socitom# 1

On Monday I viewed over 100 Ray Johnson collages. Some on Bill Wilson's "Wall of Ray," a salon style display (always changing) of Ray's work at all stages of his career. Others in a yet to be archived box, slipped into envelopes sent to a friend back in the 60s. Other on the gallery wall at Feigen's Johnson-Dali-Warhol show. Still others up on the top floor of the gallery, leaning against the wall, stacked two deep. Mostly collages, but also old paintings from back in his Black Mountain College days and drawings from his years at Cass High School in Detroit. Moticos in all the hues of the rainbow. Letters to friends with doodles on them; cigarette packs with notes on them. Altered postcards. Corrugated cardboard rectangles serving as backdrop for collage cut-outs. You name it.

I got back to my aunt Susan's neighborhood by dark, sat in a west village bar and sipped a gin martini. I needed the fortitude. The world around seemed altered to my sight; everyone was a cut out fragment pasted to a color-block. Store fronts felt like frames waiting for more glyphs to suspend themselves in their ether. I wrote down titles for mini-essays I will write one day. Tried to jot down stray fragments of what Bill Wilson said to me. His thoughts about laterality in Ray's work; the way he'd jump from a last name like Coffin and make it coffee then add "and doughnuts" and, and.... How one collage often spoke to another, was a response to a previous note from a friend, a reworking....How water ran through his collages, a ur-motif...How you can compare two things but not three...How Ray would walk through the east village with duct tape on his mouth. He called it duck tape. Remembering the photo of a stone wall, Ray's head and elbow gradually appearing as faux-stones at the top of the stack. The way he stood between two billboard O's, insinuating himself into the word, making himself a letter. I went to sleep almost sick with brain whirl. Woke at 2 to find the apartment ceiling draped in night shadow, undulating trees broadcasting their underwater images above me and slipping down the wall to encase the open kitchen space in its net of glyphs and watery letters.