Herakleitos 13 -- Odilon Redon 1881 (The Eye)

13.

Eyes and ears are poor informers to the barbarian mind.

Eyes (Herakleitos 12)

12.

Eyes are better informers than ears.

Hey Ray (Johnson) -- Bob Box Exhibition In Berkeley -- Proto-Blogging

 

Ray Johnson: Untitled correspondence from Bob Box Archive, 1988–95; mixed media; dimensions variable. From Esopus 16 (Spring 2011).


 
BERKELEY, CA.-

        The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents Tables of Content: Ray Johnson and Robert Warner Bob Box Archive / MATRIX 241, an exhibition exploring the seven-year exchange of correspondence between legendary artist Ray Johnson (1927–95) and collagist Robert Warner. The presentation features the contents of thirteen cardboard boxes given to Warner by Johnson in 1990.

        Warner, an optician working in New York City, first encountered Johnson’s work on a postcard sent by a mutual friend in 1988. Intrigued by the possibilities of corresponding with an artist, Warner initiated what evolved into an intense exchange between the two that continued until Johnson’s death of an apparent suicide in 1995. Over the course of their friendship Warner received hundreds of pieces of mail art from Johnson, ranging from collages to a piece of driftwood that was hand-delivered. On one occasion, Johnson Xeroxed a copy of Declaration of Independence and requested that Warner have it signed by John Cage—which he did. While they spoke on the phone nearly every day, Johnson and Warner met in person only seven times. At one of their rare in-person meetings, Johnson gave Warner thirteen cardboard boxes tied with twine, labeled “Bob Box 1,” “Bob Box 2,” and so on. Although never stated, the understanding was that Warner would preserve the boxes.

Ray Johnson (1927-1995)   


    
         In June of this year, fifteen years after Johnson’s death, Warner unpacked the boxes one at a time and cataloged their contents in public view through the course of an exhibition at Esopus Space in New York City. The opened “Bob Boxes” reveal an array of found objects, drawings, photocopies, and correspondence. Warner has described the contents as “a window into the world of Ray Johnson in the ‘70s and ‘80s: everything from signed-and-dated empty toilet paper tubes to a box that contained nothing but hundreds of envelopes that were addressed but never mailed.

Table of Content catalog



        Tables of Content displays all thirteen boxes and their contents for the first time on the West Coast. Warner has selected and arranged the letters, drawings, photocopies, and found objects like t-shirts, tennis balls, and random beach trash—the material of Johnson’s art—on an assembly of thirteen tables and surrounding gallery walls. Johnson annotated many of these things with personal codes, puns, and dark, irreverent jokes. Johnson’s work—collages, correspondence art, and performance events—remains mysterious and a bit hard to pin down. But his influences are obvious and surface repeatedly, among them Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Rauschenberg, and Elvis Presley. His collage approach was diaristic, a stream-of-consciousness flow through the matter and memory of everyday life, shifting from one topic to another, across all variety of things. Johnson once remarked, “My work is like driving a car. I’m always shifting gears.”

Ray Johnson in Josef Albers' class at Black Mountain College 1945-48 , Photo by Hazel Larsen Archer.


NOTE:


Fascinating to come across this Ray Johnson announcement in a semi-dream state sometime earlier or later this semi-night-morning. 

And as clever/strained exhibition titles go, Table of Content isn’t bad.  (Long experience devising titles for presentations, as well as subtly – I like to think -- effective subject lines for business letters, makes me sympathetic to titlers.)

The first thing I thought of – this must have been said before – is how strongly the mysterious Ray Johnson seems like a proto-blogger in his hermetic-in-plain-sight, serial, dreamy, collagist, diaristic work.

I have vivid Ray Johnson memories dating from my earliest days touring Manhattan art galleries.  My first personal encounter must have been when I  worked at the Richard Feigen Gallery on Greene Street in the spring/summer of 1971, although I’m sure I saw him several years earlier at the Leo Castelli gallery and heard someone mention his name. Of course he was a regular presence through published appearances (today we’d say postings) in the Village Voice.  Later at the Whitney, a colleague of mine (a strange lonely woman) turned out to be a Johnson correspondent, would-be accomplice and acolyte.


Johnson and his art were both quietly insinuating, disconcerting presences, impossible either to comfortably embrace or ignore.  SO much art material, sheer volume, and yet teetering on the knife- edge of, almost defining, ephemera.   You ask yourself: Modest proposal or a new sort of Grand achievement?


Now, to my surprise, I seem myself  to inhabit a portion of that same dreamy world.

The John Cale song, Hey Ray, linked below isn’t very good, although it’s always nice to see a Cale performance.  It’s as though Cale hasn’t worked Ray Johnson out yet either, or he thinks he has and gave up too soon, before saying anything incisive. So I’ve also included a recent Cale rendition of the Modern Lovers’ Pablo Picasso, which is much, much better.


Link: John Cale -- Hey Ray (2011)

Link: John Cale -- Pablo Picasso (2010)



        By the way, I love the final Ray Johnson quote in the press release about "driving a car" and “shifting gears.”  Johnson was from Detroit and I guess auto similes were in his blood, the way they seem to be for many Detroiters.

Ray Johnson

Ray Johnson, Nothing, 1993

Ray Johnson, How To Draw A Bunny, ca. 1955

Harbour Shark

 

You So High And Mighty --
You So High And Mighty --
You So High And Mighty --


You Run, Run, Run
And You Tumble Down
You Run, Run, Run
And You Tumble Down
You Run, Run, Run
And You Tumble Down!


HARBOUR SHARK!


Try Your Best, Nevertheless --
All The Good You Get --
Could Be Following You --
And You Know That It’s True!


HARBOUR SHARK!
 

(Grabbing For Yourself and Yourself Alone
Grabbing For Yourself and Yourself Alone)


HARBOUR SHARK!

 

 

 

NOTE:  




I don’t recall exactly when I first heard the Wailing Souls’ song Harbour Shark, but it was a long time ago and I’ve carried it around in my head as a touchstone ever since.


The record was first released by the Wailers’ Tuff Gong label in Kingston in 1971 under the artist name Pipe and the Pipers, which was an early styling of this great four-man harmony group led by Winston “Pipe” Matthews and Lloyd “Bread” McDonald.  As is well-known, the Wailing Souls and the Wailers (formerly the Wailing Wailers) were taught the rudiments and fine points of harmony singing in the same Trenchtown kitchen by the great Joe (“There’s A Reward”) Higgs.


In Jamaican parlance, a “harbour shark” is a greedy, rapacious person or, as one Yahoo Answers correspondent put it so well:  “a want all, the type of person who would want half of the cake, if it should be shared between five, quite similar to most politicians, trust me.” 


The Wailing Souls re-cut this song a few years later in a slower version, which is also excellent, but I prefer this one.  The group’s catalogue is astonishing in quality and range.  A good (if slightly chronologically/stylistically late) starting place to “nyam down” (i.e., “eat greedily” ) Wailing Souls music for those interested would be the Channel One “Best of the Wailing Souls” collection of mostly rockers-style material.


The harbour sharks pictured here doing their scary thing are bull sharks photographed in Sydney Harbour, Australia, a location that has had more than its fair share of shark attacks.


This song is so resonant, memorable and touching.  Melodies and rhythms may change, evolve, alternate, but Harbour Shark will always be relevant.

Music Link:


Harbour Shark -- The Wailing Souls (1971)

James Rosenquist's F-111 Exhibited In Original Castelli Gallery Wrap-Around Configuration (Worth Noting And Visiting)

  

James Rosenquist. F-111 (detail from Section 3). 1964-65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 sections. 10 x 86′ (304.8 x 2621.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange).



NEW YORK, NY. (MOMA)- 


        James Rosenquist designed the eighty-six-foot-long F-111 to wrap around the four walls of the Leo Castelli Gallery, at 4 East Seventy-Seventh Street in Manhattan. He began the painting in 1964, in the middle of a turbulent decade marked by the escalating Vietnam War. Funded by citizens’ tax dollars, the F-111 fighter-bomber plane was being developed as the USA’s newest, most technologically advanced weapon. Rather than celebrate its military might, Rosenquist used the plane as a symbol of the economic implications of war. As it flies “through the flak of consumer society,” he later explained, the jet’s sharply pointed fuselage pierces superimposed images of commercial products and references to war, such as the bullet-shaped hair dryer floating above a young girl’s head and the atomic mushroom cloud frozen behind a beach umbrella. Through its expansive network of colliding visual motifs, unfolding across twenty-three panels, F-111 questions what the artist has described as “the collusion between the Vietnam death machine, consumerism, the media, and advertising.” Its jumps of scale, surprising juxtapositions of fragments of imagery, and vivid palette exemplify Rosenquist’s singular contribution to Pop art in the United States.

Section 1

Section 2

Section 3

Section 4

     
        F-111 is presented here as it was first exhibited at the Castelli Gallery in 1965, now also alongside a group of collages the artist made in preparation for this monumental composition. Rosenquist was well acquainted with painting on this immense scale: before becoming an artist he had earned a living as a billboard painter in New York City. Interested in the phenomenon of peripheral vision, Rosenquist wanted the painting to create an immersive environment that would heighten the viewer’s awareness of his or her own position in space. He cited artistic precedents for this ambition in works such as Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and the large horizontal paintings by Abstract Expressionist artists Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.

James Rosenquist photographed by Dennis Hopper, 1964


 

NOTE:  This Museum of Modern Art press release announcing the exhibition of James Rosenquist's F-111 in proper wrap-around style along with some ancillary studies for the painting seemed like an appropriate item to re-circulate here, despite Blogger's scale, sizing and color limitations. 

Among other things, Rosenquist's great painting stirs up many happy memories in me about my early days of discovering how great painting can be and how it can open your eyes to the world in different ways than literature and music.  When I was in high school, my simultaneous exposure to and absorption of Pop art, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism propelled me into becoming the person I remain (at least what's left of him). 


This morning I read a fairly recent interview with Rosenquist (who always gives trenchant interviews) denying (in a way that seems contrary to the MOMA quote included above) that he was expressing any specific  dogmatic political views in this intense, dramatic work.  The inquisitor was doubtful about this, but I'm not.  For me, the power of Rosenquist's art is primarily visual, not literary or didactic, and comes from the way he forces pupils to open as wide as possible to take in and assimilate without barriers or impediments the power and scale of ocular experience.  Overwhelming and jarring at first, structural significance,  fine details and discernment come later.


Anyway, I haven't seen F-111 in person for quite some time and I'm looking forward to a visit.  I expect I'll stop in at my onigiri place on W. 55th for lunch and fill the vacant spaces in my mind with other memories of hours spent at the Leo Castelli Gallery during its beautifully golden years.

James Rosenquist (aged 4) pictured with his parents, North Dakota, 1937

 


F-111 as originally exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York City, 1965