Game without a Prize

2010_9_18 A Game Without a Prize
Modern Art has been an umbrella for all kinds of marginal individualists. Some are professional artists, some are artists self-taught, and some, strictly speaking, aren’t artists, more like people who were fellow-travelers with imagination. Arthur Craven comes to mind as the latter. He was a poet-boxer, a self-styled Dadaist, and a nephew of Oscar Wilde which made him feel he had the right stuff to hang out with artist and poets. Craven got hooked up with Mina Loy, a poet, who was big in Bohemian circles. In any event, most of these marginal figures were compulsive about their creativity, but they made art more for personal satisfaction than worldly rewards or even recognition. Making things provided energy for self-transformation. It was art for the artist’s sake; indeed, it was anti-public art, where communication was not an urgent issue. It was doing, the process, which drew them into art, the uplifting energy which was the goal and the benefit. Some of these people were the off-spring of Dada and Surrealism, with Marcel Duchamp the trail blazer and chief role model.

Several years ago I saw a documentary about a prototypical eccentric artist, Ray Johnson (1927-1995), an American artist who was a seminal figure in the Pop Art movement, performance art, and a pioneer in using language in his collages. Because he was so often on the cutting edge he was known as “New York’s most famous unknown artist.” His cult status in New York was probably was behind the making of the movie about Johnson. It was made by John Walter and Andrew Moore. They titled the film, “How to Draw a Bunny.” My friend Paul Fako was the first to tell about the film which I then ordered from NETFLIX. Johnson started out an abstract painter after attending the most progressive college of the early post-war era, Black Mountain College. But he didn’t stick with painting very long and eventually devoted most of his attention to collage and to becoming the underground artist extraordinaire. He scorned the gallery scene, calling his involvement with art “a game without a prize.”


There was a small scale, stay-at-home hermetic character to his collages and “mail art.” The latter was another of his innovations. He would send small colleges by mail and ask the recipient to add something to the image and send it on to someone else. He was one of the first to try an interactive art. His work was a species of introverted doodling fed by an eternal fountain of playfulness. He had a unique ability to turn everything into a pun, a joke, a performance, or an image. For example, and this was in the film: a broken bottle of instant coffee became “Coffee Break,” spontaneous throw-away joke, art that exist primarily in the mind. These kind of encounters, like the broken bottle, Marcel Duchamp tagged “ready-mades” which were “a sort of rendezvous,” something the result of “the long arm of coincidence.” Johnson’s signature image was a (sort of) bunny head, hence the title of the film. His friends enjoyed having Ray around because he was an amusing fellow and you never knew what he might say or do next. Like Duchamp he excelled at “breathing.”

Unfortunately, on June 3, 1968 Ray was mugged and attacked in lower Manhattan. It was, oddly and coincidentally, the same day that Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas and just two days before the Robert Kennedy was gunned down. Did he see this event as more evidence of synchronicity? We don’t know but we do know he moved to Glen Cove, Long Island, where he continued to work hard but at the same time he became increasingly more reclusive and cultivated his role as an outsider. He turned down several show opportunities in New York.

His death occurred on June 13, 1995. He was found face-down floating in Sag Harbor. Authorities figured he jumped off a nearby bridge. Some of his friends are convinced it was a “performance suicide.” They noticed a strange numerological coincidence. He was 67 when he died, with the two numbers adding up to 13. His hotel room’s number was 247, again the numbers adding up to 13. And of course June was the month he was assaulted, Warhol was shot, and RFK was killed. As far as I could find out he was in good health. He left no will and to everybody’s surprise his bank account had $400,000 in it, just one more mystery about Mr. Johnson. The money was distributed among 10 cousins.

Arthur Craven had a similar mysterious death or at least disappearance. He rowed off into the Gulf of Mexico by himself and was never seen again, nor was his body found. Like Elvis, maybe he is alive somewhere, dreaming of Mina Loy.