Customer Reviews

How to Draw a Bunny

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

On Friday, January 13th, 1995, Ray Johnson checked into a Sag Harbor hotel, drove to the 7-11, then walked to the Sag Harbor Bridge, where he jumped to his death. This action, like most of his life, was foreshadowed by a number of clues, numerical coincidences and puns. When police entered his house, they found, among his belongings, a complex suicide note presented as a box full of small, beautiful collages. When they started investigating, the stories told by people who knew him each seemed to describe a different individual. This film is a quest to discover more about the mystery that was Ray.

I saw this film at Film Forum in NYC and it's criminal that it didn't receive wider distribution. Ray Johnson lived his life as a performance piece, improvising puns and jokes into everything he did. His artworks are complex zen riddles with punchlines, with collaged paper sanded like round rocks, all put together with elmer's glue. He was the eternal prankster, and the wonderful interviews relate many "Ray stories" from the likes of his art dealer, patrons and fellow artists (including Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Chuck Close, and Christo). Far from being someone who tried to become famous, he worked to avoid it, shunning publicity and pranking the art world, and mailing his work out for free to people around the world. I was one of those people.

The film is brilliantly assembled, hilarious at times, and absorbing... and the Max Roach score is a great bonus (complete with some footage of Max playing the drums). If you are interested in art and love a good story, this film is for you.

A fascinating look inside the New York art scene and the predecessor class to Warhol. I confess that I knew absolutely nothing about this artist before watching this documentary, and yet I couldn't get enough of it. Truly a man who lived his life as art. And his death? That's the central guessing game of this film, and it makes for a captivating and vaguely haunting biopic.

The subject of this film is a lesser-known artist Ray Johnson, who was an extremely private person. While he knew everyone in the New York pop art scene, no one knew him very well at all.

Moreover, in the documentary, at least, he seldom seems to sell a work of art, yet all he does is create art. He became a constant presence in the New York art scene from the early 1950's till his suicide in 1995. He is credited with creating the first happenings when he displayed his collages on a city street. He began to concentrate on creating elaborate collages.

He is so shy about his art that even as his friends, maybe all his friends, get shows at well-known galleries and even at the Museum of Modern Art, he never allows MOMA's curators to judge whether to admit his works to the museum's collection. Instead, he mails his art to many friends, collectors and MOMA's library. The library, as is its custom, duly catalogs and keeps the mailed art. In that way, he gets in the back door of the museum.

So when his friend Chuck Close wants a piece by Ray exhibited in Close's own exhibit at the museum, the MOMA library shows the "mail art" that Ray sent.

His address book is a Who's Who of modern art: Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol. All these artists knew and respected Ray Johnson and his work.

His house was a living space unfurnished except for shelves and shelves of his art works: small collages which he called moticos, drawings and paintings.

The film does not solve the puzzle of Ray Johnson, but it certainly presents what anyone knows of this oddly private artist. In fact, he was known as "the most famous unknown artist in the world."

This is the best documentary on an artists I have ever seen, period. I had never heard of Ray Johnson before I watched this for the first time. Since then I have become a huge fan of the artists who died in 1993. I have watched this doc probably five times since i bought it and everytime I fing something new and great in it.

The interviews are great, especially the ones with Warhol Factory Photographer Billy Name. And the Footage of the artist is haunting, and full of drama and ambiguity. The work and ideas of the artits are fantastic and because of this documentary I have taken a huge interest in this him, but come to find that all books published on the artist are out of print, hard to find, and expensive!!! So for any Ray Johnson fans this is a staple, must have in your personal collection!!!

Ray Johnson is the most underrated artists of the last half of the twentieth century!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Poignant and moving, with a fantastic soundtrack that keeps driving the plot forward. Glad I saw this film. Ranks up there with "Here Is Always Somewhere Else: The disappearance of Bas Jan Ader" and "In the Realms of the Unreal - The Mystery of Henry Darger." One of my favorite documentaries about art.

Pop artist, prankster, and provocateur extraordinaire, Ray Johnson (1928-1995) had many acquaintances, but to a person no one claimed to know who he really was. His life, his death from suicide, and his prolific work were a single, seamless performance act. This documentary interviews curators, his agent, collectors, the police that investigated his death, his first cousin, fellow artists like Christo, and even, appropriately, his mail carrier (Johnson mailed thousands of pieces of his "mail art" to people around the world). The same semantic range of words emerges from them all -- enigmatic, elusive, isolated, underground, and mysterious. In one "work" he dropped sixty foot long hot dogs from a helicopter. In another, we see him hopping around on one foot as he beats a cardboard box with a belt. "He kept so much of himself to himself," remarked one person. "No one ever seemed to know what he did, or what he thought he was doing," observed another. But upon his death a veritable treasure trove of Johnson's work surfaced--paintings, drawings and especially mixed media collages pasted on the cardboard inserts of laundried shirts (he once told a friend he did "chop art" and not "pop art"). The film, much of which is shot in black and white, begins and ends with consideration of his theatrical death on Friday, January 13th, 1995. His body was found floating under a bridge in Sag Harbor, New York, by buoy number 13. The night before Johnson had stayed in room #247 (= 13) of a motel. He was 67 (= 13). A few days later people discovered his house meticulously staged with transparent clues. Johnson was clearly an extraordinary and eccentric genius, once referred to in the The New York Times as the "most famous unknown artist." His works which spanned nearly 50 years are now exhibited in museums around the world.

Strange, private and idiosyncratic artist Ray Johnson is quite the mystery. While Johnson appears to be somewhere near the center of New York's downtown art movement in the 1950s and 1960s, he shuns fame and it appears, even selling his work. Yet there he is, working away, creating a body of whimsical and highly appealing work that one imagines will only grow in influence over time. The filmmakers behind "How To Draw A Bunny" should be applauded for creating such a compelling film with so little archival and primary interview material to go on. Part mystery, part art biography, part portrait of the New York art scene in the time of Warhol, this film delivers a compelling and, before now, little-known story in a smart, honest and stylish way.

This is an fascinating documentary that I have watched countless times. It is a very entertaining attempt to portray the art and life of the singular collage artist, Ray Johnson. I describe this film as an "attempt" because no one really knew what made Ray Johnson tick. He was one elusive individual. To this day, no one knows what drove him, what inspired the incredibly quirky way his ran his life and art career or the motivation for his suicide by drowning in New York state's Sag Harbor at the age of 67.

As a native New Yorker, I could not help but be nostalgic watching this documentary because it shows how artists in the 60s could comfortably live below poverty level, producing their art, commiserating with other artists in their community while enjoying New York City rents of well under a $100 a month! Highly recommended!
Siouxie Sayles, Brooklyn, NYC

This movie is just the thing that fits inside you and never goes away. I first heard of this movie at the Museum of Fine Arts. It was playing there and I missed it, but it looked interesting. So I ordered it on Netflix and then promptly forgot what it was about or why I ever wanted to see it. So I kept sliding it down on the list (trust, mistrust) until, finally, I forgot to manage my list and it came to the house. That can happen, as you know.
John Waters and Andrew Moore put together a film about the artist, Ray Johnson, that leaves you wondering which is better--Ray Johnson--or the movie? The answer is --both. Okay, Ray Johnson was, well, Ray Johnson. The movie is a Ray Johnson motico. On one level it plays as a retrospective of Ray's live and his art. On another level it plays out as a totally noir B detective movie. More like a noir detective documentary. (Remember Dragnet?) It's Dragnet in an exquisitly "Ray" way. Ray Johnson was not an outsider artist. He knew everyone in the arts, and everyone knew him. But in an important sense he was an outsider artist. He was outside of everything. Hilarious interviews with friends who tried to buy some of his art work. The negotiations over the sales became bigger than the art. And the art is stunning. Film footage of Ray at a suburban garden party-episodes and also on his "foot" period. He drew and collaged feet for a long time. Finally he rented a helicoper and dropped "foot-long" hot dogs over Long Island. What a fabulous movie this is.

More than one person interviewed in this fascinating documentary states that no one really knew Ray Johnson. The film certainly does nothing to dispel that notion. Through interviews, archival footage, photos, and shots of his art, Johnson is presented as the ultimate man of mystery. We get as great sense of what Johnson looked like simply because he seems to have loved being photographed and the film shows hundreds of photos taken of him by various friends. Today, he might have put up a webcam in his living room so as to expand the number of viewers of his life. And indeed, one of the suggestions of the film is that Johnson was always performing. The most disturbing issue raised is whether Johnson drowned himself as part of a bizarre piece of performance art. The film ends with no definite conclusion, but the possibility definitely looms in the end that he did.

Some other reviewers talk of whether the film will restore (enthrone?) Johnson among the pantheon of American artists. I hope not. I find pop art and the collagists interesting, but apart from Joseph Cornell, who was a major inspiration for them, I don't find many of them to be truly great artists. Their actual works of art seem geared more toward starting conversations and debates than an actual engagement with their productions. Nothing that I saw of Johnson's art made me feel that he was a major artist. Interesting? Yes. Fascinating? Indeed. But his art is too opaque to enjoin the kind of interaction you can get from artists like Jasper Johns or Mark Rothko or the aforementioned Cornell.

Nonetheless, while I don't view Ray Johnson as a major artist he clearly was a well known figure among the New York art scene and it is clearly good to know more about him. But if anything, rather than proving why Johnson was a major artist, I think the documentary shows why he was not. He simply did not seem to connect emotionally with people. He did not some across as warm or especially engaging. In the video segments in which he appeared, he seems almost aggressive in keeping the viewer at arms length. And the video scenes from his house at the end reinforce all this. His home consisted of nothing but shelves holding an enormous number of items boxed up. His books were not on shelves, but stacked on top of each other against walls. He had no furniture to speak of and his walls largely devoid of artwork, strange for an artist.

In the end, Ray Johnson emerges as a unsolvable puzzle. Did he kill himself as performance art? I have no idea, though I would not dismiss the idea as impossible. It does, however, make more sense than the simple suggestion that he committed suicide because he was unhappy. But in the end, who knows?