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

The flip side of your silliness, which usually entertained and charmed us, was that you could be really irksome. You knew precisely how to harass and annoy your friends, and you spared no effort in making life a purgatory for certain dealers and collectors. Anyone who attempted to buy or sell your work without your knowledge risked offending you. When works of yours changed hands in the "secondary" market, you pestered the dealers and collectors who were involved in an effort to find out the sale price. Although a few dauntless dealers expressed interest in representing you in recent years, you left them dangling. Richard Feigen maintained that you were "a lot like Cornell," that you "didn't want to sell anything."

When your artist-friend Peter Schuyff attempted to buy a collage from you, you became typically evasive. "If you want a $500 collage, send me a check for that amount," you told him; "if you want a $10,000 collage, send me a cheek for that." You showed Peter several works, and he liked one priced at $2,000. He then apparently had the "gall" to send you a check for 25% less than that. When you delivered the unframed piece, he was dismayed to see that you had lopped off 25% of the work. What, he asked, was he supposed to do? "Well, it's three-fourths of a collage," you said, "get three-fourths of a frame."

Although you had a hearty appetite for fame, you seemed increasingly dissatisfied by the quality of esteem that was accorded you. The major museum retrospectives and million-dollar auction sales never happened for you. If the international art world had agreed to historicize you as the one and only father of mail art, would you have been any happier? If you had been granted a greater share in the enormous reputation and fortune that inundated your Pop-art pals, how would you have handled it? You gave away so much NYCS mail art over the decades, bedeviled most of the dealers and collectors who were interested in you, and found so many ways to sabotage whatever market remained for your "serious" collages, is it any wonder that the art world's money-changers and reputation-launderers avoided you?

Hints of despair occasionally tumbled out of your envelopes, but always modified by your ironic humor. In 1989, you sent me three photocopied sheets, each with big block letters arrayed against a background of collaged news clippings. They respectively announced: "Ray Johnson collages one million dollars each," "Ray Johnson letters to David two million dollars each," "Ray Johnson free art works three million dollars each." A 1993 mailing contained five photo-copied drawings of paired, cartoonlike heads. One face in each drawing in inscribed with your name; the other is labeled with one of the following names: Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Bob Rauschenberg, Jim Rosenquist and Andy Warhol.

You sounded perfectly fine during our several telephone chats during the early part of last January. It was I who called you in what turned out to be our last conversation, and I did detect a bit of irritation or impatience, but your curtness was hardly what I would take as evidence of suicidal depression. Other friends of yours, including Chuck close and Duncan Hannah, also spoke to you in the days prior to your departure and they, too, thought you were your normal self. We knew you led a fairly active social life on Long Island and saw lots of people. We also knew that you had developed an interest in photography and went on nature walks along Long Island Sound every afternoon. You were an avid reader, borrowing many books from the local library, one of the last being Alain Borer's Rimbaud in Abyssinia, which you found absorbing.