On Friday, August 1, the Museum of Art and Archaeology will screen How to Draw a Bunny as part of the MAA Film Series. The screening, in 106 Pickard Hall, begins at 7:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
The 2002 documentary film How to Draw a Bunny (dir. John Walter) approaches the life and death of New York avant-garde artist Ray Johnson as a mystery story, which seems appropriate, since Johnson’s life and his artistic activities were a puzzle even to those who knew him. The mystery explored by the film is not how Johnson died – his 1995 suicide by drowning is the first biographical fact we learn about the elusive artist – but rather, who he was, both as an artist and as a person. The trope of the filmmakers as sleuths creates a highly effective approach to story-telling that makes for a compelling narrative. Johnson’s fascinating story told by people who knew him, combined with his visually compelling art works, result in a film that is rich and engrossing on every level.
How to Draw a Bunny is one of my favorite documentaries. Documentary films about artists are generally superior to the bio-pic genre (i.e., fictionalized biographies) when it comes to informing viewers about an artist’s life and work in a substantive way, but How to Draw a Bunny goes beyond merely informing us: it demonstrates that a really good documentary film can be more entertaining than a bio-pic as well.
For the viewer, the first mystery might well be why we have never heard of Ray Johnson. One fan (who is an aspiring artist himself) refers to Johnson as “this famous New York artist,” but he’s hardly a household name to any beyond those who are particularly interested in the New York avant-garde art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Johnson was an incredibly prolific collage artist, and he also created many performance pieces (for which he coined the term “Nothings”). He was friends with so many famous artists – including John Cage, Chuck Close, Jeanne-Claude and Christo, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein – that it’s a mystery to some of them (as Jeanne-Claude remarks in the film) why Johnson himself didn’t receive broader recognition.
Part of the reason for his lack of fame was Johnson’s overt rejection of the art market. Although he courted many dealers who were interested in his art – gallery owner Richard Feigen describes his work as “among the most interesting of anybody in the 20th century” – Johnson made both his work and his person elusive. Frances Beatty of the Feigen Gallery says she tried for 14 years to organize a Ray Johnson show, but never could get the artist’s cooperation. Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein describes Johnson’s work as “related a little bit to happenings, environments, and those sorts of things, which were consciously made not to sell, and it was sort of an anti-commerce idea.” Johnson was a conceptual artist; he created art objects, but the process of making – as well as the process of negotiating sales – were more important to him than the end results (a sensibility he shared with Christo). According to many people interviewed for the film Johnson tended toward unnecessarily byzantine price negotiations. It becomes clear that he preferred the game of endless haggling to a straightforward sale.
Born in Detroit, Johnson got his artistic start at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school in North Carolina (modeled on the German Bauhaus) that was the breeding ground for a good many American avant-garde artists of Johnson’s generation. There in 1948 he met the older artist Richard Lippold, who brought Johnson to New York, where he would remain; the two had what Lippold describes as an intimate and loving relationship that lasted 26 years.
As an artist, Johnson is regarded as an early practitioner of Pop Art because of his use of advertising images like Lucky Strike logos and pictures of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. His interest in collage, as well as his playful sensibility and his critiques of the commercial art world, demonstrate the profound influence of Marcel Duchamp, one of the overarching figures of twentieth-century avant-garde art, and other Dada collage artists. Another profound influence on Johnson was the work of Joseph Cornell, known for his intricate boxed assemblages.
Johnson’s collages incorporate subtle humor, small jokes, and obscure messages. The filmmakers refer to his “aesthetic of secrets” as if his works were puzzles, containing secrets within secrets. Ray expanded the ideas of portraiture and self-portraiture to a conceptual level. The filmmakers try to capture Johnson’s playful sensibility and the collage aesthetic as they lead the viewer through a process of piecing together the puzzle, trying to solve the mysteries Ray left behind.
Johnson regarded his art as messages, a form of communication, and he initiated what he called “the New York Correspondence School of Art:”
“Correspondence art consists of compression of ideas and images into envelopes and I spent my entire life condensing, you know, conceptual art, fashion, fitting things to fit envelope sizes and folding things to fold into envelopes. I had gone through this ritual day after day, year after year, for many many years as my working process when I’m in my studio; I’m not static at all, I’m completely fluid, I go from one idea to the next, it’s a complete flow of the imagination. I deal with things that are constantly being chopped up and shuffled and moved around, ‘cause I’m not a painter, I’m a collagist. But it gets to some point where what can you do with it after you’ve done it? That’s why I began putting everything into envelopes. I have this stockpile of material that I put into envelopes and mail them.
“I’m very fond of the idea of the message in the bottle and the chance of it being found, or never being. And that’s pure romance. But once again that was a dilemma as to what does one do with one’s sculptures or one’s paintings or one’s drawings, so I solved that problem by chopping them up all into little pieces and mailing them to people.”
Johnson claimed that his work expanded the ideas behind Cubism because once he had cut it up and mailed it to various people, the “picture plane,” so to speak, was literally extended farther and farther.
Like Jackson Pollock and many other New York artists, Johnson eventually moved to the safety and seclusion of Long Island, where he continued his artistic practices at his home in Locust Valley. Johnson left the City as the result of being mugged, which happened coincidentally on the same day that Warhol was shot, in 1968.
How to Draw a Bunny is an exceptionally well made film, from the exhaustive research to the film’s form, which replicates the artistic style of its subject. Filmmakers John Walter and Andrew Moore collage together visual and aural impressions: the stories and voices of the many people who knew Johnson, as well as Johnson’s own words. When they started their film project, very little had been written about the artist, so they had to do a lot of original research to uncover his story. In the process they discovered vast collections of photographs, video, letters, and art works, which are brought to light in this documentary and which make Johnson’s work accessible to a large audience for the first time. We see hundreds of Johnson’s collages, which alone is a good reason to see the film.
By comparison, most bio-pics pay relatively little attention to the artist’s work. This is in part due to the difficulty of acquiring the necessary permissions from the copyright holders; in Surviving Picasso (1996), for example, no actual Picasso paintings could be used (instead, replicas were created for the film), although Lust for Life (1956) does show a large number of original Van Gogh images. But the more salient reason that bio-pics underemphasize the artist’s work is that many of them don’t seem to care about the actual art works, instead focusing on the artist himself (or herself), as an individual who becomes interesting for being creative and artistic, even for being a “genius.” Bio-pics emphasize the dramatic aspects of the artist’s life, be it the struggle for recognition (Lust for Life), passionate sexuality (Artemesia, 1997), crippling illness (Moulin Rouge, 1952, and Frida, 2002), or emotional instability, alcoholism, and early death (Pollock, 2000), to name a few recurring themes.
Typical bio-pics, from Lust for Life to Pollock, play up the idea of the artist-as-romantic hero, a tortured genius whose misunderstood life ends in tragedy. Bio-pics fetishize the artist’s death as if it held the key to understanding his entire life and his oeuvre. Van Gogh’s suicide (depicted in three feature-length films about the artist) has made him the archetypal tragic genius in the popular imagination. It seems that the function of the bio-pic genre of film is to mythologize the artist, which How to Draw a Bunny manages to avoid doing, for the most part.
Although it is not the framing proposition of the film, some myth-making does emerge in How to Draw a Bunny. Billy Name, once a member of Warhol’s Factory, explains the fact that Johnson never used narcotics or drugs of any kind because “he was already high all the time; people would get high on things to try to get to where Ray was.” Name turns this observation into artistic analysis: “That was one of the factors about Ray’s aesthetic, it was always on that level, the revelatory level. He was always where inspiration and revelation were. It’s where people go periodically, or occasionally, or take narcotics to achieve, but he was there all the time.”
In general, though, the film does not dwell on myths of genius, or of the romantic hero. Although the film begins and ends with Ray’s suicide – coming full circle, in deliberate reference to Citizen Kane (1941) – the filmmakers acknowledge the unknowable aspect of this event. They signify the impossibility of getting close to it by shooting from a helicopter the scenes of the car as it drives to the suicide location, as well as the Sag Harbor / New Haven Bridge, from which Ray jumped. Thus they underscore their message formally by refusing to let the camera get close to the car and the bridge. It’s a haunting reminder of what cannot be known – and another feature that differentiates this documentary from most bio-pics.
The climax of the film is the exploration of Johnson’s Long Island apartment, recorded on film, first by the Sag Harbor Police when they were investigating his death, and then by the Richard Feigen Gallery, who handled the estate. The Sag Harbor Police Chief, Joseph Ialacci, gives a detailed account of the case, including his efforts to contact Ray’s friends and to piece together Ray’s personality and identity. The filmmakers describe him as the first member of Johnson’s posthumous audience, which puts him in the same position as us, the film’s viewers. At the same time, Ialacci’s investigation is very similar to the process that the filmmakers themselves went through to tell Johnson’s story.
The filmmakers benefitted from a vast number of photographs taken by Hazel-Frieda Larson, Norman Solomon, Bill Wilson, Billy Name, and Peter Moore, as well as film footage shot by Wilson and Nick Maravell. Maravell shot 13 video sessions over the last 2 or 3 years of Ray’s life; the final session they shot is the one that opens the film, in which we see Ray describing a psychological alphabet game. The existence of so much video footage of Johnson from so many sources was serendipitous for the filmmakers; it’s hard to imagine this film without it.
If the film whets your appetite for more, you can watch the excellent commentary track recorded by John Walter and Andrew Moore, as well as outtakes and deleted scenes, all of which are included on the DVD.
Author: Professor Elizabeth Hornbeck teaches a course entitled “Artists’ Lives on Film,” which is being offered this fall. It is cross-listed in the Art History and Archaeology department and the Film Studies program.