signed in at 5.24pm. Under "Company Name", he wrote "New York Correspondence School". He was in the room for 90 minutes. He brought no luggage. He made no phone-calls.Shortly before 7pm, Johnson drove from the motel to the village, a one minute trip, and parked his old Volkswagen in front of the 7-Eleven store, about 30 metres from the bridge.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Johnson left his car, climbed the grade to the bridge's pedestrian walkway on the cove side and followed the railing to the middle of the span where it arched slightly to a height of about 7m above the water. The tide was rising beneath the bridge, flooding in from the open bay into Sag Harbor Cove. And then what? All we really know is that Johnson was alone. Did he drop himself over the side "as he would drop an envelope into a letterbox", as Bill Wilson imagines? Or, as another friend, David Bourdon, envisions, did he spring from the rail like the suicidal tramp in Renoir's farce, Boudu Saved from Drowning (reportedly one of Johnson's favourite films)?
Ray was alone on the bridge, but under it two teenaged girls were hanging out, and they heard the splash when he hit the water. They saw him bob to the surface and watched as he began swimming out towards the center of the cove. It was weird, but he seemed OK, because he never yelled for help. He was doing the backstroke. Still, they hurried to the police station two blocks away to report what they'd seen, but the office was closed. They couldn't find a patrol car, either, and none of the grown-ups they encountered on the street seemed overly concerned with what they told them. Finally, the girls went to a movie.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Johnson's body washed back and forth ("floated the measureless float", in Walt Whitman's phrase) on two high tides and two ebb tides during the course of the moonlit night, and was discovered shortly after noon the next day in bright sunshine, drifting face up in the water, fists clenched and arms crossed over his chest like a Pharaoh, 50m inside the mouth of Sag Harbor Cove.
Ray Johnson's suicide doesn't fit in with any of the usual suicide statistics that I know of. He is not known to have made any previous attempts on his life. Manic depression, culprit in the suicides of so many painters, poets and composers, does not seem to have been a factor, nor was he terminally ill. There were no drugs or alcohol in his blood, and an HIV screen test found no trace of infection. As for being driven to the deed by debt, when Sag Harbor police looked through his wallet on the shore of the cove, they found sixteen 100 dollar bills. On his last morning, Johnson had withdrawn $2,000 from a bank account of $100,000. Altogether, he had some $400,000 in savings.
If there had been any doubt that Ray had staged his death as a "piece", those doubts vanished upon entering his Locust Valley home in the days after his suicide. Throughout the house, there were stackings, pilings, groupings, placements of objects, hints, messages, all imbued with Johnson's spirit, all personal; "Ray's visual poems", according to Bill Wilson. The effect was of an elaborate composite suicide note in Johnsonian code, magnified by the fact that no one in his final audience had ever before seen the interior of Ray's home.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Beatty recalls that it was "like going into Ali Baba's Cave, with everything set up like a series of 3D puzzles. You could tell that he expected us to be there; he expected all this to be seen. There was his line of neckties, with an Andy Warhol tie poking out; his pairs of shoes in a row, with part of a phrase written on one shoe, and the second part of the phrase on the other shoe; all the fake eyelashes that he used in his collages were lined up perfectly on his work table. Each room had something. One of the most powerful experiences was walking into a small room full of framed works, all turned against the walls except for one huge portrait of Ray's head - by Chuck Close - staring out at you.
"It was eerie, but not surprising, that he put so much thinking into the way the house should be found. On the other hand, it got to the point where I wasn't sure if I was looking at `a piece' or just an example of Ray's usual obsessive orderliness. Clearly much of it had been set up just before his suicide; other things had been organized as they were for years. There was this long accretion, like archaeology, and after a while it was impossible to tell where one level left off and another began. Down in the basement, all his tools and rakes and wheelbarrow were organized just so, but then there were also piles of leather Duchampian valises.
"We had to take it apart because his heirs had to sell the house. I didn't want it to be dismantled; neither did Ray's gallerist Richard Feigen. It could have been left just that way as a Johnson museum. But over a period of weeks, we took it all down. But we created a grid showing the position of everything and catalogued every piece in every box and videotaped every wall and surface in each room."
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
----
*
p.s. Hey. Only five more days until (1) the blog posts will be things you've never before again and (2) I will see you live again after so long, assuming I haven't managed to slip in a p.s. or two while on the road. I wrote this on May 6th, so I have no idea. Ray Johnson is great. Be with him.