Ray Johnson | 'WHAT A DUMP' at David Zwirner

Ray Johnson, Untitled (Lucky Strike Lucky Strike May), 1979-1987; 1991. © Ray Johnson Estate. Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate 

Detroit artist Ray Johnson formulated his primary medium, collage, into “moticos,” odd-shaped images stemming from magazines, comic strips, and advertisements. The work of Johnson largely shifted to representing pop-culture figures, in layering photographs, newspaper headlines, and fragments of lists. David Zwirner’s exhibition Ray Johnson: WHAT A DUMP focuses largely on never-before-seen collages and drawings of Johnson’s, in the first exhibition to represent Johnson as an influential queer artist. The archival material from The Ray Johnson Estate will be on display at the gallery’s location in New York, 525 West 19th Street, New York. The exhibition will be on display from April 8–May 22, 2021. Appointment bookings are available on davidzwirner.com. 

Flaunt had the opportunity to curator Jarrett Earnest about his collaborative process of curation for the exhibition and the nuanced meaning of queer inclusion in the art world. 

Installation view, Ray Johnson: WHAT A DUMP, David Zwirner, New York, April 8 – May 22, 2021. Courtesy David Zwirner.

What was the inspiration behind the exhibition and the process of curation?

I thought I knew who Ray Johnson was as an artist. There’s a lot of books and a documentary I saw when I was in art school. When the opportunity came up, I wasn’t sure about it, but I wanted to go and see what was there at the estate. When I went, it told a completely different story about who this guy was. It was really queer, dirty, almost mean, funny, and interested in sex and power dynamics. It was really actively involved with younger queer performance artists I never thought of him in relationship to. That was a story I wanted to tell and learn more about. All of the work has happened during COVID in a strange way that is a Ray Johnson methodology. I will ask someone to dig through a box in a house and find this weird cassette tape where they recorded all of their answering machine messages from Ray Johnson. I’m asking people to do things as a way to curate the show, which is not normally how I would do it. I started with a list of keywords like toilets, false eyelashes, and everything related to these keywords. They pulled in all of the things related to these keywords, so the process has felt very collaborative. 

Can you tell me more about the title of the show WHAT A DUMP?

It’s something I say all the time, because it’s very famously this quote from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where Elizabeth Taylor says “what a dump!” It’s a part of a lot of people’s vocabulary, and it’s a piece of gay culture from a different era. This work is so queer, but why have I never heard anyone frame it that way? Institutionally and in art historically, there are layers of homophobia, but also there is a knowledge thing where if you’re not a 60-year old queer man, you don’t immediately recognize the phrase “what a dump.” It’s two different kinds of knowledge confronting each other. 

Ray Johnson, Untitled (Dear Shirley Temple, Geldzahler), 1956-1992. © Ray Johnson Estate. Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate 

Installation view, Ray Johnson: WHAT A DUMP, David Zwirner, New York, April 8 – May 22, 2021. Courtesy David Zwirner.

How did you choose the themes of the show and decide what works you wanted to include?

It’s such a process. I started by reading everything I could about Ray Johnson and talking to people, being interested in his obsession with classical Hollywood cinema. Also his obsession with fan clubs. I would say “I would like to see everything that has a movie star in it, everything that has nudity in it.” They would bring boxes of stuff from storage with relevant things, and from there I refined. I found a letter Shelly Duvall wrote to him in the 70’s, giving him her signature so that he could use it. I casted a really wide net, and once I had a sense, I focused on the different relationships in the show. I have work from a lot of different artists in the show that relate to Ray Johnson. I narrowed down what story I wanted to tell, and I’ve been thinking about exhibitions as a narrative form. It’s how you tell a story through stuff. It’s not a linear story, which makes it so much more interesting. Especially with someone like Ray Johnson, who was anti-chronology. Peter Hujar had taken portraits of Ray Johnson and had put them in this book called “Portraits of Life and Death.” Death and portraiture are such big themes in the show, so I could bring in not only the Peter Hujar portraits but also the other portraits in that book. I used associative logic to choose things, but everything I chose has a strong and direct tie to the other things in the show. Sometimes that’s very literal, and sometimes it’s more of an emotional association.

What do you want spectators to gain from viewing the exhibition?

I think more than anything about Ray Johnson in particular as an artist, I want them to think that the history that they know about the art scene in America in the 20th century could be told differently. It could be a completely different story. Ray Johnson used his connections to other people as a material. You can’t do a show about Ray Johnson with just Ray Johnson art. His art was a communication with others in a dialogue. He structured that dialogue in different ways. There’s mail art he would put out in the world, people would do stuff to, and send back to him, in this collaborative process. There’s a lot of work that isn’t literal as a collaboration, but that uses Ray Johnson as a lens for telling a story that is a story about a lot of people. I would like people to gain that art is about making its own community outside the justification of a market or institution. Ray Johnson represents a lineage of artmaking that was radical in that it was about being a part of your life, and not needing anyone else to value it for it to be intrinsically valuable as artwork. The ethos is so strong in the outsiderness that is so antagonistic to the mainstream. That’s something we’re really primed for, for where we’re at culturally.

Ray Johnson, Untitled (BRUNCH), n.d. © Ray Johnson Estate. Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate 

How has studying Ray influenced your personal perspective on art?

It’s given me a lot of questions about what exhibitions are, and how writing about art works. Working on Ray Johnson is this perfect vehicle for thinking about those things differently. He was so dispersed in his art, into other people’s lives, mailboxes. I’ve gotten so many messages after the announcement of the show came out from people that have said they have things related to Ray Johnson they’d like me to see. It’s astonishing how much he lived in the world. To write the story of it asks for a different kind of exhibition and a different kind of writing, one that can deal with the fluid and intangible dynamics between people and things. This is so much about writing the story. Trying to track down all of the facts related to Ray Johnson is hard and improvable, but the holes within the story facilitate a certain kind of perspective. There is an arbitrariness of what I can prove and not prove, but a necessity of certain things to be lost for a different view of that story to become intelligible. If you knew everything, there would be too many details. Doing this show in the context of COVID made me realize how much we need others, and how art is always happening in that communal situation. It’s contemplating how you do an exhibition that does justice to that particular truth, which is that we are enmeshed in each other’s lives in a way that without that, there is no culture.

What is one of your favorite pieces from the show?

One of the things that has been very moving to me is bringing in the work from Jimmy DeSana. He took a bunch of photographs of Ray Johnson in the archives and then I realized a lot of those photographs were used in a queer magazine called File Magazine. Jimmy DeSana had photographed a lot of people in the show, and the way I knew about him was through a book he had on S&M called “Submission,” so I included some of those things. But dealing with the archives of his estate, I asked them to send me a lot of things I couldn’t see. She brought back work I had not thought about at all, photographs where he would take a picture, cut it up, light it with colored lights, and take another photograph of it. I realized that has so much to do with other things in the show, not only Ray Johnson’s approach to collage, but the lineage of queer collage. So much of Ray Johnson’s work is about covering the face, and in the DeSana photographs he had carved out eyelash shapes, peeled them up, lit them, and re-photographed them. He had a literal relationship to Ray Johnson, but those photographs and the objects themselves can talk to each other in space that is complicated and subtle. Art has to not just answer all of the different factual requirements, but beyond that has to take you somewhere you want to wrestle with.

Ray Johnson, Untitled (Basic Instinct Lucky Strike), 1993. © Ray Johnson Estate. Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate.

Installation view, Ray Johnson: WHAT A DUMP, David Zwirner, New York, April 8 – May 22, 2021. Courtesy David Zwirner.

Do you think the art world is doing a good enough job of including queer voices and perspectives?

It’s a really interesting moment. What I like about Ray Johnson is that it is art that is so deeply queer, but not just butch queens with nice bodies. The queerness is at the level of form, and the approach to reading. It’s the structure and subcultural reading by the associations and kinds of jokes. It’s really important to bring people like Ray Johnson into the way we talk about queerness right now, because it’s a non-photogenic queerness. It’s against representation. Current discussions about queer artists is about representation in artwork in a literal way, which has proven to be important, but that is only one strategy to have different kinds of voices in art. Ray Johnson is a queerness that is not hot, kind of gross, and kind of violent. I think that’s what we need. Queer art needs a much more rigorous and strange possibility for queerness outside of something that often gets reduced to something that is very literal. There have been times where I thought to myself in this exhibition, “Am I a crazy queer conspiracy theorist? How come I’m having to argue this for the first time?” No one denies it, it’s all there. Obviously something has changed to allow for people like me to do the work I’m doing at this level of visibility. The weight presses on you of how many stories you don’t know and how many stories you will never know. Much of the work of artists who died of AIDS got trashed. There’s no way to fully bring that story back.

Ray Johnson's home in Locust Valley, New York, 1995. Photo by Frances Beatty. Courtesy of the Ray Johnson Estate