The Sundance Channel has running documentaries on Monday nights and I really scored last evening!
First was John Walter ‘s How To Draw a Bunny, about the enigmatic artist Ray Johnson, which I’ve been dying to see for some time. Johnson was a huge inspiration for me as an art student.
“The most famous unknown artist in the world," Johnson is best known for his collage work but it is hard to pin him down. The artist got his feet wet in all the most essential art scnes of the fifties through the eighties – from the abstract expressionists, Fluxus. Pop Art, performance art and his work was the precursor of the styles Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and even Raymond Pettimbon, become famous for.
What a fascinating life – he went to Black Mountain College, and befriended most of the art world luminaries of the second half of the twentieth century – Warhol, John Cage, the deKoonigs, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly (the Lichtensteins, James Rosenquist, and Billy Name participate in this film) – and yet remained very much an outsider and under the radar while producing a huge body of work. Johnson was highly unorthodox with his techniques – he was an early pioneer of the decidedly non-archival Xerox medium, for example - and also in his handling of his body of work; his famous “moticos” were mailed gratis to friends and fellow correspondents throughout the world, many lost forever. In selling his work he seemed to take a delight in playing a sort of illogical tango through endless "business correspondence" which exasperated his dealers. It all seemed like a game to him, and part of a performance. To this day art historians and even his close friends are trying to put the pieces of the puzzle of his life together.
Johnson drowned in Sag Harbor under appropriately mysterious circumstances in 1995. Stitching together interviews with friends and associates and working with what little biographical and personal information available, How To Draw a Bunny is a fascinating portrait of an essential and true original and a vibrant - offbeat but ahead of the pulse - career but the film doesn’t come close to breaking Ray Johnson’s code.
The final police video footage of the contents of Johnson’s Locust Valley home/studio where he existed in virtual isolation is heartbreakingly poignant. It is sad to think of the loneliness which underlied the artist's iconoclastic work and existence - his "Moticos," to me, appear to be his way of connecting with others. His legacy, stacks and stacks of boxes of a lifetime’s work – a treasure trove or an Estate nightmare depending on how one looks at it - is Johnson’s ultimate pièce de résistance, his final prank.
Last night I was also delighted to catch Gabrielle Crawford’s Jane Birkin – Mother of All Babes. Jane Birkin, of course, has been my crush since childhood. I had heard about the project and I expected it to be a sort of vanity fluff piece. Which it was for the most part, but I was unaware of how active Jane B. has been as an international humanitarian since the 90s. As somewhat of a Serge Gainsbourg completist and scholar, the biographical details of the documentary were hardly revelatory for me. However, I took great pleasure in revisiting variety show and film clips I have not seen since I was a child in Paris. And the family Super 8s of Serge clowning around with his children just about broke my heart. The gaps between Birkin’s teeth seem have widened with age but she has matured admirably, her voice and acting chops are at the top of their game and she is really giving back to society through her volunteer and relief work.
Two other documentaries I saw last night, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam about the legendary Chinese Vaudeville performer, and Up the Same River Twice are also quite compelling and worth checking out.
