What-A-Dump-By-Jarrett-Earnest-2021
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WHAT A DUMP by Jarrett Earnest Perhaps I have loved the shadows that lay hidden behind his radiant forehead and his shining glance. Can you distinguish between loving roses and loving the scent of roses? —Yukio Mishima, Madame de Sade1 In his first session at Black Mountain College’s I summer art institute in 1945, seventeen-year- old Ray Johnson studied with legendary designer Alvin Lustig, who revolutionized book publisher New Directions’ aesthetic in the 1940s.2 That year, Lustig was in the process of creating a cover for Louise Varèse’s translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. The name “rimbaud” sits at the center, the source of an explosion of nested, jagged star shapes, redolent of Clyfford Still, in cream, yellow, and crimson, pulsing against a blood-red ground, while scratched along the bottom “ILLUMINATIONS” tingles like electricity. The cover, among others by Lustig, channeled the full force of abstract expressionism to convey the quasi- mystical charge of its contents: a sacred book of modernism. After moving to New York in 1949, Johnson did commercial design work, including a few jobs for New Directions. In 1956, he was tasked with redesigning Illuminations for an expanded paperback edition, published in 1957. The aesthetic decisions of Johnson’s cover have become so deeply absorbed into our visual culture as to now appear all but fated, pre- saging a new sensibility that would become “pop.” Johnson’s cover features a tight crop of Étienne Carjat’s 1871 portrait of Rimbaud when he was a seventeen-year-old from the provinces, terrorizing Paris’s poetry scene. Johnson upped the contrasts of the black-and-white image, enlarging the halftone screen to empha- size the inherent qualities of photomechanical translation. The effect is spectral, masklike, 2 WHAT A DUMP 3 Jarrett Earnest as though the image of the poet is and isn’t escape together.”5 In 1967, when Smith moved there, a face seen on the surface of Mars. to New York to become an artist, that copy of The closer the eye gets to the printed surface Rimbaud’s Illuminations came with her, its worn the more the features recede, dissolving into cover tacked over her writing desk for years. a mist of coagulated dots. The title and Ray Johnson was already making collages author’s name are blocked out in thick, ribbony saturated with popular imagery, blurring high script at a bias, alternating between black and and low, with a special fixation on movie stars, white mid-word, to contrast with the shifting long before the attitudes that became pop background. “R. Johnson” is hand-lettered in art cohered into anything recognizable as a the upper right corner, a hieroglyph as much as movement. In the mid-1950s, he was appropri- a signature. Johnson’s design was the first to ating pictures of Elvis Presley and James Dean utilize Rimbaud’s image in this way, fusing from advertisements to make cryptic collages the poet’s portrait into the public imagination pasted with logos from Lucky Strike brand ciga- as an icon. rettes. Around the time Johnson was designing Within the rising counterculture of Illuminations, one collage pairs an identi- the 1960s, this edition became ubiquitous. cally sized photograph of the recently martyred Its cover foregrounded the teenage cipher of “rebel without a cause” James Dean with the outsiderness, characteristic of the young original Carjat portrait of Rimbaud, pasted French poet, who, as one of his biographers vertically on a blackened board. The Dean put it, “has been treated by four generations headshot (top) is heavily striped with trans- of avant-gardes as an emergency exit from the lucent hot-pink ink, almost entirely covering house of convention.”3 In ways that are de- the image, while Rimbaud (bottom) has the pink monstrable but incalculable, Johnson’s cover bands only over his eyes, nose, and mouth. contributed to this proliferating influence. The collage identifies an unmistakable affinity: Sixteen-year-old Patti Smith is merely the two artists with passionate intensity and most famous of innumerable teenagers who knew aberrant sexualities, hostile to the mores nothing of the poet but grabbed the book of their time. Johnson equates Dean’s violent because of Rimbaud’s “haughty gaze,” which in death at twenty-four from a speeding sports car her case peered out from “a bookstall across crash with the force of Rimbaud’s renuncia- from the bus depot in Philadelphia.”4 It was tion of poetry at the age of twenty. The visual on this visual evidence alone that she stole logic suggests transposing the features from the book that changed her life. She would one onto the other, blurring them together, have likely passed over Lustig’s elegant star- while retaining a vague distinction between burst if it were the edition on the stand the actor, known for playing characters, and that day. Smith described the effect of the book the poet who once proclaimed that “every being on her: “His hands had chiseled a manual of seemed to me to be entitled to several other heaven and I held them fast. The knowledge lives.”6 The hot pink underscores their twinned of him added swagger to my step and this could roles as queer icons — a fantasy couple whose not be stripped away. I tossed my copy of images evolved into potent sites of identi- Illuminations in a plaid suitcase. We would fication for gay men as that subculture began 4 WHAT A DUMP 5 Jarrett Earnest taking shape. What might at first seem an arbi- identical cartoon faces. By way of his robust trary, even capricious juxtaposition of a poet network, a swarm of Rimbauds were soon set and a movie star takes on the clarity of a loose upon the world, moving among the various formula when seen within the larger mathematics audiences of the international art magazine, of queer desire. some returning to Johnson glamorized or brutal- This image of Rimbaud continued to pro- ized, often both. liferate in Johnson’s collages and mailings In the case of a photographic image, until the end of his life, becoming a personal there are essentially two operations for its emblem. And like Rimbaud’s poetry, the struc- transformation. The first is additive: ink, tures of Johnson’s work undermine any single glitter, other images, sundry stuff can be put or coherent sense of an internal “self,” onto the picture like a cosmetic, an invitation inverting identity outward through seemingly to put the young Rimbaud in drag. Many respon- endless chains of slippage and dispersal. In an dents gleefully understood, returning burlesque issue of Arts Magazine in 1971, Johnson repro- versions of the poet’s visage. The second is duced the Rimbaud portrait, filling a page of deconstructive: to cut the image up, allowing the magazine with the life-sized face. “FOLLOW the parts to be rearranged and collaged with INSTRUCTIONS BELOW” was printed on the opposite pieces of other images. In each case, the effect page, with a number of corresponding options of “defacement” brings both a joyous freedom acted out by his trademark wide-eyed “bunnies” and lurking violence to the subject, one for how Rimbaud could be altered. “Detach along perfectly suited to Rimbaud’s poetry and biog- dotted line ... participate by adding words, raphy. When Paul Verlaine left his wife for letters, colors or whatever to face ... & mail Rimbaud — according to the account of one to Ray Johnson, 44 Seventh St., Locust Valley, Constable Lombard of the Brussels police, who N.Y. 11560” (his home address). In 1971, this had been tracking the young poets — Verlaine was only the latest incarnation of Johnson’s not only exclaimed “We love each other like interest in participatory art making and circu- tigers!” but also “bared his chest in front of lation via the postal service. As early as the his wife. It was bruised and tattooed with mid-1940s, Johnson was mailing heavily illus- knife wounds administered by his friend trated letters to friends, which became a fully Raimbaud [sic].”7 elaborated artistic mode by the mid-1950s. In In 1978, the twenty-four-year-old David 1962, artist Ed Plunkett named the phenomenon Wojnarowicz took advantage of a short stint of Johnson’s eccentric mailings the “New York at an ad agency in Manhattan, using their Correspondence School,” which Johnson shifted photostat machine to make an enlarged copy of to spell as “Correspondance,” crystallized Johnson’s cover of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, by the iconic direction stamped on each parcel: which he then cut out and burned eyeholes “PLEASE ADD TO AND RETURN TO RAY JOHNSON.” with a cigarette to create a life-sized mask.8 The playfully shifting network was visualized Wojnarowicz felt a profound connection with by Johnson’s ever-updated series of “seating the poet, who turned the extremity of his charts” — grids detailing the names of various alienation and hostility toward society into a artist friends and celebrities, beneath almost poetics that fused sacred with profane. Like 6 WHAT A DUMP 7 Jarrett Earnest Rimbaud, Wojnarowicz would pursue a similar moments throughout the twentieth century, such “derangement of the senses.” Envisioning as a shot of James Dean in a black leather Rimbaud transposed into 1970s New York, jacket, cigarette hanging from his lips, Wojnarowicz photographed various friends and captioned “RIMBAUD ’55” — a gesture parallel to lovers wearing the Rimbaud mask in the places Johnson’s collage from around 1957. Cooper’s that embodied such derangements in his own homage encapsulated Rimbaud’s contradictory experience: cruising for sex on the West Side appeal: the desire to elide one’s identity with piers, beside porn theaters in Times Square, a figure who sought to disperse identity itself, in the Meatpacking District, on the subway.