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\u201cI am now so very excited I cannot sleep,\u201d the artist Ray Johnson wrote to a friend after a visit to Chicago in 1949. \u201cI have suddenly got the idea in my head that I want to dance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnson, 22 and fresh out of art school, had immersed himself in books on modern dance subjects \u2014 Vaslav Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham. \u201cIn Chicago we saw the wonderful dancer Sybil Shearer,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI was taken with her \u2014 respected her so much because she seemed such a complete artist in every way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnson, the collage and mail artist whom The New York Times once called \u201cNew York\u2019s most famous unknown artist<\/a>,\u201d did not go on to have a career in dance. But his animated letter raises an interesting question: What does dance have to do with his art?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The recent discovery of a group of early Johnson collages sheds some light. In January 2022, the Art Institute of Chicago received a message saying that some Johnson material had been found. The message came from the Morrison-Shearer Foundation in Northbrook, Ill., which oversees the estates of that \u201cwonderful dancer\u201d and choreographer, Shearer; and the photographer Helen Balfour Morrison.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The foundation had stumbled upon something major \u2014 a group of 30 early collages that Johnson, who died in 1995<\/a>, had mailed to Shearer in 1955. \u201cThe Shearer collages are so exquisitely handmade,\u201d said Frances Beatty, managing director of the Ray Johnson Estate. \u201cI hadn\u2019t seen anything like that in the later mail art.\u201d<\/p>\n After the Ray Johnson Estate authenticated the collages, the Art Institute purchased them. (As a Chicago Objects Study Initiative fellow there, I worked on researching and cataloging the collages.) They have since been published online<\/a>.<\/p>\n Previously unknown to scholars of Johnson\u2019s art, these works tell a new story, not just about his friendship with Shearer but also about the community of dancers and choreographers with whom he developed his artistic voice.<\/p>\n The 30 collages are each irregularly shaped and can fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. To make them, Johnson took the cardboards used for pressed shirts, cut them into puzzle-piece-like shapes and layered them with bits of paper, printed with images or text. Several are of period movie stars: Audrey Hepburn, Marlon Brando. Others are of historical figures and images: Shakespeare, a reproduction of El Greco\u2019s \u201cBoy Blowing an Ember.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Johnson referred to these early collages as \u201cmoticos\u201d (an anagram of osmotic<\/a>), a term he coined both for the collages and their fluid status as objects circulating in the world. In the early 1950s, he produced moticos in large quantities and displayed them in unconventional settings: across the floorboards of an art studio or between the planks of a sidewalk freight pallet. On one occasion, he placed them on the body of his friend, the art historian and critic Suzi Gablik, making her a human gallery of sorts. Gablik would later describe this ad hoc performance as the \u201cfirst informal happening.\u201d<\/p>\n In the same year Johnson mailed the collages to Shearer, he wrote \u201cWhat Is a Moticos?\u201d<\/a> a short text about his new concept. A moticos, he explains, is associated with motion \u2014 you might find it on a moving train or on the top of your automobile \u2014 and also ubiquitous: \u201cIt may be in your daily newspaper.\u201d For Johnson, a moticos is always waiting to be found, and once it is, treasured and protected so it can be discovered again: \u201cMake sure it is in a box or between the pages of a book for your grandchildren to find and enjoy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Shearer moticos were found tucked away in her attic. When writing to Shearer, Johnson called the group \u201cTaoist Collages,\u201d probably because they included written verses from the \u201cTao Te Ching,\u201d a foundational work of Taoism. Broken into fragments, this text functions like connective tissue for the set, suggesting that individual collages might be pieced together into a single moticos poem.<\/p>\n Johnson probably came across the \u201cTao Te Ching\u201d at the Orientalia bookstore in New York City, where he worked in the 1950s. The bookstore helps to trace another kind of connective tissue \u2014 the web of friendships that tethered Johnson to the New York avant-garde dance community in those years. Like Johnson, Nicola Cernovich, Orientalia\u2019s manager, and his loft-mate, Remy Charlip, attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a hub of interdisciplinary artistic activity. All three were close to the choreographer Merce Cunningham \u2014 who founded his company at the college \u2014 and his collaborators: the composer John Cage, the dancer Viola Farber and the artist Robert Rauschenberg.<\/p>\n Given Johnson\u2019s proximity to this group, his assertion in the letter that he would study dance \u2014 \u201cprobably with Merce\u201d \u2014 comes as no surprise. But the newly discovered \u201cTaoist Collages\u201d write another chapter of Johnson\u2019s dance story, one involving Shearer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Born in Toronto and raised in Nyack, N.Y., Shearer began her career performing with the Humphrey-Weidman company in the mid-1930s. After touring briefly with Agnes de Mille, she debuted her solo choreography in 1941 at Carnegie Hall. Like Cunningham, she was interested in pure movement \u2014 the body and gesture abstracted from narrative and pantomime, while still embodying what the dance historian Susan Manning called a \u201cgestural quirkiness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Shearer was a technical and creative force. \u201cShe can do anything with her body\u201d the critic Margaret Lloyd wrote. \u201cShe can liquefy it to the point of dissolution, or coil it taut as a steel spring, only to let go in lashes of energy.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike Cunningham, who made a career in New York, Shearer left for Chicago soon after her successful Carnegie Hall show and devoted herself to choreographing and teaching in the Midwest. She met Helen Balfour Morrison, a portrait photographer who spent the rest of her life supporting Shearer, contributing costume and lighting design, publicity and filmic documentation.<\/p>\n \u201cHelen was her life partner \u2014 her Louis Horst, her John Cage,\u201d Manning said, referring to the collaborative and romantic partners of Graham and Cunningham. Shearer purchased land on Morrison\u2019s property in Northbrook, a northern suburb, and lived alongside Helen and her husband, Robert Morrison.<\/p>\n Johnson and Shearer became friends through the sculptor Richard Lippold, whom Johnson met at Black Mountain and with whom he was romantically involved from 1948 to 1974. Lippold, too, was enmeshed in the dance world: his wife, Louise Lippold, trained and performed with Cunningham; Richard wrote about dance and worked as an editor for the journal Dance Observer. The Lippolds, admirers of Shearer, became her friends after Cunningham introduced them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Johnson had a front-row seat to these friendships, but as Richard Lippold\u2019s secret partner, his position was complicated. In 1949, Johnson joined him on a trip to Northbrook where Morrison and Shearer had invited Lippold to lecture and exhibit work. \u201cA young painter friend of mine will be with me,\u201d Lippold wrote to Morrison, \u201cand I\u2019d appreciate if he could be housed as well as me, since he will be of considerable help en route.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At Northbrook, the two men might have sensed a dynamic similar to their own. Helen and Shearer, living alongside Helen\u2019s husband, were involved in their own unconventional domestic arrangement \u2014 one that Scott Lundius, the executive director of the Morrison-Shearer Foundation, called a \u201ccreative marriage.\u201d<\/p>\n For Johnson, the Northbrook visit was creatively transformative, provoking his impassioned letter and prompting a new turn in his idea of himself as an artist: the urge to dance.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything seems to have led up to this excitement and I feel it is what I should do,\u201d he wrote in the same letter. \u201cOf course I shall be off on another direction tomorrow; but it is the excitement that is important.\u201d The excitement stuck, and though Johnson didn\u2019t become a dancer, he kept dancers and choreographers close at hand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For one, he cultivated a friendship with Shearer, attending her performances with Lippold and writing to her. \u201cTo let you know we all think of you and your wonderful dancing,\u201d he wrote in 1951, \u201cI am sending you this fan letter, also four drawings I made for you inspired by your imaginative concert in Philadelphia plus my imagination about drawing. I hope you like them. The drawings are more like ideas or costumes or moods than dance movements and are meant to be humorous.\u201d<\/p>\n Those drawings, now lost, were precursors to the moticos Johnson would address to Shearer. The seeds of his interest in dance were growing. What would it look like, he seems to ask, to make objects in dialogue with choreography?<\/p>\n