“Sincerely Most Sincerely”

By Mike PowellSeptember 22, 2014

“Sincerely Most Sincerely”

Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson, 1954-1994 by Ray Johnson

ONE NIGHT in January, 1995, the artist Ray Johnson parked his car at a 7-11 in Sag Harbor, Long Island, walked to a bridge next door, jumped into the water, and started doing the backstroke. Two teenage girls drinking Cokes under the bridge saw Johnson jump and ran to the local police station, but it was closed. Then they bumped into a friend’s mom, who told them not to worry about it, at which point they went to the movies.


One nice thing about hypothermia is that most people don’t realize they’re drowning. Police estimated that Johnson lived for about five minutes before going into euphoric shock. When they pulled his body off the beach the next day, they found $1,670 in the pocket of his windbreaker and no note.


Even before Johnson became a recluse, he was an enigma — someone who held his personal life at an impossible distance from his private one. He solicited attention from the art world but was stubborn about showing work; he made a lot of friends but confided in nobody. In 2002, the filmmakers John Walter and Andrew Moore made a documentary about his life called How to Draw a Bunny, in which a parade of well-known people — including the artists Chuck Close, Jim Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, and Christo — talk fondly about how little they knew him.


Which is interesting in part because he kept in touch with people almost constantly. In addition to a career’s worth of collage and painting, Johnson produced an unending stream of what he called “mail art,” combining doodles, diaristic asides, one-liners, and other creative detritus stamped and sent out into the world. Some went to friends; some went to acquaintances like the poet Marianne Moore, who Johnson seemed interested in primarily for her tri-cornered hat, the kind of cartoonishly reductive accessory any artist would love.


Very little of it says anything personal about Ray Johnson, at least not in the conventional sense, and yet reading it feels like a breach of privacy, like listening to a child whisper to herself under the covers. “DEAR BOB,” goes one to the artist Robert Warner, reproduced in a magazine called Esopus. “YESTERDAY I PEED YOUR NAME ON A BLUE BUOY,” under which is a simple sketch of a buoy with the name “Bob” written on it in dashes and dots. When I contacted a Johnson archivist looking for a rough estimate of how many of these things they held, the answer came back in cubic feet.


Johnson was a lateral thinker who used words to obfuscate more often than to explicate. He liked puns, homonyms, double meanings, and other varieties of intellectual slapstick — basically, anything that would interrupt a word on the way to direct communication. An early interview question about “art for art’s sake” was met with the answer that Johnson sure could go for a glass of sake. A single page reproduced in Siglio’s new Johnson collection, Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson, 1954-1994, looks something like this:


                                                       NO


 


                                            CHRO    LOGY 


Artists this funny are bound to be taken as jokes, which is a real tragedy. Even in his circle of letter-writers — first named the New York Correspondence School and subsequently renamed the New York Correspondance School — Johnson always seemed like someone playing a game only he knew the rules to, the sole inhabitant of a cold star. If mail was invented to collapse the distance between people, his expanded it to the point of becoming impossible to cross. (No surprise that he was also fascinated by fan clubs, which take a group of people with deeply personal feelings about a single subject and abstract them into a broad, nameless group.) Another stray paper in his archives reads, with solemn finality, “CORRESPONDENCE ART EXISTS FOR ONLY ONE PERSON. ME.” One of the last people to see him alive was his mailman.


For purposes of historical taxonomy, Johnson is considered a pop artist — someone who took the trash of the everyday and elevated it to the heights of the museum. Look mostly at his mail and writing, though, and Johnson becomes a lone wolf whose work feels chillier and more cryptic than most pop art but also more instantaneously personal. Footage from How to Draw a Bunny shows his tiny house after his death, brimming with boxes, ordered with the haphazard intimacy of a hermit with his own private system, which is in essence who Johnson was when he died. Even the documents in Not Nothing have a worked, palimpsestic look — something found after years of sitting forgotten on a shelf.


Nothing is billed as “Selected Writing,” which, in Johnson’s case, basically means “anything with words on it.” Arranged chronologically, it incorporates letters, annotated scribbles, personal manifestos, and unclassifiable bits that look an awful lot like comic strips sans narrative. (Think Matt Groening circa Life in Hell or the work of someone like Mark Newgarden, who slides between the worlds of comics and fine art with ambassadorial ease.) The argument of the book is that Johnson is an artist best understood not by what he positioned at the center, but through all the small things he shuffled off to the side. Or, to give some credence to the platitude thrown around throughout How to Draw a Bunny, that Johnson’s biggest project was his life.


Johnson used mail because it was fast, cheap, and ephemeral — everything that comparatively official “art” wasn’t. “There is obviously very little art work of merit in these letters and their presentation,” he wrote in 1964. (His estate seems to agree: they don’t buy or sell it.) In one of his most serpentine pranks, he mailed a series of letters to the library of the Museum of Modern Art who by charter are bound to put them into their archives — a tiny fuck-you not only to the institutional bureaucracy of the museum but to the fact that they’d never selected any of Johnson’s work on their own volition.


Now, choosing to send paper mail when you can send email is a consciously regressive choice, like crocheting scarves or pressing nut milk, the province of neo-homesteaders and antiquarians who believe life has become too automated for comfort. In the course of writing this, I Googled “mail art” only to realize as I wormed through the links that all the information was coming to me through a computer screen. The great organizational muscle of the web prevails. Everything outside it looks increasingly like esoterica: fun, harmless, irrelevant.


Had Johnson decided not to throw himself into Sag Harbor, though, it’s easy to imagine him flourishing online, where communication is even faster, cheaper, and more ephemeral, where people collect people without ever knowing each other, where actual human beings become distant, oracular presences — the kinds of avatars Johnson used correspondence to create for himself.


Mail art was both Johnson’s greatest legacy and his biggest distraction. (“I was unaware that he was doing a lot of artwork at the time, because all I saw was correspondence,” Roy Lichtenstein says in How to Draw a Bunny.) He never produced a single work that summarized some broader artistic idea; he never captured a moment. He was also a Buddhist who treated life as infinitely mutable, more the current than any one wave. Mail comes and goes but paintings — they hang on the wall forever.


Call it a hedge against the insecurity of being rejected (you can’t lose if you don’t play); call it a stance against the macho hubris of a definitive statement. Buried near the bottom of a letter in Not Nothing is this surprisingly candid passage: “I got very drunk and I cried and went into the bathroom to weep my eyes very red,” it starts. “I suddenly thought of all the children I met the Weidman kids two of them Tor & sister & the McCracken boys 3 of them Ruth Asawas kids and I thought gee they’re all going to be killed.” Which is to say that it’s also possible Johnson may have just struggled to be creative in the face of the fact that all things end.


I recently found my own collection of Johnsonian mail art in a shoebox during a move. Most of it was from an old girlfriend, sent at a time when email felt like some pathetic fad. Looking over it transported me back to my parents’ basement, where I used to sit cross-legged with piles of books and magazines discarded from the public library, collaging together cards for hours on end, a painstaking process to make something that looked like brain soup spilled across the page.


So much of what Johnson did was there — the jokes, the fragmentation, the implicit sweetness buried under layers of association — without being cognizant of who Johnson was. Most of all is that palpably teenage conflict of having so much to say but knowing that words are not enough.


Neither the girl nor I ever talked about the mail — part of the unspoken code of sending it was never asking if it got there — but it became essential to how we communicated. It was us (we made it) and not-us (unreflective of who we were when we were two people together in space). Through it we found a tertiary identity, born of imagination but as real as anything else. It made me think of something Johnson wrote about correspondence art, reproduced in Not Nothing. “At this moment I wish to be taken quite seriously,” he concludes. The paper is signed Ray Johnston, J-o-h-n-s-t-o-n, someone nobody — not even Ray Johnson — knew.


 ¤


Mike Powell is a freelance writer living in Tucson, Arizona.

LARB Contributor

Mike Powell lives in Tuscon, Arizona. He contributes to PitchforkGrantlandRolling Stone, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @sternlunch. 

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