Sarah JM Kolberg on Ray Johnson

Posted on September 10, 2014September 19, 2014 by Rachel Nackman

Ray Johnson, BOO[K], ca. 1955, artist’s book: collage on cardboard cover with hand-sewn binding; handwritten text and drawing in black and red inks on cut paper pages, 8 x 6 inches (20.3 x 15.2 cm), closed. © Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co. / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Ray Johnson’s BOO[K] (ca. 1955) exemplifies the intellectual investigation of many homosexual artists of the period—mobilizing words’ polysemic qualities to challenge and undermine dominant culture’s power to dictate meaning. An interest in the multiplicity of meanings is central to the work of Johnson’s fellow homosexual artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Jess, and Cy Twombly, for whom, in the highly homophobic atmosphere of the Cold War, the prospect of authorial expression was fraught with danger. As such, they created highly developed strategies for mediating expressivity—self-conscious strategies, which in every instance called into question the very notion of the authorial.

This hand-crafted artist’s book, consisting of cardboard-mounted collaged images and black and red inked letters on translucent cut paper. Johnson’s use of translucent paper allows words on underlying pages to show through both sides of the page, enabling readers to create their own readings; subverting the traditional notion that the author fixes the meaning and the reader merely receives it. In its ability to be read forward or backwards, and on multiple pages simultaneously, BOO[K] decenters the conventional linearity of reading. Alternate readings are always present, which one can either attend to or ignore.

Johnson called his collaged works moticos, an anagram of the word osmotic, which conveying ideas of permeability and transmission emphasizes the works’ fluid verbo-visual qualities. In BOO[K], Johnson employs the paper’s transparency to play with notions of primary and secondary content. For example, on the right-hand page, behind the words Mother has a picture book we can read the ghosted words from the following page: May I see and mother? We can interpret this phrase as a request to see mother’s book or as an inquiry about the presence of the mother. Through strategically placed cutouts, Johnson alternately obscures and reveals text, evoking a tension between hidden and visible meanings. On the right-hand page, a rectangular opening has been cut into the page such that the fragment boo, in red ink, is revealed from the underlying page, while the k, in black ink, is present on the topmost page. In dividing the word in this fashion, Johnson ironically echoes these artists’ lived experience: bifurcated and differently legible according to one’s point of view.

The use of language as a tool of power was viscerally palpable to Cold War-era homosexuals, for whom this identificatory label was not merely descriptive, but a scarlet letter used to police and persecute them. Certain terms, such as heterosexual, became coterminous with normalcy and others, such as homosexual, coterminous with deviance. Revealing the dynamics of the process by which these ideological mystifications took place was a central problematic for these artists. In making clear that words mean differently in different contexts, they sought ways to demonstrate that all such labels – and the qualities they name – are mythologized as natural and enduring, rather than being recognized as the shifting and arbitrary product of social construction. As Slavoj Žižek explains, “one of the fundamental stratagems of ideology is the reference to some self-evidence – ‘Look, you can see for yourself how things are!’ ‘Let the facts speak for themselves’ is perhaps the arch-statement of ideology – the point being, precisely, that facts never ‘speak for themselves’ but are always made to speak by a network of discursive devices.”¹

BOO[K]’s physical qualities literalize these artists’ interests by showing how language itself is never fixed but instead a layering of meanings upon which the reader draws. BOO[K] is literally read through its pages, making visible the way in which a text always draws upon references that are external to it, becoming, as Roland Barthes claimed, a “tissue of citations.” By highlighting each individual’s agency in meaning-making, BOO[K] facilitates the reader’s recognition that vision is neither passive nor purely receptive—that what you see depends on where you sit. For homosexual artists in the Cold War consensus culture, this possibility was key toward their larger goal of destructuring a homophobic culture organized around a very particular angle of vision concerning the “natural.”

1. Slavoj Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek and Nicholas Abercrombie (London, Brooklyn: Verso, 2012), 11.

Ray Johnson Biography

Ray Johnson (b. 1927, Detroit, MI; d. 1995, Long Island, NY) studied at Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1945-1948). The most recent retrospective of Johnson’s work opened at Raven Row, London (2009), and traveled to Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Recent solo exhibitions in 2014 have been held at Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, New York; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; and The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Group exhibitions have been held at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2009); Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, Germany (2011); the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. (2011); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California (2012); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012); the Brooklyn Art Museum, New York (2012); the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York (2012); the Musée Denys-Puech, Rodez, France (2012); the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois (2013); The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (2014); and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York (2014). More information about his work can be found at www.rayjohnsonestate.com.

Sarah JM Kolberg Biography

Sarah JM Kolberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo specializing in the American and French post-WWII period, with additional areas of focus in narratology, queer theory, and queer subjectivity in experimental film. Her dissertation will focus on the Nouveaux Réalistes. She has won numerous awards as both a writer and independent film producer, holds a joint MA in English and Film, and will complete her MFA in Media Study this year.

Cat Dawson on Ray Johnson

Posted on September 10, 2014September 18, 2014 by Rachel Nackman

Ray Johnson, Untitled (Man in Hat with Metallic Thread), 1960-1962, string and printed paper collage on paperboard, 4 x 3 ⅜ inches (10.2 x 8.6 cm). © Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co. / Photo: Ellen McDermott — Ray Johnson, *Untitled (Man in Hat with Metallic Thread)*, 1960-1962, string and printed paper collage on paperboard, 4 x 3 ⅜ inches (10.2 x 8.6 cm). © Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co. / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Best known for his work in collage and correspondence art, Ray Johnson remains an enigmatic figure in the post-war American landscape. His use of time- and community-based media—such as objects sent through the US Postal Service—added a dimension to his work that differentiated him from his cohort. Correspondence art resonated primarily with the practices of a slightly older generation of artists, including John Cage, whose work followed principles of conversation rather than communication, the former implying egalitarian involvement and the latter more closely associated with dictation. Ever curious about meaning, Johnson often turned to puns and homonyms as a way of introducing multiple simultaneous meanings into a picture. In Untitled (Man In Hat) from 1960, Johnson uses a found image of a man wearing a hat, onto which is superimposed a spool of thread. Though the spool looks like a collage element, it is in fact native to the printed image; Johnson has added only the thread, which appears to be wound around the spool in the picture. This is a classically Johnsonian conceit: a visual play between what is appropriated and what is inserted, and also a linguistic rhyme (head/thread).

Two later collages in the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, suggest Johnson’s exploratory engagement with the historical evolution of meaning in fine art. Both pieces, undated but likely made in the 1970s, use images cut from art catalogues of the time. One of these collages features a reproduction of an 1804 self-portrait by French Neoclassical painter Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, excised from a magazine and mounted on cardboard. Circular holes have been cut out of the picture and cardboard, echoed by similar holes cut into the strips of paper collaged over various parts of the composition. A collage element affixed toward the right edge, also cut from a magazine, bears a picture of a hand painting a circular shape red, with the words, It’s easy, printed below.

Ray Johnson, Untitled, n.d., magazine and paper collage, 8 ⅝ x 8 inches (21.9 x 20.3 cm). The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. © Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co./ Photo: The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York — Ray Johnson, *Untitled*, n.d., magazine and paper collage, 8 ⅝ x 8 inches (21.9 x 20.3 cm). The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. © Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co./ Photo: The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Ray Johnson, Untitled, n.d., magazine and paper collage, top: 1 ½ x 7 inches (3.8 x 17.8 cm); bottom: 4 x 7 inches (10.2 x 17.8 cm). The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. © Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co./ Photo: The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York — Ray Johnson, *Untitled*, n.d., magazine and paper collage, top: 1 ½ x 7 inches (3.8 x 17.8 cm); bottom: 4 x 7 inches (10.2 x 17.8 cm). The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. © Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co./ Photo: The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Ingres, one of the early forebears of Modernism, is renowned for his renderings of complex spatial relationships, which served as examples for later generations of artists, including Piet Mondrian, whose work Johnson repeatedly referenced. Indeed, the other collage on view here features a photograph of Mondrian in front of Broadway Boogie Woogie, arguably his most famous late painting. Johnson has cut Mondrian’s body out of the picture, leaving only the artist’s outline to suggest his presence. By making Mondrian conspicuously absent and by partially covering Ingres’s face, Johnson puts particular pressure not just on the relationship of artist to artwork, but also on the authorial presence and visibility of the artist within a finished work of art. If we can understand the inclusion of Ingres as Johnson’s protest against dismissal of artworks on the basis of form without consideration of conceptual depth, the physical absence of Mondrian can in turn be understood as Johnson’s investigation of the presence of the artist – or lack thereof – and its effect on the terms of reception for a particular work or idea.

Ray Johnson, Janis Joplin, 1971, mixed media, 22 x 16 ½ inches (55.9 x 41.9 cm). © Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co. / Photo: Ellen McDermott — Ray Johnson, *Janis Joplin*, 1971, mixed media, 22 x 16 ½ inches (55.9 x 41.9 cm). © Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co. / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Johnson’s primary medium was collage, but unlike in the objects discussed above, the majority of his collages comprise a cut-and-pasted combination of found images and the artist’s own repetitive drawings—of snakes, for instance, or of bunnies. By excising images and words from their usual contexts and re-inserting them in other, less frequently used spaces, Johnson coaxes these fragments to assume various new meanings – a practice that opened the door to alternative interpretations. This working method became central to Johnson, Rauschenberg, and other post-war artists. In Janis Joplin (1971), Johnson uses the theme of Joplin’s death that same year as a referent, but the effect of the resulting “portrait” transcends both Joplin and death. It is Johnson’s presence—made known through the hand-drawn moticos and sequences of numbers and shapes—that seems to dominate, not that of his ostensible subject. Johnson is his moticos: we know him by these visual signs, rather than by his biography. The use of imagery linked primarily to Johnson in a work about Joplin in effect collapses the two. What Johnson calls to mind, here and elsewhere in his work, is the way a subject is constituted not by some essential fact, but by its relationship to other subjects. In foregrounding this paradox, Johnson enables the possibility of new and different thinking around identity and its networks.

Ray Johnson Biography

Cat Dawson Biography

Cat Dawson is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo specializing in art of the American post-war postmodern. Her particular interests include the interplay between text and language, conceptual art and theories of the body, mid-century painting and the sexuality of abstraction, and psychoanalysis. Her dissertation is on sexuality and difference in American post-war painting.

Mary Mann on Ray Johnson

Posted on July 3, 2012September 19, 2014 by Rachel Nackman

Jack wrote a letter.

He spent days writing it. First, the salutation. Then, the closing. And then, Jack puzzled over the middle. He dreamed of what he could write. He considered all the possibilities. He ended up writing his letter backwards, which is how he liked to read magazines. He pasted in some pictures from an actual magazine for emphasis.

He signed the letter very carefully and folded it into thirds. He selected a green felt pen to address the envelope, and he sealed it with a bitter lick of glue.

Then Jack walked to the United States Post Office, taking a left on Fifth Avenue and a right at the bottom of Madison Square Park. On the way he gave sixty-seven cents to an old homeless woman with a McDonald’s cup in her hand. He stepped out of the way of a tot, on a trike, who was followed closely by a hovering father. He saw: a young couple kissing on a bench; many people on cell phones, striding this way and that; a woman stroking a squirrel on its side.

The line at Shake Shack snaked around the southern section of the park. It was cool and dark inside the post office. Jack waited in line in order to buy the stamps in order to mail the letter that he had taken so long to write.

“Anything liquid, perishable, or potentially hazardous?” asked the postman as he took Jack’s letter.

“Just words,” said Jack.

The postman put a stamp on the envelope and took Jack’s money. Then the letter went into the big blue sorting bin, and Jack went back outside and began to walk. He heard: sirens, trucks, people talking, cabbies honking. He smelled: falafel carts and taco vendors, ladies’ perfumes, car exhaust.

Jack thought about his letter. Born in the big city, it would soon ride in its first truck, bound for its first flight. It would soar high above: the bustling cities and gentle green hills of the East; the long expanses of wheat and corn and soybeans of the Midwest; the mountains and valleys and deserts of the West.

The plane would land in the Far West, and Jack’s letter would travel in another truck that would rumble along beneath the shade of tall redwoods and sequoias. Red and green, red and green: the whole landscape would be like a Christmas postcard. The whoosh of quiet. The clean smell of dirt. The spicy smell of pine.

Jack’s letter would be placed in a mailbox on the side of a dirt road. Jack leaned against a storefront on 13th Street and closed his eyes. A particular pine grew next to that mailbox—a Ponderosa pine, very tall and straight, red and rough, with thick clusters of needles shooting out of its high branches. The tree, when you buried your face in the furrows of its bark, smelled like vanilla cake.

Ray Johnson Biography

Mary Mann Biography

Mary Mann (b. 1985, FL) is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Columbia University, New York. She is the associate editor of the book collaboration Woman in Clothes (Penguin, 2014), and her writing has appeared in The Believer, The New Inquiry, The Rumpus, The Hairpin, Matter, Salon, and New York Magazine.

Vaughn Whitney Garland on Ray Johnson

Posted on September 30, 2011September 16, 2014 by Rachel Nackman

Inside the System: Ray Johnson as New Media Artist

Conventional definitions of digital media posit the ever-expanding interconnectivity between people as the crowning achievement of technology.¹ These same definitions often celebrate the Internet as the place where anyone—at any time—can communicate with everyone else. Not only does the Internet enable access to the world in real time, but it also facilitates and improves participation and communication among users. Many of the outspoken theorists who have been instrumental in defining the field of new media make a clear distinction between digital and traditional media—separating the world along technological lines. According to this line of thought, new media began with the development of computers and with the appearance of code, database structures, and online user collaboration.² This argument suggests that new media is defined fundamentally by interconnectivity and access–to information and to other users. Yet I counter not only that the term “new media” should encompass works created before the computer, but also that the mail art project devised by the artist Ray Johnson should be recognized as a primary example of new media art.

Between 1972 and 1994, Johnson challenged the concepts of ownership and originality by looking to a community in order to produce finished works of art. Johnson’s mail art practice resulted in artworks centered on his personal and shared communication with others. He would send handmade collages to friends, often with directions for the recipient to forward the work to an acquaintance after making modifications to the original object. Among other elements, these artworks included photocopies, found objects, newspaper and magazine clippings, written or typed notes, and detailed drawings. As a body of work, Johnson’s mail art manifests a web of interconnectivity and participation within a community—a practice initiated decades before the development of Internet culture. The series of correspondence currently on view in the exhibition Art=Text=Art: Works by Contemporary Artists at the University of Richmond’s Joel & Lila Harnett Museum of Art reveals how Johnson sought connection with others through a process of creative collaboration.

Johnson’s mail art fostered a collaborative relationship between sender and receiver, occasionally implicating the passive recipient as a creator in turn by asking him or her to add information and send the work to a third party. Through this participatory activity, Johnson highlighted the interface between various subjects and related references, as well as that between participants and subsequent viewers. In this way, his project anticipated the hyperlinks that now direct an online viewer or reader in search of further information. Within computer culture, hyperlinks allow us to search by jumping from place to place, discovering new information as we move through various outlets. Hyperlinks thus facilitate the construction of webs of information based on complex layers of association, enabling users to extend exploration beyond an original or singular object of interest. Similarly, Johnson’s intermixing of visual and textual references encourages the viewer to look past the object. Interpretation of this the work involves accessing external information from mass culture, as well as delving into the dialogue between sender and recipient(s).

Much like contemporary artists who use online resources, databases, community chat rooms, or listservs to create and present works of art, Johnson also located his power in the appropriation of a large-scale municipal service. Rather than relying on a digital system of interconnectivity, Johnson’s work required an analogous system of physical connection, namely the United States Postal Service. Through the USPS, everyone is accessible to everyone else. Only an address or PO box number, along with an intermediary in the form of a mail carrier, is needed to establish a tangible connection. Johnson’s use of the mail service as a creative tool sheds light on how much these connections mattered to the finished product.

Because interconnectivity was clearly essential to Johnson’s mail art, it is instructive to consider its bearing on how the work is interpreted. In order to find meaning in the work, the viewer must examine Johnson’s use of referential media, including script, drawings, abstract found objects, photographs or photocopies. In one work included in Art=Text=Art, Johnson began with a sheet of letterhead, reading “Shelley Duvall Fan Club,” which serves as a base of information on which to build the work of art. This particular piece includes ink-stamped references–hyperlinks in analog–to the Paloma Picasso Fan Club and the Claude Picasso Fan Club. Combined, these three references to popular figures serve to codify this particular work of art, encouraging viewers to make mental connections between the sheet at hand and these exterior subjects. Since Johnson addressed and sent these particular items to an art collector, Wynn Kramarsky, we can imagine that Johnson was additionally commenting on his own fan club of sorts—those who acquired his work.

In this and other examples from the Kramarsky correspondence archive, the participatory aspect of Johnson’s work is clearly evidenced and can be considered within the context of the “shared experience” typically associated with new media. In Johnson’s mail art, the shared experiences are the initial receipt of and the (possible) additions to the object. Yet Johnson’s work is also shared beyond the interaction of the sender and recipient, through the postal service. The mailing of the work facilitates the relationship of the artist to his recipients, and in new media art, this type of relationship has evolved in proportion to the expanding ease of high-speed communication. The shared community additionally relies on an abstract language: that of the nebulous “database” built of mass cultural associations. Passage of Johnson’s work through the postal service leads to the artwork’s manipulation in the physical sense, yet it also effects the decoding of the artwork vis-à-vis each individual’s access to the collective cultural understanding.

Johnson asks the viewer or receiver to “plug in” to a database in order to decode his work. His instructions encouraged sampling and mass-culture mash-ups that reconfigured collective definitions of popular topics, as exemplified by the Shelley Duvall Fan Club letter. The artist often included hand-made logos and symbols, like the cartoon bunny seen in the same collage. (This bunny is often referred to as a self-portrait, frequently serving as Johnson’s signature or commercial insignia.) The information included in each piece is in fact part of a code, a way of accessing the universal language shared by the participants. In order to understand what it means to be in Shelley Duvall’s Fan Club one must know, and be excited by, the work of Shelley Duvall. This means that the viewer must have direct knowledge of what it means to be Duvall’s spectator or must be in a situation such that he or she can understand what fan clubs are about in general. Either way, the recipient must be plugged into the databank: he or she must possess knowledge of the underlying structures that define the text and images used in the collage.

In approaching Johnson’s mail art, the recipient is asked to rearrange the scattered elements of each piece in order to decode the message. This act of decoding—actively discerning links between media and associations—is a primary characteristic of new media technology. When technology is used to combine media and associations, the resulting message is both understandable and presentable to others. The ability to link seemingly unrelated constructions is, from my perspective, what defines a practice as new media. While digital theory tends to place new media exclusively within the context of the computer, a more nuanced definition of the term should also be applied to artworks in traditional, pre-technological media. Ray Johnson’s work is a textbook example of an analog medium–collaged mailings—constituting a landmark technological achievement within a certain period. Digital theorists have commented on the unique ability of the Internet to foster connectivity, yet it is critical that we recognize how Johnson’s mail art achieved quite a similar thing. Once a recipient opens a Ray Johnson envelope, they have the opportunity to dive into a wide range of links in order to access its meaning. Through this interactive process, the viewer becomes a critical collaborator and generator, in that he or she retains the key to a system of understanding shared by a distinct community. Mail art practice is built, in part, on this shared understanding and on the continuous “logging” of the world by artist, sender, and receiver. While Johnson initiates the activity, it is the network that guides the creation of an original work of art. It is within this system that Ray Johnson’s work takes form, thus drawing the artist into alignment with the contemporary movement of new media.

Vaughn Whitney Garland received an M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2003. He is a practicing artist and is currently a Ph.D. student in the interdisciplinary Media, Art, and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University. More information about his work can be found at http://www.vaughngarland.com/.

Axel Wilhite on Ray Johnson

Posted on June 29, 2011September 19, 2014 by Rachel Nackman

Ray Johnson, Correspondence Archive, 1972-1994, mixed media on paper, dimensions variable. © Wynn Kramarsky & Ray Johnson Estate, Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co. / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Fever Dream about Ray Johnson

It seems like everyone has a story about Ray Johnson. I also have a story about Ray. It’s not a story in the traditional sense–not a “One time, Ray and I…” sort of story–because he was long dead when I met him.

The context of my Ray Johnson story is that I was asked to write a fictional response to Ray Johnson. I had never heard of Ray before. But suddenly I was inundated with images of his work. And then something unexpected happened, which was that I got sick, and while I was sick, I had a dream about him. That’s my Ray Johnson story.

The dream, as dreams tend to be, was a collage. This one had five parts.

The Part with the School:

The dance class at the Correspondance School was called “Steps to Christ,” and the twelve steps were clearly diagramed on the chalkboard. I sat by the window because I wanted a view of the grass, and beyond the grass, a river with a bridge, and beyond the river, two peaks. (Later, I would see an envelope in an art gallery, elaborated by Ray with two bunny heads labeled “Himalaya” and “Heralaya.”) On every desk there was a nametag. I pinned my nametag to my chest, and my name was Art Baud. Ray arrived late. I knew his cue ball head from his picture, and his face–cheerful and sly as if he were wearing some kind of mask. He was twice the size of everyone. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. It looked like he’d gone swimming in all of his clothes. The teacher was waiting patiently with her hands folded on her desk; she wasn’t going to start her lesson until everyone was seated. The problem was that Ray was too big for any of the chairs. He was standing, trying to think of what to do. The tension in the room pulled the air taut. Finally, Ray lay across the whole back row of desks, and everyone cheered.

The Part with the River:

Instead of going on with the lesson, the whole classroom stood up (still cheering) and carried Ray out onto the campus quad, where the sun was shining and the birds were flitting over the grass. The grass gave way to the riverbank. Something about the quality of the day assured us a dip was going to be the perfect thing. We set Ray down next to the bridge, where lots of curious objects had washed onto the sand. Ray reached down and picked up a nutcracker in his huge hands and smiled, and then everyone stripped. I was soon surrounded by hundreds of naked celebrity artists, and I felt very self-conscious. Ray was already splashing around in the shadow of the bridge, huge and smiling. The artists began running single-mindedly towards the water, but before they could reach it whatever was holding their bodies together was disappearing, and they were scattering across the beach. Where they fell there were now more objects: ropes and combs and potato mashers and bicycle seats. I picked up a box and tried to collect all the pieces, but it felt futile: there was too much to pick up. When I saw that Ray was beckoning to me from the water, I jumped in.

The Part with the Telephone:

The water was so cold I thought my heart would freeze. Was I still holding the box? I suppose I was. I sunk down into the black water, clutching the box to myself for warmth, and when I opened my eyes everything was red, like a darkroom with a red lamp. In fact, that’s exactly where I was: in a darkroom, where a string of red photographs was suspended above red plastic chemical tubs. All the photographs were of mandrake roots. With their insinuations of legs or trunks or ears, some of them looked liked elephants while others looked like fetuses or rabbits. I took the photographs off the line and put them into the box. I realized a telephone was ringing somewhere. I reached over and picked up the handset. It was Ray’s voice. He wanted to know why something wasn’t in “the show.” I was confused. “Bring the beach box you’re holding!” said Ray. I said I would, even though I didn’t understand. He hung up. I was incredibly confused. There was the sharp noise of cracking celery, and I turned around.

The Part with the Auction:

The face of a horse-sized rabbit hovered in space, crunching down on a carrot and thumping the floor with its six-foot-long feet. It was the biggest rabbit I’d ever seen, and Ray sat on its back, holding on by its ears. He was inside some kind of ring, the kind you might find at a horse show. This was an indoor stadium and there were hundreds of people milling around the stands. Ray reached over the fence, took the beach box from my hands, and rode the rabbit into the middle of the ring. The audience took their seats. The lights went down and a spotlight came up on Ray. We were waiting to see what would happen next; it was so silent. Then, a man next to me raised a white paddle. Instead of Ray speaking, it was the huge rabbit doing the talking in Ray’s voice. “I have two hundred,” it shouted. “Do I hear two-fifty?” A woman in a broad-brimmed white hat raised her paddle. “Two-fifty! Three hundred?” said the rabbit. The man next to her raised his paddle, and the numbers kept going up and up. It seemed everyone had a paddle and everyone was using it. Even I had a paddle. I raised it into the air. Ray pointed at me in the audience, and a sudden spotlight blinded me. There was a hush in the stadium. “He’s bought it now, ladies and gentlemen!” Bought what? My stomach dropped. What did it cost?

The Part with the Letter:

I ran to a place that was simultaneously all the places I’d ever lived. The living room, for example, was a mix of childhood and adulthood, and the walls were striped in two shades of green, glacial and avocado. I sat down at the kitchen table. I was forcing open an envelope with a pen. Inside there was a Xeroxed profile of a man’s head; its jaw was missing. For upper teeth, someone had written in tiny architectural caps, “PLEASE DRAW SOMETHING IN THE SPACE PROVIDED.” I looked through the window and drew what I saw: a man swimming in the water in January.

Ray Johnson Biography

Axel Wilhite Biography

Axel Wilhite (b. 1985) is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer. He holds a BA in Mythology and Literature, New York University, and an MFA in Fiction Writing, New York University. His interest in the intersection of literature, culture, and visual art has led to numerous collaborations and experiments. He is an avid practitioner of kendo, or the art of Japanese swordsmanship. He has shown his paintings in the United States and abroad.