Ray Johnson and the Last Dance of the Taoist Collages

It was filled with artworks—what the artist Ray Johnson called his Taoist Collages—that he had mailed to her 50 years earlier. These collages were not simply a stand-alone mailing between two friends, but rather the precursors to Johnson’s mail art practice. They marked a pivotal moment in the artist’s career when he was using the postal system to disperse his early collages, works he called “moticos.” Researching these rediscovered works offered a new perspective onto Johnson’s ties to the world of dance while also shedding new light on the Art Institute’s own holdings of Johnson’s work.

sample of taoist collages

Soon after mailing the Taoist Collages to Shearer, Johnson followed up by sending her a photograph, cut into an irregular shape and containing a brief message on the back. He wrote: “Picture on other side a fragment of my ‘moticos stage set.’”

mailing to sybil shearer

Note the faint photo of the motico set on the verso of the mailing

The photograph pictured his 1956 collaboration, Duettino, with New York–based choreographer James Waring, a project that marked his first foray into designing sets for dancers and choreographers. Working with Waring, Johnson devised a set of mobile panels composed of overlapping paper collages attached to upright boards, producing a sea of abstract shapes and colorful images culled from popular printed media.

DANCERS WITH RAY JOHNSON’S “MOTICOS STAGE SET”

A detail image of Johnson’s set for Duettino conveys the range of material he incorporated, including silver and multi-colored paper, stamps, a miniature calendar, as well as printed images culled from newspapers, magazines, and books.

It also signals Johnson’s particular interest in images of people and bodies of various shapes, ages, and positions: a standing baby’s backside, the upside-down view of a woman’s naked legs and torso, the doubled image of a man in a trench coat, a woman or girl carrying concrete slabs above her head, a man reading.

On the right (of the detail image), Johnson incorporated an image of the Russian dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky performing in the 1911 ballet La Spectre de la Rose. Nijinsky appears mid-step, his arm outstretched as if holding the publicity image for the 1953 play Kean, which rests on top of it. At his feet, we see the image of a bullfighter, bent over, as if captured mid-fight.

This mixture of visual sources suggests that Johnson selected the Duettino images with the performance context of the work (and the fact that it would be shown in relation to moving dancers) at the forefront of his mind. Like many of his collages, the panels evoke an imaginary constellation of the world in which people and things drawn from vastly different contexts are invited to coexist within a two-dimensional plane.

Close examination revealed numerous material and visual connections between Duettino’s panels and the individual collages Johnson produced in these years. Overall, we identified five instances where images from the Duettino set had an afterlife in collages.

FIVE DUETTINO COLLAGES WITH AN AFTERLIFE

These collages ultimately found their way to the collection of William S. “Bill” Wilson, Johnson’s self-appointed archivist. Like Shearer, who kept the Taoist Collages filed away for five decades, Wilson protected Johnson’s collages from further recycling and reassembly. While Shearer stored them in her attic as mailings, Wilson framed them and hung them on the wall, occasionally lending them to museum exhibitions. 

Without the care of friends like Shearer and Wilson, these collages—rare glimpses into Johnson’s early output—would likely have been reused by the artist in new constructions. Their discovery thus points to the crowd-sourced meaning of Johnson’s “moticos,” which is determined in part by the actions of their recipients. 

In a fitting turn of events, the Taoist Collages and the collages given to Wilson from Johnson’s “moticos stage set” now reside at the Art Institute as part of the collections that have been assembled since 2018. Together they offer important documentation of Johnson’s involvement in the world of avant-garde dance and choreography in the mid-1950s. 

—Jenny Harris, PhD candidate, University of Chicago, and 2022–23 COSI Research Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art

The Ray Johnson Collections

The Art Institute of Chicago Archives is thrilled to announce that the Ray Johnson Collections database is now available to the public. This digital collection includes not only the database but also video tutorials, a usage guide, collection finding aids, selected images from the collections, and more.

The Sybil Shearer Collection of Ray Johnson is just one example of the Archives’ growing Ray Johnson and extended mail art holdings, which include a collection of original mail art correspondence between Ray Johnson and Chicago artist and friend Karl Wirsum; a group of 46 “movie star collages” of the 1990s, a type of large-scale, totemic collage that Johnson created later in his career responding to his own early work with celebrity images; and others. The Wilson Collection is the largest holding of Johnson materials to date at the Art Institute, containing approximately 50 linear feet of collages, design flyers, mail art, letters, photographs, and more, most of which are arranged chronologically in over 171 three-ring binders spanning the years of Johnson’s and Wilson’s respective lifetimes.

Over the past year, the Archives has worked diligently to catalog the Wilson binders in an accessible database. (Visit Ray Johnson Collections to explore the binders.) A comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the collection was also compiled, containing over 3,000 subject terms for people, places, themes, artwork titles, and formats found throughout the binders. In addition to a basic keyword search, researchers can filter by these terms, allowing for more complex searches and nuanced results.

Physical materials can be requested for in-person research. To make an appointment to view archival collections, contact us via our Contact and Application for Access form or archives@artic.edu.

—Jessica Smith, associate director, Archives, Research Center

More Resources

Get insights about Ray Johnson from Caitlin Haskell and Jordan Carter, curators of the exhibition Ray Johnson c/o.

See how these objects offer a new vantage point onto Johnson’s ties to the world of dance from Jenny Harris.

Explore the friendship between Ray Johnson and Bill Wilson in this interactive feature.

Learn more about correspondence art from Sofia Canale-Parola.

Check out all the Taoist Collages.

Topics

• Collection
• Museum History
• Artists
• The Digital Museum
• Modern Art
• Arts of America
• Photography and Media