// R A Y   J O H N S O N //

Looking into the theme of ‘Mail Art’ and its place in historic and modern creative movements, the name Ray Johnson was a quick one to appear. the twentieth century artist was popular following his activity as part of the downtown art scene in New York in the early 1950s. Johnson painted geometric and abstract images heavily influenced by his previous professor, Josef Albers. The crucial thing about Johnson’s work was not just how he created it but later his destruction of the same pieces. Most of his pieces were destroyed in his personal process of creating collages which resued this original artwork. In 1954, these small-scale collages were labeled as “moticos” and featured irregular shapes and images from popular culture. Some of these celebrity influences included Elvis Presley and Shirley Temple as well as regular department store models. Much of Johnson’s work in this area anticipated Andy Warhol’s pop imagery which started to appear in 1960. Despite artistic similarities, Johnson’s approach to work and fame was drastically opposed to Warhol’s and he was known for dodging it being labeled as “the most famous unkown artist” by Grace Glueck in the New York Times (1965). His deliberate elusiveness was a popular debate and added to the interest of his character. 

Much of Johnson’s work started a modern understanding of performance art such as his tendency to share his moticos around New York with strangers in the streets, train stations and cafes. These performances were even sometimes self recorded in order to collect public reactions to his work and each intricate creation. Much of the work used in these sessions of self publication were later supposedly burned.

Jonson reused his moticos by cutting them up and creating new tiny compositions with them which could then be inked on, painted and sanded to create new pieces of work. These new collages were extremely complex and had an underlying emphasis on structure repetition and semi-geometric forms and shapes. Johnson can easily be seen as an early instigator of performance art acting in other’s pieces and creating his own such as the staging, “Funeral Music for Elvis Presley”. 

“In his typically self-deprecating way, Johnson would say that he did not make Pop Art, he made “Chop Art”.”

In 1995, Johnson was witness dressed in black as he dived off a bridge in sag Harbour, Long Island before backstroking out to see. This suicide was heavily speculated and many aspects of his death seemed calculated such as the repetition of the number 13. The date of his death, the 13th January; his age at the time (67, 6+7=13) and the number of the motel he had checked into earlier that day, 247 (2+4+7+13).

“There was much speculation amongst critics, scholars, admirers, and law-enforcement officials about a “last performance” aspect of Johnson’s drowning. After his death, hundreds of collages were found carefully arranged in his Long Island home.”

Ray Johnson is still considered one of the major artistic innovators of the second-half of the 20th century within the critical community but his work remains mainly unknown and heavily under-appreciated by the general public. Some of his relevant pieces are selected below and will be used as starting points for further experimentation with my postcard images.

Working from these ideas, I intend to print a selection of my post card images and effectively graffiti them with block colours and shapes in a similar style to Ray Johnson’s work above. To do this, I will print them on standard 80gsm paper and use ink pens to illustrate them with words and text. I printed four of the postcard images onto sheets of paper with a white border which allowed me to work slightly around the image as well as directly onto it. I also printed all eight of my stamp experience to work with as a test influenced by this artist. I started by drawing rough doodle-like images directly from Ray Johnson’s work onto a plain sheet of paper before starting on the images. The sayings, words and illustrations used are all heavily influenced – if not directly lifted (such as the legs below) from Ray’s own postcard projects as part of his Mail Art series.Below are a series of small tests on my own images. They were printed out on a normal copy printer so are not a high quality and were manually deformed with pens and ink markers. 

I also used this experimentation technique on some of the stamps I created in photoshop after they were printed out. Again, they have been manually manipulated rather than digitally and feature a mixture of original ideas and influenced doodles for Johnson’s own project work.