Ray Johnson, Morgan Library review — banal, poetic, astonishing photographs by a man of mystery

When Ray Johnson jumped off a bridge on the East End of Long Island in 1995, the police chief was baffled: the more people he interviewed, the less he understood. “Everyone had a story about Ray Johnson, but nobody knew the whole Ray Johnson,” he said. “He would allow you just so far into his being, and that was it.”

The investigation continues. The man the New York Times once dubbed “New York’s most famous unknown artist” is recognised (if at all) for his collages. Now the Morgan Library has uncovered a stash of Johnsoniana that’s even more obscure, an archive of 5,000 snapshots taken with 137 disposable cameras between 1992 and 1994 and stored away in boxes. Curator Joel Smith displays a well-chosen bouquet of these in no particular order, because how do you organise a spirit full of spontaneity and randomness?

Like most of his output, Johnson’s photographs are at once banal and poetic, casual, hermetic and intermittently astonishing. He dispatched some of these whimsical, fleeting creations, one at a time, to a select audience of celebrated strangers and distant correspondents. Here’s a lyre-strumming statue embracing an oversized Oscar Mayer sausage; there, a cut-out silhouette of the artist’s head set against a log on a beach, a layered portrait of death, both long ago and imminent.

He developed a graphic signature, a stencilled bunny with erect ears, saucer eyes and a trailing nose, which he emblazoned with other people’s names (Pablo Picasso, Harpo Marx, Erik Satie) and propped up in various locations. Each of these roaming rabbits signified that Johnson had been there and now wasn’t; they are self-portraits of the artist as absence.

His originality and his circle of acquaintances (friends might be a stretch) made him a known unknown, a prolific and well-connected man who quietly dissociated himself from the commercial art world but kept flitting about the edges. It’s exciting, if disconcerting, to see his work in precisely the way he wished we wouldn’t. In 1958, the dealer Leo Castelli suggested mounting a show of his collages (a few of which are now on view at the Morgan). Johnson walked away without a word. “There was no perusal of the meaning of these pieces,” he later grumbled. “They just wanted them as objects. ‘Aren’t these nice! Put them in a museum with nice lighting’ . . . I wanted to paste things on railroad cars. Nothing to be seen by anyone except coyotes.”

So how do coyotes look at art? Johnson’s visual koans tempt the human viewer to decode them, yet he also said that the whole point of his work might be “not to have meaning”. Best to just relax and enjoy the enigma with canine acceptance.

Johnson was born in 1927 in Detroit and first surfaced in the art world as a student at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s. There, he studied with the Bauhaus guru Josef Albers and met the composer and maverick philosopher John Cage, who became a lasting influence.

He moved to New York in 1948, flirted with Abstract Expressionism and then destroyed his early dabblings. Existential soul-baring just wasn’t his MO, and he mined popular culture instead. Well before Warhol (whom he eventually got to know), Johnson was charmed by Elvis glossies and Lucky Strike wrappers. In “James Dean in the Rain”, assembled between 1953 and 1959, Johnson juxtaposed two identical shots of a drenched Dean with writhing black forms and totemic symbols that only the artist could decipher.

In the early 1960s, Johnson invented what he half-jokingly called the New York Correspondence School. He sent someone a photo or a letter-sized collage and asked that person to pass it on, creating long, semi-secret chains of possession. He wasn’t averse to the occasional spectacle, though. Once, he had a helicopter drop foot-long hot dogs like leaflets on the crowd at an arts festival. “I was quite shocked to hear that people ate the hot dogs,” he remarked. His long-suffering dealer, Richard Feigen — vexed to receive a bill for aircraft hire and frankfurters — described Johnson as one of only three artists who “inhabited a different planet from the rest of us”.

Johnson was mugged at knifepoint on the same June 1968 day that Warhol was shot, and the double trauma drove him out of the city. He moved to a grey clapboard house with white shutters in Locust Valley, Long Island. There he all but cut himself off, hoarding his work in boxes stacked on the floor and communicating with the far-flung and famous by telephone and mail.

Those cartons later disgorged photos that teeter between a rigorously abstract sensibility and a figurative language grounded in pop iconography. They rhyme and pun and dodge and dart, mixing clichés and surprises with pristine elegance. Johnson specialised in wry, slightly contorted self-portraits. One, from 1992, shows him lying on a beach alongside a dead horseshoe crab, the creature’s globular top and spiky underside mirroring his shaved pate and stubbled chin. Some viewers might even mistake the inert crab for an electric . . . Ray.

In another stroke of light magic, Johnson shoots his own shadow on a nearly white slab of concrete so that he appears to be juggling a manhole cover like a balloon. It’s hard to distinguish substance from shade. The heavy iron disc resembles a weightless sphere, and Johnson himself has dissolved into a two-dimensional projection.

Death stalks many of these scenes, sometimes by suggestion, sometimes more explicitly. He frequented graveyards and, on one eerie occasion, came across a “Raymond” headstone in a Johnson family plot. The shot he produced there is one of his anti-self-portraits.

Smith warns against reading Johnson’s work for omens. “It would be trivial,” he writes, “to hunt through the large, complex, often comical and always personal body of work for nothing more than a rebus suicide note.” And yet . . . A few weeks before his death, Johnson placed two unopened packages at the edge of a pier as if they were savouring the sunset together. A few minutes later, in a second photograph, one of the boxes is plunging into the water below.

In a final image, we see him peer through a shop window at his own reflection in a mirror. He’s almost completely hidden by a woollen cap, the Instamatic covering one half of his face and, over the other, a sign with his signature bunny and the words PLEASE SEND TO ЯƎA⅃ ⅃IꟻƎ — “real life”, mirrored. Was he announcing his plans to vault beyond the here and now? Maybe. “I’m through with doing Nothing,” he remarked to his friend, the gallerist Frances Beatty, who had spent years trying to inveigle him into a solo exhibition and who today manages his estate. “Now I’m going to do Something, and then you can have your show.”

To October 2, themorgan.org