Grand Masters of Collage – Valery Oisteanu

Ray Johnson (1927-1995), Untitled (Gala 3), 1976 — 85. Collage on illustration board; 14 1/2 x 12 in. Courtesy of Pavel Zoubok Gallery

Emerging from a backwater where populist and elitist pop culture sometimes meet are five master-class collagists, united here under the banner, "Constellation." This mix-and-match quintet can only be defined by multiple esthetic characterizations: neo-dada accomplices, surrealist co-conspirators, Fluxus-happenings pranksters, assemblage-ist provocateurs. Witnesses to the prohibited desires, their ultimate act stays frozen for our perusal; the exhibit looks like an absurd theater with a décor of urban-folk naiveté played by erudite actors.

The works on display are grouped in clusters, an involuntary mimicking of nostalgic altars exploring stylistic divergences and convergences. Experiments begun by these five immediately provoke a radical dialogue among themselves and with the viewer, a spirited subversive conversation about the art world.

Decoding the scrolls, secret objects and curio cases of American art-saints May Wilson, Ray Johnson and Al Hansen, we rediscover a sanctuary filled with vintage American ready-mades elevated to the spirit of rebellion against a consumerist and fame-driven society. Historically they continue the efforts of European and American predecessors such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell and other avant-gods who brought the mysteries of dada narrative and spirituality of surrealist collage to independent pop culture, as instruments of social commentary and anarchistic art-violation.

I was privileged to meet all of them in the early 1970s and to consider them as part of my extended art-family.  Most of us were collaborators in Correspondence (sic) art events and in small publications such as the Bay Area Dadaists magazine, Ana Banana and Bill Gaglione’s Vile magazine (also in San Francisco) and Michael Andre’s Unmuzeled Ox in New York. I became a bona fide "Rayjohnsonite" involved in curating art shows in the 70s and 80s with Johnson and Wilson (the Grandma Moses of the avant-garde) and co-exhibiting my own collages alongside Buster Cleveland and John Evans in Soho and the East Village.

The precise generational esthetic art category of this type of work is still to be decided. Call it sculpture with found objects, the result of a happening performance, a visual poem, a mail-art prank, evaporation, conceptual-art language or all of the above. An academic title for such an art category would be "post-surrealist collage." Essentially, the five artists’ "kick-it-up-a-notch" approach catches the viewer by surprise at every turn by adding new techniques of rubbage, de-collage, fumage and other innovations to the process of destruction or deconstruction.

May Wilson (1905-1986) was a collage artist from Maryland, where, in 1965, she began to fold and cut paper to create snowflake patterns. She glued those snowflakes onto old collages and pictures of soft pornography. When she moved to New York in 1966, she decorated the walls of her room in the Chelsea Hotel with her work. She also found discarded dolls and teddy bears and bandaged them and sprayed them with monochrome pigments of antic gold, Prussian blue, copper green or silver. (These and her silver-sprayed collection of keys resemble a strange altar of an art-alchemist or a "medicine art woman.") Later she began a series called "Ridiculous Portraits," in which she glued self-portraits onto prints and postcards. Candid and ironic, sarcastic and childlike, these comical grimaces were a poetic commentary on popular culture.

Wilson often contributed to correspondance-art mailings initiated by Ray Johnson. As Al Hansen vividly recounted in Art & Artists magazine in 1966: "Cut it? Ray Johnson often cuts up old collages, new collages, Larry Poon gave him a painting and Ray folded up and nailed to the board like a little package." David Bourdon called Johnson "a mischievous court jester."

Johnson actually was the main catalyst for the experimental activities of a group practicing Black Mountain College magic. He single-handedly created an international movement of mail art that still survives him, and as such he left behind thousands of collaborative works with other artists. In "Icons and Images of the Sixties" (1971), Nicolas Calas declares: "Ray Johnson is to the letter what Cornell is to the box."

"Moticos" were RayJo’s name for the early pieces, photocopies of red and black squares painted on likenesses of Elvis Presley and James Dean to create lasting pop images. His events were called "Nothings," "Prison Walks," "Evaporations," or puns on fame with titles like "Paloma Picasso Fun Club," of which I became an honorary member at one of Ray’s events in 1974 at the Ronald Feldman Gallery.

One little-known factoid about Ray is that contrary to his talent and enormous fame in the international community, he had only a few solo exhibits throughout his life. Among them were the Boylston St. Gallery, Cambridge (1951), the Marian Willard Gallery (1965, 66, 67), the Richard Feigen gallery (1968, 71), the Nassau County Museum, Roslyn, New York (1984) and the Goldie Palley Gallery (1991). The retrospective at the Whitney came posthumously in 1999.

Al Hansen’s sculptural "accumulages" or, as he liked to call them, "un-collages" also take the form of faux-primitive dolls. They are also anti-consumerist odes to chocolate and cigarette addiction. His Mahjong Venus (1995), made from board-game pieces, is a vintage jewel-like assemblage in which symbols, words and images are united in a visual poem of a "strange goddess" dancing.

Buster Cleveland’s sparkling, decorative assemblages are the frozen fragments of a campy but playful pop-history preservation game, complete with a glittery pseudo-commentary such as "ART FOR UM" magazine-cover/machetes collages. Most of Cleveland’s artworks are also urban anthropological time capsules of a particular time and place, with beads, car hood ornaments, Coca Cola bottles, etc., congealed in translucent polyurethane.

John Evans, the soul survivor of this "Augustus circle" of American pioneers of grand collage, is represented here with vintage works on paper from the 60s, superb examples of mixed-media visual poetry and compositions elevated to a master class. Untitled #10 Book 16 (1970-71) is a collage made of white envelopes of mail, recycled postal stamps and rubber stamps, all somehow creating a figure reminiscent of Hansen’s Venus nudes.

John is also a "messenger" for other artists. In one of his diary-collages, June 22, 1982, he recycles mail-art memorabilia related to George Maciunas, Ray Johnson, Buster Cleveland, E.F.Higgins and Fluxus, all crowned with duck heads. Evans is probably best known for his compositional collages on letter-size paper; his abstract-expressionistic paintings and painting-collages are very rare shown and finally will be exhibited here next year.

May Wilson sprayed silver on her assemblages until they become encased. Ray scratched with sandpaper his collages until they became somewhat faded. Al Hansen created a Venus sculpture from burned Marlboro cigarette butts, Buster Cleveland captured the "glitter out of garbage" suspended in an immobile translucent work. John Evans performed a ritual of artist-karma with "object trouve" stickers and photos connected by splashes of India ink.  All five employed early dada and surrealist concepts, but translated and transposed into the new esthetic of the late 20th century. Many new artists are following them in creating new experimental post-surrealist collages. And the beat goes on.