Exhibition Review: Ray Johnson "WHAT A DUMP"
Installation view, Ray Johnson: WHAT A DUMP, David Zwirner, New York, April 8 – May 22, 2021. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Written by: Andy Dion
Ray Johnson, a founder of the mail art movement, has a timeless air, honing and transgressing cultural bookmarks and timestamps in much of his work. Accessible and raw, if a bit gritty, Johnson’s work feels relatable. What keeps Johnson so hot today is his attitude — an outsider one that is both traceable in the American pop cultural zeitgeist and dogged fascination with what drove him.
Ray Johnson, Untitled (Lucky Strike Lucky Strike May), 1979-1987; 1991 © Ray Johnson Estate
Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate
Curated by Jarrett Earnest, WHAT A DUMP is an exhibition of Johnson’s never-before-seen work at David Zwirner and the first collection of his work to celebrate his identity as a seminal queer artist. The exhibition's title references a curiously maintained collage in the late artist’s Locust, New York, home, which displayed a Who Killed Virginia Woolf line of the same name, calling attention to the mess. Earnest illuminates Johnson’s tendencies as a purveyor of culture in his art. By conjuring images of James Dean, Arthur Rimbaud and Shelley Duvall, Johnson’s visually busy collages become coded and filled with memories of the screen and celebrity.
Ray Johnson's home in Locust Valley, New York, 1995. Photo by Frances Beatty. Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate
Ray Johnson, Untitled (Dear Shirley Temple, Geldzahler), 1956-1992 © Ray Johnson Estate
Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate
Although the titular DUMP may represent a messy life, the exhibition feels like so much more. Each artwork poses a unique mess of paper containing massive depth. There is an overwhelming presence of faces and eyes, real or implied, often familiar or famous. Johnson collages photographs and illustrations of daily objects and commodities and fashions them into cherubs, amorphous clocks and abstract messes of color and texture. By sourcing images from what seems to be mass media, Johnson hodgepodges familiar themes into his work and subverts them into his own dream children. His curious process of sampling and cutting up is even borrowed from his idols Arthur Rimbaud and William Burrows and serves as a benchmark to the punk rock ethic of creative destruction. Perhaps recalling the voracious DIY ethic, Earnest made a zine to supplement the exhibition.
Installation view, Ray Johnson: WHAT A DUMP, David Zwirner, New York, April 8 – May 22, 2021. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Looking through WHAT A DUMP feels oddly voyeuristic in that Johnson’s work surrounds the viewer like a mail art trompe-l'œil, and each piece is filled with countless tiny parts curated and created from a personal place. Collage is a medium characterized by temporality, the source materials often scavenged from magazines or illustrated with the purpose of sealing everything together in a permanent unifying vacuum. Ernest claims this exhibition says more about Johnson than any other of his. On Johnson’s identity as a queer person, he told Cool Hunting, “There are memorials to Judy Garland and pictures of Liza Minnelli. It is a queer text. I didn’t have to make an argument for it, I just needed to let the work be available on its own terms.” Looking at the room at David Zwirner is like peering through a diary’s windblown pages, naked and splayed out, revealing.
Ray Johnson, Untitled (Liza Minnelli with Pink Paint), n.d. © Ray Johnson Estate
Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate
