> contents / How not to look at dark collages in a well-lit basement / Mark Bloch /

Dark collages in the basement. Ray Johnson back underground where he may or may not belong. a couple of dozen ray Johnson collages and several objects and letters are displayed in the basement of the Feigen Contemporary gallery on west 20th street between 10th and 11th avenues in Chelsea. Visitors are greeted on the stairway to this show called How To Draw A Bunny, (named after the movie about Johnson to open at the Film Forum in about 2 weeks time for a duration of two weeks) by a Ray Johnson bunny head announcing twice, one above the other: "Ray Johnson Museum Ray Johnson Museum". This two-pronged effect is reminiscent of the World Trade Towers being struck and then crumbling in unison. Two acts which a judge recently declared, for insurance purposes, must be seen as one. Or more accurately they reminded me of a photocopy and it's twin brother (or sister) a photocopy. Where is the original? it washed out to sea with Ray Johnson, a true original.

I was relieved this opening was very nice but wasn't the usual, high-fallutin', high profile Ray Johnson affair. The past few times we've seen opening s of Ray's work, lots of art world superstars attended but this was just a few homegrown friends and fans. Low key. Leave your umbrellas and glamour at the door. I am sure the superstars will show up eventually to kneel at the altar of the latest installment of the Ray J Death Knell but last night it was rainy and while many familiar faces from Ray Johnson's Art World were in attendance, many wonderful people in fact, terrific enthusiastic friends of Ray as well as newcomers to the um... fold... it lacked the angle of spectacle that past post-Ray J Ray J events have emanated. it was refreshing in a somber, rainy, black and white sort of way.

The work. The work is interesting, as always. Very interesting choices by Muffet Jones, the Johnson archivist and curator of the show, assisted by the rest of the staff at Richard Feigen's organization, which represents Ray's Estate. The highlights: Some interesting looking portraits when I first walk in. Silhouettes. Tall, skinny profiles from the seventies. Again, two pronged. One person's visage inside another, with Ray's thoughts stuffed into their heads. The one I recall best is Lou reeD and James Rosenquist, I believe the pairing was. Long and skinny on what looked like masonite and not in Johnson's trademark walnut frames. But I didn't have my glasses with me so I couldn't read the wall tags or see the details. Don't look at a Ray Johnson show without your glasses. I will have to return to see detail. But I could see that each one was taller than his portrait work that we've seen in the past. Maybe 30 inches by about 12? I don't know. I need to go back. from far away I was struck by the grayness of these collages. the blackness with a little whiteness. They emitted an overall dark gray feel as did the whole show.

Except for that "mail art wall". I call it the mail art wall because it was Ray's bunny heads displayed "mail art style". Which means haphazardly overlapping... wild and crazy... and overwhelming. I wasn't crazy about the display. I would have liked to see the entire wall made into a giant poster without all the distracting white paper edges bumping into neighboring white edges. it was something like 100 or less 8 1/2 x 11 pieces of paper butting into each other for a good purpose- to show the depth and breadth of Ray's bunny heads. Mostly black ones but some red and blue ones as I recall. Mostly photocopied but some written on with pencil or magic marker bleeding through to the other side of the page. Many seen before but some not. Mostly vertical but some horizontal in format. Mostly big- filling up the entire sheet of copier paper, others small, in bunny "lists" like his work that has been seen ad infinitum in the past. I actually enjoyed seeing this work, I just didn't love the way it was presented here. A personal choice. Maybe after 20 years I am growing tired of "mail art style". But perhaps it is good that the world is finally catching up with Ray and the mail art aesthetic that followed him. For some people, used to seeing his collages viewed museum style, framed under glass and one at a time, this is a new way to think about art. Like a wall of Sean Landers doodles.

In addition to the many bunny heads, an amusing standout on this wall was an altered newspaper clipping of Willem De Kooning drawing at an easel. Ray had made it look quite convincingly like his old friend Bill was drawing a large bunny head. it was reminiscent of Rauschenberg's ground-breaking Partially Erased De Kooning Drawing.

There were a series of 1966 collages, quite striking in their simplicity. Two in particular were just simple abstract shapes as his work of that year tends to be. Others had trademark Ray-isms: hand lettering and fragments of commercially printed objects. But the two in the middle had bicycle-seat- like shapes in the background, accented neatly with abstract "tesserae"-- those little sandpapered tiles he so uniquely utilized. To their left the bicycle-seat pieces were complimented by a couple of Marianne Moore tricornered hat shapes on other collages, perhaps earlier. I didn't catch the dates on those.

Perhaps the best part of the show was a vitrine in the middle of the room with some letters to people like the poetess Marianne Moore and Mort Janklow, the literary agent that enjoys Ray's work. I had seen an exasperated Mr. Janklow explain the process of commissioning a work from Ray in what I have seen of the movie, How to Draw a Bunny. I have not yet seen the entire film. but the vitrine complimented the Marianne Moore collages and the stories Janklow told because here were the very letters described where Ray kept changing the rules of his multi-faceted portrait of Janklow. A friend I met at the show who was not very familiar with Johnson's work commented that the letters seemed mean to her. I explained that they were meant to be arcane, baffling and absurd rather than mean but as I ruminated on her comment, it became interesting precisely because she does not know much about Ray and his history. so at face value maybe they are a bit mean. After a second viewing (but without my glasses), the letters to Moore also had a terse and uncomfortable vibe to them.

Ray's edginess may have steered his career in curious directions but it never hurt his art. overall the show is magnificent because Ray was. The vitrine contained a few knock outs. One was actually a kind of series: 3-dimensional objects festooned with carefully-rendered 2-dimensional bunny heads on their surface. It reminded me of the n-dimensional analysis that Duchamp's work has received, comparing the 2-d Large Glass with the 3-d Etant Donnes. Such comparisons were not lost on the mysterious Mr. Johnson. So these altered softballs and boxes and a buoy for Joseph Beuys were intellectually stimulating but, more importantly, they just looked cool.

The other wonderful thing in the vitrine was the first exposure to the late photographs of Ray Johnson. I have been wondering when the world would notice that Ray was very serious about making photos with disposable cameras during the last year or two of his life. He did it diligently and with the purposefulness that he brought to his collages and his mail art. In fact, he didn't see those two activities as being separate and the same could be said of his photos. I was very happy to see them displayed at last, almost 8 years after his death. Again, playing with notions of surface and depth, he would take "throw away" pictures of two dimensional objects in three dimensional settings. The four or five displayed here included pointy black and white triangular vectors positioned atop a tombstone or a wide shot of a pair of bunny heads leaning against one of many graves in the frame. In one snapshot he had cut a hole in a bunny head and awkwardly poked his own face through.

Another real stand out in the show were 4 or 5 very long bunny head images on board. One said "Jasper Johns" and was elongated as if manipulated on a xerox machine but it was hand painted in black and had a few raised surfaces also in black. Another said "Eric Satie" with long red cilia dancing from the surface from his years of making combs and also reminiscent of his work with eyelashes. These longer works adorned corners around the room and were quite effective in both their execution and placement. In the very back of the gallery was a piece that was on the back of the invitation to the show, "Ray Johnson Collages One Million Dollars Each" next to the now well-known photo of Ray Johnson "moticos" stuck in the floorboards of a friend's loft.

Finally, as I left the gallery to ascend the staircase, I caught a bunny head mounted on the underside of the stairwell that did not say simply the name of Robert Desnos, the Surrealist poet. It said, instead, "Send to Robert Desnos". An interesting and deliberate change for one of Ray's disembodied bunny heads. Furthermore, the "send to" hare noggin was sandwiched between two black and white movie star photos. One, below, was a sharp focus life-sized headshot of Janet Leigh screaming for her life in the shower scene in Psycho. Above was a gentle, benign slightly fuzzy image of a young androgynous face with hair slicked back like James Dean, comprised of large halftone dots from being blown up to the same scale as the Janet Leigh pic. Ray had died at sea. The woman in Psycho died in the shower. Robert Desnos died in a refugee camp during World War Two. Who was the person at the top of the sandwich? The How To Draw A Bunny filmmaker John Walter informed me it was River Phoenix. So there we stood watching River rising from Ray's buried ashes toward the ground floor.

This show is worth a visit, even if you have to go out in the rain. Eyeglasses optional.

Copyright © Mark Bloch - markb@echonyc.com