Cosmic Ray: an open letter to the founder of the New York Correspondence School - letter to the late artist Ray Johnson

Art in America, Oct, 1995 by David Bourdon

Dear Ray,

A bright moon, a bridge over an inlet, two teenage girls down by the water, and an unexpected splash: the enigmatic sound incites the girls to rush up onto the bridge, where they catch a nicely illuminated glimpse of you backstroking away from them, not calling out for help. O.K., but it would have been a better story if they had jumped into the water to rescue you. Then your bizarre performance might have turned into an intriguing variation on one of your favorite Jean Renoir films, Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932). Boudu, a scruffy tramp, jumped off the Pont des Arts in Paris with every intention of drowning himself, only to be rescued and taken home by a kindhearted neighborhood bookseller. The would-be suicide repaid the act of kindness by creating havoc in the bookseller's life, seducing both his wife and maid. You, too, could have made life miserable for our samaritans and their families. Instead, the girls telephoned the police station, got a recorded message (closed for the night), and proceeded to a nearby movie house. (Maybe they had already seen Boudu).

At first, when I heard your body had been plucked from the waters of Sag Harbor, Long Island, I was convinced it had to be an accident: you had slipped on a rock during your daily "nature walk" along the shore. (But you were some 80 miles from your home in Locust Valley.) Later, I suspected you had met with foul play, even though the police found no evidence of that. The French verb decoller--to unglue, to disengage, to take off like an airplane--began rattling through my mind. Gradually, I accepted the probability that you--ever-cunning collagist, friend and confidant for 30-plus years--had made a premeditated decollage.

You were always a mysterious personage, resolutely withholding information on what made you tick. I was fascinated by you from the moment of our first meeting, through Andy Warhol, in 1962. The two of you, friends from years back, were on similarly skewed wavelengths, constantly scheming, tirelessly seeking amusement, always relishing life's absurdities. It was all witticisms, gossip and laughter back then. Andy was the lighthearted, bubbly one, while you tended to be the chortling prankster.

You viewed everything from an oblique angle, detecting correspondences between words, objects and actions that had seemed entirely unrelated until you discerned a pattern of clues that only you could string together. You sleuthed your way through a dense, fanciful world of analogies, anagrams, homonyms, rhymes, puns, all sorts of formal parallels and correlations. Your sense of humor could be conspicuously morbid, and tales of freaky accidents and weird fatalities made you positively gleeful. At the time, you were producing A Book About Death, an ongoing project of photo-offset drawings, pages of which you periodically mailed out to your friends. Many of your mailings contained intimations of catastrophe.

From the sheer plenitude of your mailings, it appeared that you devoted several hours a day to clipping and sorting an extensive inventory of printed paper ephemera, Scotchtaping some of the snippets together and stuffing them into "found" business envelopes that were imprinted with the names of various companies and institutions. The envelopes often revealed your careful attention to design, most noticeably in your typical use of five one-cent stamps, aligned in a row (first-class postage then cost only five cents). Occasionally, you went far out of your way to get a specific postmark: I remember how you once coerced me to accompany you to a post office in Red Hook, a not-so-visitor-friendly section of Brooklyn, where you wanted to obtain a cancellation mark intended to impress the recipient of your letter.

You annotated some of the enclosures in your mailings with instructions to "Please send to" so-and-so, as if the communication would remain incomplete until it was forwarded to a third party. Sometimes, this was your way to introduce people whom you perceived to have something in common. Thanks to you, mail art circulated among an ever-expanding network of correspondents. At some point in the early 1960s the name "New York Correspondence School" became attached to the mail art of your network of pen pals. The NYCS, you once remarked, was like a "fantastic, gigantic Calder mobile ... constantly in motion."

I, like many others, treasured your mail art because you crammed so much imagination and wit into a simple envelope, making us, the recipients, feel clever and special. Your send-ups of Andy consistently amused me. For one mailing, you Scotch-taped a dictionary definition of "celery" to a magazine reproduction of Andy's painting of Campbell's Cream of Celery, then paired it with a label from a can of Andy Boy Brand Celery Hearts. In another mailing, you taped a review of Andy's "Drawings for a Boy-Book" show to a portion of an envelope bearing a Boys Town stamp, and addressed it to me as "D. Boyrdon."

As you developed your correspondence art during the 1960s and '70s, you continually varied your formats and techniques, ranging from unique hand-scissored snippets, earmarked for a particular recipient, to printed "mass mailings." You frequently embellished your enclosures with one or more straight-faced rubber stamps--"COLLAGE BY RAY JOHNSON," "COLLAGE BY JOSEPH CORNELL," "ODILON REDON FAN CLUB," etc. With the proliferation of photocopiers in the '70s, you switched almost exclusively to mechanically reproduced images based on your original pen-and-ink drawings, which have a cartoonishly playful, deliberately naive character. Many of the photocopied drawings with their rows of "bunny heads" or wienie-nosed Kilrov-type faces are delightfully clever.