How
to Draw a Bunny
by John
Walter and Andrew Moore
Distributed by Palm Pictures, New York
NY, 2004
DVD, 90 mins., color and b/w
Sales: $29.98
Distributor’s website: http://www.palmpictures.com.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa, USA
ballast@netins.net
This film is a documentary on the life,
work, and apparent suicide of American
artist, Ray Johnson (1927-1995). He and
Pop artist, Robert Rauschenberg, were
students at the same time (c1946-48) at
Black Mountain College, where two of the
teachers who influenced him were Bauhaus
painter Josef Albers and musician John
Cage. Johnson could be very clever at
times, as when he made an artwork from
a pair of black and white saddle shoes–he
painted JOHN on the toe of one shoe, and
CAGE on the toe of the other.
Perhaps because most of his efforts were
experimental, irreverent, and more conceptual
than tangible, his work was rarely exhibited,
nor is he easy to categorize in the usual
art movements. At times, he is regarded
as an early practitioner of Pop, Fluxus,
and Performance Art. But he may also have
originated Mail Art (in which he mailed
cryptic drawings, including drawings of
bunnies, to other artists, with instructions
to "add to and return to Ray Johnson")
and maybe even Happenings (which he called
Nothings). Nevertheless, for all his apparent
innovations, he was not widely known,
so that, as someone once remarked (maybe
it was the artist himself) that he was
"the most famous unknown artist in
the world."
In a way, this film is less about Johnson’s
odd life than it is about his mysterious
death at age 67 on January 13, 1995 (on
Friday the 13th ), a day on
which he apparently drove for two hours
from his New York home and jumped from
a bridge in Sag Harbor near the end of
Long Island. There was no explicit note,
but his death by drowning was declared
a suicide, in part, because as explained
in interviews in the film he seems to
have planted intentional clues as if he
hoped his death would be the finest and
final accomplishment of "the original
art-world prankster."
As morbid as its subject is, this film
is almost always fascinating and not infrequently
funny as well. Mostly, it holds one’s
attention because it features vintage
snapshots, home movies, and videotapes
(many of Johnson himself), mixed in with
clips from interviews with his art dealers,
the investigating police officer, and
various friends and acquaintances, among
them well-known artists like Richard Lippold,
Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Chuck Close,
and James Rosenquist.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, No. 2,
Winter 2005.)
