The titles of two Bob Dylan biopics came to mind as I read this innovative and incisive biography of the collage artist Ray Johnson. 2024’s A Complete Unknown suggests the epithet most associated with Johnson, “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” as Times critic Grace Glueck memorably called him in 1965. Glueck’s paradoxical turn of phrase captures Johnson’s simultaneous desire and reluctance to make a name for himself in the postwar art world, as well as the outright difficulty in approaching him as a subject. Even his closest friends said they didn’t really know him. Johnson was nothing if not well connected in the art world, yet he eschewed gallery shows for much of his career, and was notoriously difficult for curators to work with. In the years since his death (presumably by suicide, in 1995), there has been a growing tide of exhibitions and publications along with an award-winning documentary film devoted to Johnson, who is steadily assuming a place in art history that he assiduously dodged during his lifetime.

Meanwhile, the title of another film about Dylan, Todd Haynes’s 2007 I’m Not There, recalls Johnson’s elusive nature. “One of Ray’s art forms,” recounts his friend Henry Martin, “was the disappearance.” Johnson had a knack for absenting himself in various ways (literal and figurative), which ties in with his obscurity. Writes Ellen Levy, “the artist’s way of disappearing has made him hard to know” (p. 25). Like Haynes’s film as well, Levy’s book foregrounds the problem of coherence and continuity in artistic biography, something Johnson himself actively challenged. “For Johnson,” she notes, “the fiction of history as an unbroken, forward-directed continuum was of a piece with the fiction of the unitary self [and] in the special case of the artist’s biography, the fiction of a cohesive oeuvre.” Her artistic biography aims to give a full account of Johnson’s remarkable career while avoiding the pitfalls of the biographical genre, notably the sense of a predetermined course or coherent narrative, whether triumphant or tragic. Rather, she declares, “this is a collagist’s story, a collection of fragments recomposed into a palpably discontinuous whole” (p. 8). The book intersperses Johnson’s own words (printed in bold) with Levy’s text, sometimes blurring the distinction between them. Offering the most thorough and wide-ranging account of Johnson’s art (and, in the sense they were intertwined, his life) published to date, Levy highlights certain tensions and contradictions—self and other, public and private, art and non-art—as fundamental to his aesthetic.

Johnson’s work was itself elusive, falling broadly into “three main artistic modes, all governed by collage principles: exhibition collage, correspondence art, and performance” (p. 25). It quickly becomes clear that these modes overlap and intersect, as in the critical example of the Moticos, Johnson’s neologism (a rearrangement of the word “osmotic”) referring to dynamic and interactive collages with popular imagery and abstract painted forms on shirt cardboard cut into irregular, sometimes quasi-sculptural shapes that Johnson began to mail to friends in 1955. Johnson was among the first artists to incorporate found images of celebrities and advertising into his artwork and was later recognized as a Pop art progenitor; fandom was a recurring theme throughout his career.

As works of art the Moticos’ presentational context was notably unresolved—wrote Johnson, “The works cannot be exhibited in the usual way because they constantly change, like the news in the papers or the images on a movie screen” (p. 110). They were meant to be seen but also to be handled (turned over, rearranged). On occasion he placed groups of them in the urban landscape in dramatic stagings. He was known to burn them or to reuse them in subsequent works. Some have been preserved, but by their nature they were contingent and unstable, and many have been lost. These collage works enact a dialectic of preservation and destruction, fixed composition and endless rearrangement. A Moticos (the word could be used as a singular or a plural) was a thing, but it was also in movement and subject to change. As such the Moticos posed a problem having to do with their status as art objects and the proper mode of presenting them. Ultimately they referred back to perhaps the two most formative influences on Johnson during his time as a student at the experimental Black Mountain College—Josef Albers and John Cage. From Albers, Johnson took a learned sensitivity to formal construction, shape, color, and material; from Cage he learned to let go of intentionality and the art object as a static or stable entity.

Straddling as they did formalism and conceptualism, Levy notes, “the moticos proved too ephemeral for the collectors and too material, too appealing to the eye and hand, for those who preferred Nothing in their art” (p. 115). Moticos is a “homeless genre,” which Johnson largely abandoned by 1960 even as it formed the basis for all that followed (his little silhouettes of the oddly shaped Moticos formed a quasi-alphabet as well that appears repeatedly in his subsequent work).

The problem with the Moticos was what to do with them. The main presentational context that Johnson chose for them, somewhat by default, was the mail. Sending them to people allowed the Moticos to be seen and experienced by a chosen audience, if nothing else. There remained an ambivalence for Johnson about whether ultimately to destroy or preserve them, whether to even try to sell them, whether recipients should keep them or return them.

Here as elsewhere Johnson turned his problem into a strategy, using the post as medium and material as well as method of distribution—in the process inventing the genre that came to be called Mail art. As developed by Johnson, Mail art was open-ended and reciprocal, establishing expansive networks of communication. He would send out clippings, fragments of works, drawings, flyers, and anything else he might place inside an envelope, the outside of which itself might include collaged elements and extra text. Starting in 1958 Johnson invited recipients of his mailings to “please send to” designated further recipients, and later actively solicited collaboration with directions to “please add to and return” or “please add to and send to.” Johnson was drawn to the intimacy of contact afforded between sender and recipient, but also to the detour of personal artistic works through channels of public information flow. Notes Levy, “Postal communication is at once absolutely public and absolutely private” (p. 114). Mail art offered an alternative or supplement to the exhibition and publication venues then available to the artist, affording new forms of distribution that piggybacked on existing systems.

Around 1962 artist Ed Plunkett suggested the term “New York Correspondence School” for the activity that Johnson, he, and others were engaged in. A mash-up of the New York School of abstract painting and the correspondence schools advertised in comic books and on matchbooks, it combined the high and the low—serious art but also ephemera and, crucial for Johnson, humor. It also suggested a larger existence of an extended group, a “school” of art activity that transcended any individual artist. Johnson respelled it “Correspondance,” a nod to Merce Cunningham and others in the dance world whom he admired as well as a way to make the name his own. Despite having launched a significant new art form, Johnson came to refer to the “Correspondance situation” as another quandary, at once a serious “art activity” to which he devoted most of his efforts, and something of questionable value that he dismissingly referred to as “junk mailing” (pp. 136-7).

In 1970 Johnson held what “would have been the artist’s first solo show in a museum,” notes Levy, “had it not been a group show” (p. 213). “Ray Johnson: New York Correspondence School,” on view at the Whitney Museum and co-curated with Marcia Tucker, featured hundreds of works sent by and to Johnson by well known and lesser-known correspondents. It had a mixed reception, given the inherent paradox of exhibiting in a museum work that was meant to evade the conventions of fine art. But it established Johnson as the leader of a new and wide-ranging movement, characterized, as he put it in a 1977 flyer, by the “free distribution of art and information.”

Johnson was a pioneer of art conceived in terms of a web of contacts rather than the production of objects. By 1973, however, he had grown wary of being the figurehead of the groups and publications that were celebrating Mail art and the notion of a “correspondence school” as a generational development. He announced the death of the “New York Corraspondence [sic] School” in a letter to the Obituaries section of the New York Times that year, signing it with the name of a new, made-up organization, Buddha University, along with a cartoon bunny head that would become increasingly central to his iconography (p. 234). Numerous other Universities and Clubs followed, sometimes consisting of little besides a single announced meeting, which in the event may or may not have been held, or simply a rubber stamp.

The Meetings were an outgrowth of the “Nothings,” Johnson’s term for the performances he had begun doing in 1961. His answer to Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings,” the Nothings were unscripted and unpretentious gatherings where Johnson would undertake one or more seemingly random activities. Similarly, the Meetings, initially of the New York Correspondance School starting in 1968 and later devoted to various Fan Clubs and other organizations devised by Johnson, were about the occasion of bringing individuals together at a specified time and place, with little or no planning or structure, what Johnson said he hoped would be “expressive of a new form” (p. 189). In these years Johnson had close ties to the Fluxus group (his first “Nothing” was held at Fluxus founder George Maciunas’ AG Galley, and he had an important artistic relationship with George Brecht among other Fluxus figures). Like Fluxus drawing on Cagean and Duchampian practices, Johnson shared with the group an interest in fugitive actions and alternative methods of exhibition and distribution, along with the decentering of artistic production and reception.

Alongside Mail art and performances, the third type of artistic activity pursued by Johnson in the 1960s and ’70s was the production of what Levy calls “exhibition collage” —obsessively worked, almost impossibly detailed mosaics made from painted and collaged “tiles” or tesserae arranged in asymmetrical shapes and mounted on board, sometimes in relatively large formats. Featuring an array of names, texts, and images made and found, these works were tactile and visually layered yet conceptually overdetermined and often virtually inscrutable. They relate thematically to Johnson’s other works but with the difference that they were, in Johnson’s words, “planned for the frame” (p. 187) and as such different from the correspondence art or “throwaway” gestures of the Nothings, which were designed in essence to avoid the frame. In tension yet coexisting with these other types of activities, the exhibition collages showcased Johnson’s formal sensitivities and sophisticated design sense, as well as venturing toward a commercially and institutionally marketable body of work. Levy offers attentive close readings of Johnson’s dense verbal-visual allusions and witty associations, situating the exhibition collages within Johnson’s larger body of work and the dilemmas posed therein. For Levy the tiled collages represent “concretized ambivalence” —between fragment and whole, motion and stasis, withdrawal and display (p. 149).

When, in 1970, critic Robert Pincus-Witten consigned Johnson, along with some other Pop artists who in his judgment fell short of artistic greatness, “to the status of evaporations,” Johnson responded by making a rubber stamp with the motto “Evaporations by Ray Johnson.” Writes Levy, “This caption expresses both Ray Johnson’s deepest fear and his deepest wish—that the disappearance might be not merely one art form among others in his repertoire, but his true métier. The name that embodies this talent for evanescence, the name Johnson ultimately attached to his aesthetic as a whole, is Nothing” (p. 49). The idea of fading from view, leveled by the critic as a negative judgment of Johnson’s lasting importance, was for Johnson more of an aesthetic philosophy. Fading from view was inevitable, but how to reckon with it? Fame, artistic reputation, material remains? One answer, as Levy suggests, was to embrace it.

In 1968 Johnson moved to Locust Valley, a suburban village on the north shore of Long Island, thirty miles from Manhattan. Residing there for the last quarter-century of his life, he maintained a deliberately peripheral relationship with the New York-based art world, while continuing his correspondence activities apace. In 1980, he took a page from the New York Times featuring ads for art galleries and replaced one of the ads with a scrawled announcement reading “Ray Johnson nothing/no gallery.” He then made photocopies of the page so that his alteration looks like an original advertisement and mailed these to friends. It was, writes Levy, “a vow in the form of an advertisement” (p. 296). This public notice was in fact a private communication—between Johnson and his correspondents—announcing the end of his participation in the commercial gallery system and, with the exception of a handful of shows at non-profit spaces over the ensuing decade and a half, his decision not to exhibit or market his work in any traditional sense for the rest of his life.

And yet he remained highly productive. In his final years he created a series of rectangular works on cardboard that he called “Move Stars” —latter-day versions of the Moticos—which he transported in his car trunk and would set up in various sites around his suburban Long Island locale and photograph with disposable cameras, making thousands of drugstore prints that he archived but rarely shared.

Johnson did have a final gallery show of sorts, a few weeks before his death, though it was hardly an exhibit at all. Held in late December 1994 at a small gallery in Sea Cliff Long Island that remained closed for its duration, the show consisted of a changing roster of items placed by a friend of Johnson’s in the gallery space and display window, visible only from the street outside. The title of the exhibit was presented on the gallery window: “Ray Johnson: Nothing.” Two weeks later, Johnson drove east an hour and a half to picturesque Sag Harbor, where he leapt from a bridge into the frigid January water and swam out to his death.

Levy suggests an abiding affinity between Johnson and poet Emily Dickinson, whose silhouette profile Johnson incorporated into some collages and a late “Move Star.” A line of Dickinson’s that he knew and quoted, and which Levy uses as an epigraph to her final chapter, is: “That is best which is not” (p. 302). As with a Zen monk’s embrace of the spirit of negation, Johnson’s willful obscurity and elusiveness are defining features of his work, along with a repeated return to the ultimate problem of death. Johnson was obsessed with the ephemerality of art, fame, life itself­. In her conclusion Levy summarizes Johnson’s philosophy with the well-worn phrase, “nothing lasts forever” (p. 352). It’s a platitude but, especially in view of Johnson’s work and ideas, also a profundity.