Ray Johnson, the reclusive genius artist at Blum Gallery in Los Angeles

Ray Johnson, Black Hat with Figure, 1966, mixed media collage on illustration board, 74.3 x 45.7 x 3.8 centimeters, photo: Evan Walsh

RAY JOHNSON
BLUM GALLERY, LOS ANGELES
until May 4

By PETER FRANK May 4, 2024

Ray Johnson’s excellent and crucial oeuvre – and the artistic network he managed to forge around that body and the sensitivity behind it – proves to be one of the driving forces in art (and not just Western art) of the later twenty years.^e century. Johnson himself, however, did everything he could to mute his own interest. Well-educated in art history, he remained fascinated by the art world throughout his life, but insisted on remaining on the periphery, where, like some avant-garde metajournalist, he could process gossip, consumer advertising and other information into coded objects, cryptic images and scribbles rendered with the fluidity of cartoons (which he loved) and graffiti art (which he anticipated) – without causing a fuss.

Ray Johnson, Issa, 1968, mixed media collage on illustration board, 19 7/8 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches (50.5 x 29.2 x 3.8 centimeters), photo: Evan Walsh

Or at least he thought so. In fact, Johnson was one of the most prominent recluses in all of postmodernism, and with his effective invention (as the New York Correspondence School) of mail art he became a fixture in the art history he loved. For all his self-effacement and complete avoidance of personal attention, Johnson was widely praised in his own time as an innovator, both in art and in art society, and as an artist himself of no small genius.

That genius, laboriously cultivated and deftly exercised, is richly demonstrated in the room full of works on paper, which span forty years and, incredibly, constitute Johnson’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, nearly thirty years after his death. His was a witty take on modern life, mixing a restless search for pleasure and entertainment and the company of others (real and imagined, current and historical) with a dense, rattling, but exquisitely ordered pictorial architecture designed to play peek-a-boo . with the viewer’s own need to connect. The modality combines craftsmanship, camp and intimate collegiality, and goes against the heroic attitude of the post-war art world in New York – but also sees such macho as something exciting. Johnson wasn’t incarcerated (certainly not from his urban environment), but his artwork was.

Rene d’Harnoncourt Dollar Bill, 1970, mixed media collage on illustration board, 20 1/2 x 29 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches (52.1 x 74.3 x 4.4 centimeters), photo: Evan Walsh

Ray Johnson, Untitled (Just Another Shoe), 1979 – ca. 1991, mixed media collage on illustration board, 57.2 x 57.2 x 4.4 centimeters (22 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 1 3/4 inch) photo: Hannah Mjølsnes

Ray Johnson, Untitled (Johnsong), date unknown, mixed media collage on masonite, 18 3/8 x 15 3/8 x 1 3/4 inches (46.7 x 39.1 x 4.4 centimeters), photo: Evan Walsh

A successful graphic designer in his day, Johnson relied on texture, rhythm and line to describe and drive his name-bending, movie fantasy agglutinations. Johnson, a close friend of Andy Warhol, played fanboy in Warhol’s cinematic fantasyland; but where Warhol continued and softened the big screen of the Abstract Expressionists, Johnson – who had studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College – displayed a tight formal control and scalar modesty that sent less a message than a series of messages. – to whoever is on the other side of the gallery, the post office or the notebook.

Johnson’s collages are silly and serious, lusty and down-to-earth, spirited and somber, dosed in solitude and dazzling in disco, and above all they are well conceived and well composed, clearly guiding the eye from item to item, no matter how banal . or ridiculous those items may be. Each work is an invitation to communicate, to be communicated with, and to continue the dialogue or to withdraw from it and look at it from the edge. Johnson’s playfulness and plaintiveness both characterize even the smallest of his works. No matter how much Ray Johnson clung to the fringes of the art world, he could never disappear. W.M