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 ’s I summer art institute in 1945, seventeen-year- old 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 to convey the quasi- mystical charge of its contents: a sacred book of modernism. After moving to 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 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 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 , 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 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: 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. to be multitudinous rather than singular. When the black-and-white Rimbaud mask was pho- Cooper recognized that same impulse at work in tographed on black-and-white film, it harmonized Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York photo- the face with the wearer and environment in graphs and included a portfolio of them in such a way that the mask’s dislocation remains Little Caesar #11 in 1980.11 Along with their legible as collage and creates a crosscut publication in the pages of the SoHo News a few between past and present that is arrested, months earlier, these were the first appearances but never resolved, by the image. Whether they of Wojnarowicz’s now iconic series, and it are understood as depictions of his various is critical to understand them first as ephemera friends beneath the mask of Rimbaud or of in circulation, sometimes xeroxed and mailed Wojnarowicz himself is beside the point. What to friends, long before they were remade by is important above all else is the way each the artist as gelatin silver prints for gallery of these identities is made to slide from one exhibition in 1990.12 to the next within the work.9 The fact that Johnson designed the cover That same year, on the other side of the that Wojnarowicz used to fashion his mask, most country in Los Angeles, Dennis Cooper turned an likely without knowing who the “R. Johnson” issue of his literary magazine, Little Caesar, was at the time, indicates deeper structural into a fanzine about Rimbaud with a degenerated resonances between their two evocations of version of the same Carjat portrait printed the poet. The impulse suggests an affinity at on its cover. Cooper, who was in the midst of the level of something as ineffable as a “queer developing his own literary genre at the inter- aesthetic” or sensibility, as it was transpir- section of violence and gay sex, prefaced ing in and around in the 1970s. this issue in his own handwriting: “When I was Examining Johnson and Wojnarowicz under the fifteen I wanted to be Rimbaud, and I still do, sign of Rimbaud provides a case study of this though now I’m too old for the part. Who needed precisely locatable and intangible historical Jagger, Lou Reed, Hendrix, bla, bla. He had phenomenon, traced at the level of feeling. everything and was farther away than the stars. No chance to disappoint me. I wanted to like him and made a pathetic attempt — short in a long hair era — a fool.”10 The issue of Little Caesar is populated by pictures dubbed incarnations of Rimbaud at particular

8 WHAT A DUMP 9 Jarrett Earnest might see Michael Malce, who owned a shop spe- cializing in items from that period — the shop where Tony Curtis had once purchased a Mickey Mouse watch strap.... We talked of London, Shirley Temple, Canada, and Ray mentioned his In the May 1968 issue of Artforum, Ray Johnson interest in the Dionne Quintuplets.”15 II read about Michael Morris’s painting called Morris suggested Johnson take part in The Problem of Nothing (1966), an enigmatic Concrete Poetry, an exhibition he was curating image built of hard-edged abstraction. The at the University of British Columbia Fine Arts curator Alvin Balkind, himself a gay man, used Gallery the following year, in 1969. On his the painting to summarize the twenty-six- first trip out of the country, Johnson went to year-old artist’s sensibility in his review Vancouver, bringing collages in his luggage of Morris’s work: “To Michael Morris, the and crashing on the young artist’s couch. In best art today is a put-down; it is deliber- the catalogue for the show, Morris wrote a text ately subversive, utterly useless, consciously explaining Johnson’s New York Correspondance caught up in its own time, seriously intent School (NYCS): “Ray allows the School to upon producing monuments to nothing. Among function as a highly sensitive monitor, quick his monuments to nothing, Morris is producing to recognize in others the concerns that many which contain a theatrical bow to the relate in some way to its instigator’s inten- thirties in general, and to Busby Berkeley in tions. There is always an intensely selective particular.”13 The description stood out for process at work, both in choosing members and several reasons, foremost because Johnson deciding on the nature of activities the school himself had been staging public performances shall undertake.”16 On this visit, Morris and he called “nothings” since 1961, a playful his lover and collaborator Vincent Trasov told negation of ’s “happenings,” which Johnson about an idea they had for a Vancouver- coalesced that decade’s social attitudes into based hub for activities, called form. Morris’s slippery antagonism, paired “Image Bank,” inspired in part by Johnson’s with his devotion to the camp fantasias of Correspondance school. When Morris and Trasov Busby Berkeley musicals, also signaled kinship sent out their first “Image of the Month” and Johnson promptly sent the young artist a mailings a year later, Johnson supplied them letter, care of the Vancouver Art Gallery, with the addresses of his network. which owns The Problem of Nothing, explaining Through this initial connection with Image that he too had been involved with “the problem Bank, Johnson entered into a decidedly queer of nothing” for some time; Johnson invited subculture within the emerging Canadian art him to be in touch.14 Morris happened to be scene. Then in his forties and twice the age visiting New York shortly thereafter, phoned of most of these new associates, Johnson became Johnson as directed, and they met at a bar. a kind of mascot who had initiated an explo- Morris recalled: “When I spoke of my interest ration of subculture and self that the Image in Busby Berkeley and the sense of style in Bank collaborators would elaborate in their own thirties film production, he mentioned that I directions. Call-and-response, with directions

10 WHAT A DUMP 11 Jarrett Earnest to alter and pass along, were strategies and Jack Tims, AA Bronson’s parents, at the pioneered by Johnson’s Correspondance school very top. and adapted by many artists’ networks around In spring 1972, Johnson sent the world in the subsequent years. Mail art sixty-eight pre-addressed envelopes containing structured exchanges between those who may or mail art with instructions to send them on. may not have known each other, or knew each General Idea decided to keep them, and instead other only through slippery personae, creating sent along their own messages to the intended an arena that intentionally blurred private recipients, explaining that they had hijacked and public, art and life, self and other. Johnson’s correspondence in a move they titled Morris’s Toronto friends Michael Tims, Ronald Ray Johnson Split Project (1972). That same Gabe, and Slobodan Saia-Levy, who renamed year, General Idea debuted FILE Megazine, themselves AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge with a format and logo adapted from LIFE as a Zontal, formed General Idea in 1969.17 By then, parasitic assault on copyright and corporate Bronson was already experimenting with mail identity. FILE was the first publication of its art through a sequence of chain letters, such kind to harness mail art activities, blending as his Massage Chain Letter (1969): “Give the artists’ directories and image requests someone a massage. If you don’t know how, take from Image Bank with the results of their own lessons. Copy this letter 5 times. Send it to experiments and art projects. On the cover of 5 friends.”18 In 1970, General Idea put out a the first issue, Vincent Trasov is dressed as call via mailer, containing an image of Zontal his alter ego, Mr. Peanut, usurping the snappy in a contorted position above a text titled mascot of the American snack company Planters, “MANIPULATING THE SELF”: to pose in front of the Toronto skyline. In their first editorial, General Idea explained The head is separate; the hand is that FILE makes tangible “the invisible network separate. Body and mind are separate. that binds the world,” listing a handful of The hand is a mirror for the mind — wrap key figures including Ray Johnson who had pio- your arm over your head, lodging your neered this method of ongoing collaboration. elbow behind and grabbing your chin General Idea then concluded: “We are concerned with your hand. The act is now complete. with the web of fact and fiction that binds and Held, you are holding. You are object releases mythologies that are the sum experi- and subject, viewed and voyeur.19 ence of artists and non-artists in cooperative existence today. Every image is a self image. This text was followed by instructions to Every image is a mirror.”20 send photographs in this position to General FILE heralded a new sensibility: a defiant Idea in Toronto. They then published a pamphlet and playful mapping of a society created by collecting one hundred and twelve of the re- collaboration, outside the mainstream art world sponses, the photos reproduced as squares in of galleries and museums. The provocation was a stacked grid, two by three. Johnson appears met almost instantly by an angry editorial on the first page, beside his artist friend in Vancouver’s alt-weekly: “They have paraded , just below the photos of Kitty Tims their homosexuality as though that in itself

12 WHAT A DUMP 13 Jarrett Earnest gave the mag some bizarre status within the Daisy chains of self-reference provided enigma of the alternative society. Instead an organizational force and means of propul- the problems of homosexuality as an actual sion for FILE’s form and content. The cover way of life recede into the pageantry of camp of the second issue, published May/June 1972, parody.”21 The condemnation accurately, if shows artist Marsha Carr, a respondent to unwittingly, pinpointed the stakes of General their earlier “Manipulating the Self” mailer, Idea’s play with gay representation, attempting a double-jointed contortionist wrapping her to undermine and complicate an identity that arms behind her so that her hands clasp improb- was swiftly becoming all too legible, seeing ably beneath her chin. She smiles placidly, the rising politics of respectability as an large doe eyes slightly out of focus. The first inescapably conservative force. page of the following issue in December 1972 Dubbed their “Daddy ,” Johnson, features a full-page photograph of Johnson whose pictures, drawings, and letters bounced holding the May/June issue. The woman’s face through early issues of FILE, was a premade on the cover is cut out with Johnson smiling cult figure for General Idea’s unfolding case through the hole, hands gripping the sides study of micro-celebrity and artistic persona. of the magazine: “HERE’S RAY JOHNSON LOOKING Johnson was one of those called during General THROUGH THE LAST ISSUE OF FILE.”22 The following Idea’s radio-based performance piece Club issue opens with the photo of Johnson, only Canasta — FILE’s Filathon Telephone Canasta this time a tongue protrudes from a cut-out in Party, recorded at the CBC in 1972. After gid- the image of Ray’s face and the caption: dily ringing him at Max’s Kansas City, club- “HERE’S AA BRONSON LICKING THROUGH THE LAST house for New York’s art world, to no avail, ISSUE OF FILE.”23 This mise en abyme literal- General Idea reached his friend May Wilson at izes FILE’s editorial promise; by courting the home, who laughingly strips out of her night- intentional fluidity of persona, “every image gown upon their request and informs them is a self image,” and every self is someone Johnson is at a dinner party. Finally, Bronson else too. and the gang get Johnson on the phone, giving him updates on the other calls, catching up on gossip and playing coy games:

Bronson: What are you wearing? Johnson: I am wearing a paintbrush. Bronson: Where? Johnson: Where — In my ear. To mark his graduation from the University III of Georgia in 1972, twenty-two-year-old Jimmy They ask Johnson to come see them in Toronto: DeSana self-published a boxed portfolio called “We’ve been telling everyone that you’re 101 Nudes, comprising staged photographs of already here visiting us.” Before getting off his friends striking incongruous poses in the phone, Johnson promises to send them his suburban interiors. After coming across issues “Rimbaud postcards.” of FILE, DeSana sent a copy of 101 Nudes to

14 WHAT A DUMP 15 Jarrett Earnest General Idea, entering into their rich network. become a celebrity within the Canadian mail When AA Bronson visited New York for the first art scene via a typically circuitous chain of time in the 1970s, he connected with many of events. John Jack Baylin had started the “Bum the people he had corresponded and collabo- Bank” as a spinoff of Image Bank, dedicated to rated with but up until then had never met in the collection and distribution of ass pics, person, including Johnson and DeSana. Embracing which spawned the “John Dowd Fanny Club” once his Daddy Dada role, Johnson planned a night Johnson introduced Dowd to a group from Image on the town for their first meeting, intro- Bank when they all came to New York in 1972. ducing the two younger gay men to New York’s In a letter beneath two cartoon bunny heads thriving leather bars and outdoor cruising labeled “Frank Stella” and “Barbara Rose” — sites. Johnson’s letters, especially those with New York’s reigning heterosexual artist-critic other gay men, make frequent reference to his power couple — Johnson assured Baylin: trips to the Anvil, Spike, Mineshaft, Eagle, and other places that specialized in leather, As per your request, I will attempt to S-M, fisting, and watersports. Bill Wilson, May obtain for you a genuine photo of J.D.’s Wilson’s son and another of Johnson’s younger bum.... At the Anna May Wong Meeting gay friends who would become his chief chron- yesterday, John Dowd was there with a icler, once recalled Johnson stealing his little baby Dowd and at one point after bathtub that was decorated with painted flowers the Meeting he was bending over talking to from his home; Johnson then brought Wilson someone and the exposed backside above to the Anvil to see his personal tub now on his trouser belt was seen and had hairs on display in the bar, a young man sitting in it, the said backside. We will go all the way being pissed on by the other patrons.24 for the cover photo. I am sure J.D. Bronson describes that first meeting in will cooperate.... Please trust me to New York as a tailor-made Johnson event, one follow through on your photo request and of his “nothing” performances, equal parts pray and light candles I push the right pedagogy and pleasure. After midnight the three buttons when John Dowd is pants-lowered met downtown and started the trek up to the saying cheese. Spike on Eleventh Avenue; taxis would not dare Most sincerely yours, take them there, Johnson told them. Once they Barbara Rose25 reached Eighth Avenue, he advised they walk in the middle of the street, away from where In the end, Johnson enlisted DeSana’s help for anyone hiding in doorways could launch surprise the photos. The pictures show Johnson at the attacks. Johnson remained wary of street edge of a room looking at Dowd, who faces a violence after being mugged at knifepoint in window wearing a black T-shirt, hands on hips 1968, which occasioned his move from Manhattan and cutoff shorts around his knees. In another, to the Long Island hamlet of Locust Valley. Dowd smiles widely over his shoulder at DeSana After some time at the Spike, the three headed as he bends to lift his pants. A commercial to the Eagle where they met everyone’s favorite designer by day, Dowd eventually toured Canada leatherman and bartender, John Dowd, who had participating in “bum signings,” appearing at

16 WHAT A DUMP 17 Jarrett Earnest meetings of his fan club. He also collaborated photograph of a lean DeSana wedged diagonally on the high-design mail art publication Fanzini across a narrow New York foyer, cantilevered with Baylin. The resulting “official” image over messy piles of books with one forearm flat of the Fanny Club is captioned: “JOHN DOWD SHOT on the wall, the other curling a dumbbell BY JIM DESANA IN THE ROLE OF RAY JOHNSON” — up to his shoulder. Shirtless, donning aviators Jimmy DeSana playing the part of Ray Johnson and billowing wide-leg bell bottoms and black photographing John Dowd for John Jack Baylin, socks, the caption below announces “DESANA as promised by Barbara Rose. UPTOWN opens sept. 1,” though no further After the bars, in the early hours of the gallery information is listed — you’d just have morning, Johnson led Bronson and DeSana to- to know. Following “Ripoff Red, Girl Detective,” ward the dilapidated industrial zone along the a story by Kathy Acker, is “New York’s Ten West Side Highway to the piers, where men Best Dressed,” a photo-essay by DeSana, pictur- converged for anonymous public sex. Daddy Dada ing New York artists and dealers across a gave them advice, not only on how to navigate two-page spread.26 An accompanying text by the the treacherous debris, but also how to safely Canadian performance artist Dawn Eagle charac- cruise by sticking to the more populated areas; terizes the more-or-less nondescript outfits violent crime was common, and more likely if of the list: “[The subjects] have chosen to they were to be caught alone in a secluded slip away from this form of promotion without area. Before the cruising commenced, Johnson even taking recourse to the safeguard of an led them to an ideal viewing point to see a exquisitely esoteric or expensive accessory ... recent intervention by the artist Gordon Matta- a restraint that is admirable ... which is not Clark cut out of one of the piers, the holes to say that total image cultivation is not framed against the larger void of the night also admirable.”27 The captions drive home the sky. Then, as dawn approached and everyone deadpan satire: “RAY JOHNSON (Artist) wears had had some space to have whatever sex they t-shirt, Levi jeans and jacket, work boots” — wanted, Johnson reconvened with his friends, he stares as if frozen in a three-quarters bringing them to the open area over the water. profile, denim jacket draped off one shoulder, He had choreographed the entire evening for holding a headless and armless doll in his this moment, to see the sun rising over the hand. DeSana’s “Ten Best Dressed” portrait of skyline, illuminating the murals painted Johnson had a long afterlife; Johnson cut his on the walls of the piers — urban decay and face out of one print and created countless glittering water. copies. DeSana’s image of Johnson then rolled Soon DeSana’s photographs permeated FILE through many subsequent collages and mailings, as thoroughly as Johnson’s letters had and nestled within untold visual configurations often appeared with them in tandem. A special throughout the rest of his life. 1976 issue of the magazine, featuring a photo Dressed in simplified butch drag, Johnson’s of “FILE NYC” spelled out in studs on black “Ten Best” outfit belies his later play with leather on the cover, details General Idea’s clothing as part of his ongoing performance. gossipy misadventures during a temporary relo- For example, Johnson painted his black leather cation to Manhattan. This issue opens with a jacket with multiple neon-pink Mickey Mouse

18 WHAT A DUMP 19 Jarrett Earnest figures, a symbol of macho masculinity made based sister zine, a parody of a parody. flamboyantly “girly.” This game of dress-up William Burroughs saw the erotically disturbing was captured by a piece of mail art designed photograph of DeSana’s pale, naked body by Robin Lee Crutchfield in 1976, which shows hanging from a noose in a doorway, sporting an Johnson’s smiling face pasted on the crude erection. Burroughs had a friend track down the outlines of a body with the text: young photographer. DeSana had started seri- ously reading Burroughs as a teenager in the THIS IS YOUR OFFICIAL RAY JOHNSON PAPER late 1960s; the intensity of the queerness DOLL. CREATE YOUR OWN WARDROBE FOR HIM, and artistic experimentation, hostile to every KEEPING IN MIND THAT HE SEES NO NEW TRENDS facet of the suburban world of his childhood, IN FASHION AND HIS IDEAL WARDROBE IS A was an early and continuing influence. Burroughs MONGOLIAN GERBIL NAMED CHIN. HE DESCRIBES wanted to talk about autoerotic asphyxiation HIS CLOTHING AS “LUCKY,” AND THE ONLY and pulled out a file of his own research he COMMENT HE HAS TO MAKE ABOUT CLOTHES IS had collected over the years.29 It was an image “CHARLES MANSON.” that recurred with graphic force across his writing, the hanging man dying at the point of DeSana’s “Ten Best” list aligned with his orgasm. Burroughs stayed in touch with DeSana, growing centrality within the downtown scene, who took his portrait several times. When the photographing friends at parties in his rough book of his S-M photographs Submission came out black-and-white style that would define the in 1980, it was introduced by Burroughs, ending gritty glamour of the New Wave/No Wave scene. with the questions: “The very word ‘submis- Often DeSana came home and made prints from sion’ contains the paradox of wanting and not a night out, stamping them with his name and wanting. And this ambivalent position can only logo — disembodied hands holding a flashing be maintained by a double ignorance of not camera — before dropping them in the mail. knowing what you want to do and not knowing This was DeSana’s version of mail art, which what you don’t want to do. Can this ignorance he took seriously enough to add the following survive the impersonal click of the camera? line to a chronology he compiled, under the Can such a paradox exist in an age of total year 1975: “Opens world’s smallest art gallery, confrontation?”30 a P.O. box called DeSana, which sends out mailings as shows.”28 His portraits of culture heroes, everyone from to Debbie Harry, began to circulate outside the scene, appear- ing on the front of the SoHo News and album covers, like More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978) by Talking Heads and Exterminating Angel (1980) by Dark Day, Crutchfield’s band. Burroughs was the black sun of the counter- In 1973, DeSana took a nude self-portrait IV culture, and his ideas around language and that was later published in an issue of FILE social control radiated at the intersections and on the cover of VILE, the San Francisco– of violence, queerness, sex, and death. His

20 WHAT A DUMP 21 Jarrett Earnest mission was to combat the hypocritical forms of dominant culture and binary thinking: of domination that saturated every word and “It is unfortunately one of the great errors image of postwar America’s consumer culture. of Western thought, the whole either-or propo- Beyond his string of influential novels, sition.... Either-or thinking just is not his single most important contribution was accurate thinking. That’s not the way things his articulation of the “cut-up” as a tool, occur, and I feel the Aristotelian construct is an aesthetic and philosophical framework for one of the great shackles of Western civiliza- collage that sought to disrupt the internal- tion. Cut-ups are a movement toward breaking ized circuit that linked each individual with this down.”32 All forms of division — gay/ the wider world. While cutting a stack of straight, male/female, good/evil, self/other, newspapers, Brion Gysin “discovered” cut-ups live/dead — had to be deconstructed and recon- by noticing the accidental collisions of word figured; these structures lived in the body and and image that created new, unexpected and more mind, and altering them necessitated violence. complex meanings, and seemed to reveal under- Rimbaud frequently appears in Burroughs’s lying cultural “intentions” normally disguised explanations as the prototypical artist as by the syntax of logic. Gysin and Burroughs queer terrorist: began to experiment with different procedures, cutting a text into quarters, rearranging Poetry is a place and it is to all or folding pages in half, and retyping straight cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud’s across for a new text. What was radical was place.... Cutting and rearranging a page not the methodology per se — artists had been of written words introduces a new di- self-consciously cutting things up since Dada — mension into writing enabling the writer but the force of their theorization, with to turn images in cinematic variation. its social and sexual valences, was an inno- Images shift sense under the scissors vation of the practice. By taking preexisting smell images to sound sight to sound sound texts from the world, the cut-up was a col- to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was laboration in which the artist was only partly going with his color of vowels. And his in control, an escapee from the prison house “systematic derangement of the senses.”33 of the singular self into the “third mind,” something distinct that emerged from Burroughs Burroughs’s writing was an express influence and Gysin’s separate selves within collabo- on both Image Bank and General Idea as inter- ration. Gysin offered this description of the ventions into media circulation; the mail art cut-up: “Word symbols turn back into visual system in Burroughs’s terms could be thought of symbols — tilted back and forth through this as a transnational cut-up machine. Quotes ‘me,’ my very own machine. Every thing, at that from Burroughs appear in FILE editorials and moment, is one. I am the artist when I am open. statements from the beginning; eventually, When I am closed I am Brion Gysin.”31 Burroughs became a contributor to the magazine. Not only a call to liberate writing, Bronson later recounted that having experi- the “third mind” was articulated by Burroughs enced the political failures of the 1960s, as an assault on the philosophical foundations General Idea shed their “ backgrounds

22 WHAT A DUMP 23 Jarrett Earnest of heterosexual idealism” and sought out “the and electric connection with both of them. queer outsider methods of William Burroughs, Their ideas added a new framework to the heady for example, whose invented universe of sex- mix of his friends’ pop appropriations and mad, body-snatcher espionage archetypes provid- performances, joining Johnson’s Correspondance ed the ironic myth-making model we required.”34 school as a model for Giorno’s own ambitions He then quoted a significant passage from to circulate poetry in unexpected ways via new Burroughs’s cut-up novel Nova Express (1964): media. Giorno and Gysin soon became lovers and began collaborating on sound recordings and “We need a peg to hang it on,” he said. audio collages. While apart Giorno sent Gysin “Something really ugly like virus. Not for cut-up love letters, growing bolder in finding nothing do they come from a land without an explicit poetics for gay sex. In September mirrors.” So he takes over this newsmaga- 1965, Giorno wrote his breakout “Pornographic zine.... And he breaks out all the ugliest Poem,” made from excerpts of a “found” erotic pictures in the image bank and puts it story, which reads in part: out on the subliminal so one crisis piles up after the other right on schedule.35 At one point they stood When Burroughs happened to be in Vancouver in around me 1974 during Mr. Peanut’s performance-art run in a circle for mayor, with the slogan “P for Performance, and I had E for Elegance, A for Art, N for Nonsense, U to crawl for Uniqueness, and T for Talent,” Burroughs from one crotch was asked to lend his support and to give his to another endorsement at a “campaign event”: “I would sucking like to take this opportunity to endorse the on each cock candidacy of Mr. Peanut for Mayor of Vancouver. until it was hard. Mr. Peanut is running on the art platform, When I got all and art is the creation of illusion. Since the seven up inexorable logic of reality has created nothing I shivered but insolvable problems, it is now time for looking up illusion to take over. And there can only be at those erect pricks one illogical candidate: Mr. Peanut.”36 all different In January 1965, in the midst of the lengths collaborative work that would become The Third and widths Mind (1978), Burroughs and Gysin returned to and knowing New York after ten years abroad. The capital that each one of American media appeared to them as a citadel was going up of corruption with enormous appeal. One night my ass hole.37 at a party they met the poet John Giorno, a generation younger. Giorno felt an instant

24 WHAT A DUMP 25 Jarrett Earnest At the same time, Giorno was becoming frustrat- that began the following year. In May 1971, ed with the fact that his friends and former the artist shaved all lovers — Andy Warhol, , the hair from his body from the neck down, — did not use any explicitly gay collecting it into jars that he labeled and imagery in their art. They were professionally gathered in one of his sculptural reliquary closeted, keeping any reference to their boxes. He described his motivation as “an act queerness at the level of submerged code.38 of ‘shedding a skin,’ and consciously or Giorno and Burroughs also became increas- unconsciously giving form to my awareness of ingly close. In 1968, after a conversation with being a gay man, and confronting my changed Burroughs over the telephone, Giorno envisioned identity.”39 This was followed in June by the the phone as a medium for poetry, able to reach performance of “Flux Divorce,” the symbolic people all over the country and of different separation from his wife Bici Forbes (later Nye walks of life. He started work on his famous Ffarrabas) on their tenth wedding anniversary, “Dial-a-Poem” (1968), a telephone number anyone during which they cut in half their marriage could call to hear one of a rotating selection documents, bed, household objects, and, wearing of poets reading their work. Furthering this overcoats sewn back to back, were pulled — vision, his nonprofit record label Giorno Poetry Hendricks by a group of men and Forbes by a Systems began to release LPs in the 1970s, group of women — until the coats ripped apart. starting with a compilation of the Dial-a-Poem It was the beginning of new social and sexual audio tracks. Burroughs was often central identities for each, and for Hendricks to these releases, appearing on anthology a rebirth as an openly gay man.40 albums, reading alongside Giorno or poets like However, there remained a nagging feeling John Ashbery and Anne Waldman. Giorno Poetry about the beard. Hendricks wondered if he Systems’ You’re the Guy I Want to Share My should have shaved it off during the private Money With (1981) brought Giorno and Burroughs 1971 performance, and if by keeping it he was together with the performance artist Laurie unconsciously clinging to the straight world, Anderson. Jimmy DeSana’s portraits of all three passing in his public face while invisibly, of them are on the record’s cover. beneath his clothes, he had marked a transfor- mation. Still bothered by 1975 Hendricks talked about all this with his good friend Ray Johnson on a street corner in SoHo, and the two decided there should be a petition to resolve this “unfinished business.” Johnson, in a typical gesture, forwarded Hendricks the shaved beard of a young RISD student named Scott Mednick, Many of the artists in this tight-knit scene a seemingly random piece of mail art that Vwere asking questions about gay identity and Johnson used to connect Hendricks and Mednick. visibility in the 1960s and 1970s, a dialogue In a flurry of postcards, the newly introduced catalyzed by the in 1969 and friends began to plot a performance. In the the “ Liberation Day” march meantime, Johnson assembled a petition: “WE,

26 WHAT A DUMP 27 Jarrett Earnest THE UNDERSIGNED, REQUEST THAT GEOFF HENDRICKS Johnson via the Image Bank mail art network. SHAVE HIS BEARD.” It was signed by Johnson’s On his first visit to New York, Johnson brought established art-world friends including Schuyff along on his tried-and- fetish Arakawa, Suzi Gablik, and David Bourdon, as bar itinerary. At the Ninth Circle, the steak- well as younger gay figures who would populate house turned disco turned hustler bar in the New Wave downtown scene, such as Robin the , the two talked with another Lee Crutchfield, David Ebony, and Duncan Smith. man who was about Johnson’s age. When the Mednick came down to New York to assist with gentleman went to the bathroom, Johnson asked, the performance, in which the audience took “Do you know who that is? Edward Albee!” turns cutting off portions of Hendricks’s beard. Schuyff was dazzled. Many friends remember Hanging out afterward, Mednick got to talk joining Johnson on these rounds, which was with his heroes about semiotics; Johnson something of a Saturday night routine after explained his spelling of “correspondance” spending the day visiting galleries in SoHo. because he thought of the exchanges as a kind Having come of age in the 1940s, Johnson of performance — a pas de deux. was now witnessing a transformation in gay The beard petition was also signed by bar subculture, a kind of renaissance. With twenty-one-year-old Brian Buczak, who had met post-Stonewall organization and activism, Hendricks at a party after moving to New York younger gay men, like artist and musician from Detroit earlier that year in 1975. Almost Robin Lee Crutchfield, entered the scene in the instantly, they became lovers and collabora- 1970s, blurring gender boundaries with their tors. Buczak had already been corresponding clothes and affect — the first time Johnson with Johnson through the mail art network ever met Crutchfield, he was wearing clusters of since he had been a student at the Detroit colorful plastic earrings. However, as gay Society of Arts and Crafts. Johnson’s letters identities were becoming more public, there to Buczak and Hendricks were full of playful, was a corresponding stabilization of behavioral erotic allusions. In one, a can of Crisco — codes. On one particular night, Crutchfield popular in the S-M scene as a lubricant for fist was refused entry at Mineshaft because he was fucking — emerges from a gray xerox haze, with wearing a red velour jacket instead of the “For Brian & Geoff” written along the bottom, requisite leather or denim. Johnson convinced below a rubber stamp that reads “COLLAGE BY RAY the bouncer to let them in if he checked it JOHNSON.” In another letter, Johnson writes: at the door. Within this changing underground, “Brian, I went to the Anvil very late the other there was a frenetic attention to “gay semi- evening after our visits to Edit DeAk and the otics,” as San Francisco photographer Hal Twilight Bar and checked my leather jacket & Fischer jokingly dubbed it in his series of got the number 123 and talked the man out of 1977, which diagrams the signifiers, acces- giving me the tabs so I could send one to you. sories, and archetypal media representations Ray.” The coat-check ticket is taped below, and of homosexual men.41 This new generation’s again proclaims it a COLLAGE BY RAY JOHNSON. experience is succinctly captured in artist Around the same time, a nineteen-year-old and cultural critic Duncan Smith’s essay Canadian named Peter Schuyff connected with “Reflections on Rhetoric in Bars.” Smith begins

28 WHAT A DUMP 29 Jarrett Earnest by meditating on the slippages between sign and constellation of signs, rather than something referent before explaining that: that could reside within the boundaries of a singular or static “representation,” and it Gay people are implicated in this rhetor- is no accident that it is the dynamics within ical play. They might call themselves the physical space of a gay bar occasioning “gay,” but by so doing they fall prey to these reflections. Queerness is thus a desire to referential, denotative straightjacketing. work against fixed “identity” and instead seek Gay culture prides itself on its irony, the ambivalent freedoms of a contingent self. its exuberant “lying,” hence making the Smith’s other widely associative writing — designation “gay” or “homosexual” a pos- which includes a complex deconstruction of sible lie, a rhetorical play, an ironic Elvis Presley’s image and anagrammed analysis figure. To make homosexuality into a of famous names — provides a parallel model referent, as does “gay liberation,” seems for Johnson’s own prototypically queer method- false in terms of the idea of a “gay ology. Similar to Johnson, Duncan was obsessed sensibility” with its ironic and aesthetic with celebrity mystique, creating a series of trademarks.... deconstructed image-text collages. One shows a Does gay liberation now mean that glossy black-and-white glamour shot of Gloria gays can no longer lie about their Swanson with vertical rips down her nose sexuality? Does it mean that language and throat with “TEAR ME IN TWO” repeated on henceforth will entirely consist of refer- each cheek. Another uses a colorized produc- ents adequate to their signs, intentions tion still of Elvis Presley on the set of a to their expressions, thoughts to their film, guitar in hand, behind a movie clap- utterances? Does it mean the death of lie? board, with “PHOTO ME CRUEL” painted in gold No matter what happens, access to language over the scene. When Smith altered a copy of is contingent on our capacity to lie. Crutchfield’s “Ray Johnson paper doll” mail art, Inasmuch as gay liberation desires to have the figure was drawn into Vincent Trasov’s Mr. the courage to speak the truth, it will Peanut costume, sliding one mail art persona not be able to control those situations into another. where a lie will preserve life and live- The complete run of FILE Megazine spanning lihood. Why should one be a referee of the years between 1972 and 1989 is a primer one’s sexuality if there’s the possibility on these queer modes of reading. The layouts that honesty could cause one’s death? As themselves are usually overlapped collages, long as there is oppression and adverse with no standardized design, able to switch legislation, gays will be forced to lie. visual language completely from one article From the referent “gay” to the figure, lie to the next, from one side of the page to the or ironic posture of “straightness” is other. For the September 1973 edition, the the oscillation a “gay” still endures.42 logo’s letters have been rearranged as IFEL for the “Special Paris Issue.” Inside is a two- Smith models queerness as a multivalent, page spread of “The Letters of Ray Johnson.”43 oppositional mode of reading within a fluid Two letters, layered in Johnson’s manner, are

30 WHAT A DUMP 31 Jarrett Earnest reproduced with columns of text in the maga- never resolved — is understated by comparison. zine’s voice written along the outer edges. Indeed, part of the pleasure is the parallel The letter on the right proclaims in scratching incongruity between glamorous as script “Ray Johnson’s new book ‘What a Dump’ the housewife in the “modest cottage” and glam- send for your free copy” above a crude cari- orous Elizabeth Taylor as a boozy wife of an cature of Bette Davis in a large hat, mascara associate history professor in a small college running, cigarette smoking between teeth, town. Playing against type, the causes of their and issuing a comic-book-style word bubble: discontent are self-evident when run up against “What a dump!” their real-world personas. The line pilfered The opening of Edward Albee’s 1962 play from a play written by a closeted playwright, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has Martha “What a dump” became an acidic slogan for stumbling into her home to deliver the camp queers, an indictment of the gender roles of line “What a dump,” a reference to Bette Davis a straight world in postwar America. Entwined in a film she can’t recall. She harangues her with Johnson’s “What a dump” illustration in husband George into helping her remember which FILE is also his typed letter, which concludes “goddamn Warner Brothers epic” it was. He “if you take the cha cha out of Duchamp you halfheartedly suggests “Chicago. It’s called get what a dump.” In the 1990s, the younger Chicago.” and Martha launches in: mail artist recalls Johnson calling him to tell a variation on the joke: “What Oh, good grief! Don’t you know anything? did Bette Davis say when she looked at Étant Chicago was a thirties musical starring donnés? Answer: What a Duchamp!”45 little Miss Alice Faye. Don’t you know anything? This picture, Bette Davis comes home from a hard day at the grocery store.... She’s a housewife. She buys things. She comes home with the groceries and she walks into the modest living room of the modest cottage modest Joseph Cotten set her up in.... And she comes “Duchamp” plus “What a dump” is a typical in and she looks around this room and she VIJohnson equation, an associative free play that sets down her groceries. And she says, carries his words and images along their trans- “What a dump!” She’s discontent. What’s formations with a touch of camp irreverence. the name of the picture?44 There is no question that the gender-bending persona of , who famously created In 1966’s blistering film version, Elizabeth the feminine alter ego Rrose Sélavy, presages Taylor as Martha enunciates the line as a camp Johnson’s own deconstructions of the Artist as parody of Davis’s movie star persona, waving elusive celebrity. Importantly, he adds to that her cigarette in circles with a shrug. The construct the artist as fan, with an iconog- bitchiness of Davis’s actual delivery in 1949’s raphy encompassing a comprehensive pantheon of Beyond the Forest — the movie in question, but twentieth-century gay icons, from the immortal

32 WHAT A DUMP 33 Jarrett Earnest classics Mae West, Greta Garbo, Jayne Mansfield, they portray (just as the roles and Judy Garland to the fresher faces of Bette played are all subsumed into and indistin- Midler, Liza Minnelli, Cher, and Sharon Stone. guishable from the encompassing image of the Johnson went so far as to send reinvented camp composite Goddess). The worshipful attitude of queen and Pepsi-Cola executive Joan Crawford queer men toward these commodified stars was a letter in 1971, inviting her to see a collage so well established within popular culture dedicated to her. Famously responsive to fan that it forms the foundation of Gore Vidal’s mail, Crawford sent Johnson a reply on her Myra Breckinridge (1968), a novel whose personal stationery: character, herself a synthesis of trivia and quotation, is hard at work on a Dear Ray Johnson, study titled Parker Tyler and the Films of the Thank you very much for sending me an Forties, through which Vidal pays sarcastic announcement of the exhibition of your homage to Tyler, the gay film critic whom “Joan Crawford Dollar Bill” collage at Breckinridge quotes like scripture. the Aldrich Museum. I’m so sorry I won’t Movie star fan clubs and fan mail were an be able to get to see it before the existing popular-culture phenomenon, markedly 19th of September, as I’ll be out of identified with young women, that Johnson town on my travels for Pepsi, but it was could seamlessly incorporate into the New York kind of you to let me know about it. Correspondance School ethos. Johnson started Bless you and all good wishes to you. fan clubs for important older artists, placing them on the same level as the ones he launched Johnson answered her letter, informing her of for his favored idiosyncratic starlets, like the collage’s new whereabouts and garnering Anna May Wong, making rubber stamps to desig- another reply: “I am delighted that the ‘Joan nate various mailings and collages as part of Crawford Dollar Bill’ was sold to America’s the ODILON REDON FAN CLUB, MAX ERNST FAN CLUB, Leading Art Collector, Joseph Hirshhorn. I SANDRA BERNHARD FAN CLUB, or SHELLEY DUVALL hope that you had a magnificent Christmas and FAN CLUB, to name just a few. In effect, the will have a beautiful new year.” Facsimiles of whole of NYCS was a fan club for the character Crawford’s two notes to Johnson were cycled of “Ray Johnson,” by turns self-effacing and into mail art, distributed far and wide within self-aggrandizing, with people all over emulat- NYCS networks, marked COLLAGE BY RAY JOHNSON. ing his style and iconography and impersonating The idealized package of classic Hollywood him. Eventually, he added a FAKE COLLAGE BY actors was the result of meticulous construc- RAY JOHNSON stamp to his repertoire. In the tion by studio publicity departments; careful late 1970s and early 1980s, Johnson became so placement of stories in magazines invented fascinated by the critiques of authorship and an altogether new kind of audience relation: representation formulated by what would become movie fandom. The unbridgeable distance between the Pictures Generation that he often peppered star and fan opened up a space for both pro- Peter Schuyff with questions about these new jection and identification; the self of the artists, especially artist Sherrie Levine, who star could be dissolved into the characters wanted nothing to do with Johnson. Despite,

34 WHAT A DUMP 35 Jarrett Earnest or because of, her resistance, Johnson was soon Warhol consciously bewigged and omnipresent, sending out mail stamped COLLAGE BY SHERRIE with Johnson’s progressively willed obscurity LEVINE, a return volley in the game of under- and removal of his person and art from public mining the myth of singular genius. appearance, beyond friends and highly orches- It is useful to contrast Johnson’s star trated events. images, as emblems of fame, with those of his This paradoxical attitude toward his own friend and mirror image Andy Warhol. Born a celebrity is encapsulated by Johnson’s visit year apart, in 1927 and 1928, respectively, to General Idea in Toronto in the mid-1970s, the queer sons from industrial cities, each the second and last time he left the US. What arrived in New York City in 1949 to become could have been a journey into the very heart artists. Both pursued work as commercial de- of the scene where Johnson would relish in signers for many of the same magazines and his own fame as the almost mythic forerunner publishers, including New Directions. By 1956, of General Idea’s artistic and intellectual the two were friends and shared many cultural pursuits instead witnessed his arrival with a obsessions; Johnson’s early use of Elvis and strip of silver electrical tape over his mouth, Marilyn actually predates Warhol’s, which as though he’d been trussed up by criminals, would go on to define the era. The work of both and a note explaining simply that he could not artists evinces a mania for personae, gestures talk. For the entire long weekend, whenever that evacuate the “self” to displace it with he was with General Idea, his mouth remained the image of another, thereby creating a chain taped shut. He was excluded by his own efforts, of identification, where Warhol could be played hanging out during meals but not partaking, by Candy Darling in an interview, and Jimmy simply watching everything, and remaining DeSana could photograph John Dowd’s butt in present. AA Bronson imagined that when he went the “role” of Ray Johnson. Their twin obses- off by himself during the day, he took the tape sions with celebrity increasingly manifested in off to eat and drink, but they never saw him opposite directions: Warhol created an orbit break the performance. around himself and his image was amplified expo- nentially through mass media, while Johnson dispersed into the fluctuations of the network, letters delivered one at a time, then passed along altered in ways beyond his control. Even their physical headquarters reflect their differing directions: Warhol’s factory in Lower Manhattan was host to partiers and collabora- On April 20, 1976, Johnson had a friend hold tors flowing in and out, while Johnson rarely VIIa gooseneck table lamp a few feet from the let anyone visit his Long Island home. Through left side of Warhol’s face while Johnson traced the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol’s canvases became the slightly larger-than-life shadow onto a ever larger, emptier surfaces, while Johnson’s sheet of paper on the wall. The whole proce- became smaller, increasingly dense. Their dure only took a few minutes and once it was personas similarly contrast hypervisibility, over everyone left. However, the process

36 WHAT A DUMP 37 Jarrett Earnest of assembling what Johnson would call his selection showed particular interest in younger “Silhouette University” had just begun. By feminist and performance artists who sought the end of the year, he had completed almost to fuse art and life, such as Martha Wilson, a hundred drawings, including ones of Edward founder of Franklin Furnace, where he performed Albee, William Burroughs, Peter Hujar, and in the 1970s, as well as Linda Montano and Robert Rosenblum, the curator and eminent Tehching Hsieh during their 1983 Art/Life per- art historian who also happened to be deeply formance, for which they stayed tied together involved in New York’s contemporary art and gay with an eight-foot rope for a year. scenes, known for his rigorous and perverse The subjects never saw these drawings accounts of unusual subject matter, including again, though Johnson carefully labeled and the florescence of a silhouette-related myth in catalogued them, distributing mail art that art of the eighteenth century. In his essay announced the Silhouette University as an ever- “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the growing column of names. Without access to Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” Rosenblum these drawings, the announcements seem like yet examined the popularity of the legend of the another iteration of Johnson’s famous seating “Corinthian maid,” who traces the shadow of charts, loose grids of bunny heads, or simply her lover who is about to leave for war, thus boxes labeled with the names of his friends, inventing drawing and painting.46 Rosenblum collaborators, movie stars, obscure poets, and connects the sudden appearance of the subject so on, all intermixed in an impossible gath- with the popularity of silhouette drawings ering. Trailblazing queer theorist José Esteban as a widespread form of prephotographic like- Muñoz saw Johnson’s seating charts, along with ness. The silhouette’s sentimental associations the entire Correspondance school method, as of love and loss, presence and absence, the germ of an “anti-identitarian” queer art, perfectly suit the sensibilities of this mode one of magnetic social orbits founded on impos- of Romanticism. By the nineteenth century, sibility and “nothingness” that offered a new it’s already reduced to parody in cartoons by horizon for the imagination. Muñoz articulates Daumier, and by the time Johnson starts playing his ideal of a queer utopia by way of Johnson’s the role of the maiden, silhouettes were “nothings”: quixotically anachronistic, the domain of children’s crafts and country fairs. This performative insistence on “the Johnson continued tracing them sporad- nothing” (the not there) over the present- ically into the early 1990s, amassing almost ness of the happening (what is there) is three hundred in total. He made them of his both queer and utopian. Utopia is always closest friends, like Ruth Asawa, his classmate about the not-quite-here or the notion at Black Mountain, and the characters of his that something is missing. Queer cultural expanded art world, including Michael Morris, production is both an acknowledgment of Robin Lee Crutchfield, and Marcia Tucker, the lack that is endemic to any hetero- who curated Johnson’s New York Correspondence normative rendering of the world and a School Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of building, a “world making,” in the face American Art in 1970. His idiosyncratic of that lack. A nothing is a utopian

38 WHAT A DUMP 39 Jarrett Earnest act insofar as it acknowledges a lack that than resolved. He also fastidiously added is normalized as reality and attempts to dates to the surface every time he went back — work with and through nothingness and sometimes dozens of times — which actually ephemerality: it is both a critique and obscure rather than clarify how they came into an additive or reparative gesture.47 being, given that there is no sense of what was added when. The effect is a rejection It is within Muñoz’s understanding of the of linear time, as he once wrote in a collage: “nothing” that the silhouettes take on their “NO CHRONOLOGY.” most interesting valence. As a representation When considered as portraiture, this of a particular individual, each silhouette body of work raises certain questions. If offers the least possible amount of visual one requirement of a portrait is a likeness, information, evacuating the face of all detail these hardly resemble anyone clearly by the aside from the most basic outline from a single time Johnson finishes encrusting them. If the position. More than the fleeting instance of portrait is intended to testify to some aspect presence that it took to create them, as in of the subject’s essential self or even the Corinthian maiden myth, they are frameworks social role, that too is actively undermined. for absence and disappearance. Taken together Take for instance one of the several collages as a portrait of a milieu, the complete set Johnson made from the silhouette of Burroughs, of Johnson’s silhouette drawings shifts the originally traced in 1976. Transferred onto emotional inflection to a critique of what was a cardboard disk, the outline has become a and the force of what wasn’t — the essence shadow, filled in with black ink, perforated of a nothing. with a faint grid of white dots. A thick X Apart from the Silhouette University’s is marked right across the nose, pushing its status as a conceptual album, convening another details into dark background. Two wiggling visionary meeting through time and space in sun shapes with short tentacles hover, like Muñoz’s terms, Johnson used these silhouettes a cartoon virus, ready to enter the eye and as the armature for the collages he would make mouth, a frequently employed Burroughs metaphor the rest of his life. He would retrace the for the effects of language on consciousness. profile to make a pattern and then layer on Pasted onto Burroughs’s head, in ways imagery, building precise motifs that mutated that make the profile almost disappear, are over around the forms of the face, often burying it twenty years of accumulated materials and beyond recognition, so that resulting collages ephemera, cut from Johnson’s other collages: depicting Andy Warhol or William Burroughs delicate cartoon violets he used in stark are not distinguishable from one another by “memorial” drawings of the early 1970s; a sight alone. Johnson kept almost all of these block-lettered text reading “JANUARY 26, 1969, collages for himself, returning to them year DEAR SHIRLEY TEMPLE, GELDZAHLER”; a cartoon after year for decades, adding amendments, bunny head with alternating red and green eyes adjustments, and accretions that sometimes labeled “JOSEPH CORNELL”; an index card type- became reliefs. There is a sense they are for- written “AUBREY VINCENT BEARDSLEY 1872–1898,” ever in process, temporarily arrested rather with “SHIRLEY TEMPLE’S BLOOD” repeated twice

40 WHAT A DUMP 41 Jarrett Earnest and the varying dates of “1.3.92” and “1.9.92” the book itself. The twenty-nine individual below it in pencil and a pasted-on news portraits Hujar ultimately included situates clipping about Shirley Temple’s real-life Johnson alongside many of those whose names daughter Susan, whose newsprint image is com- and images Johnson had long included in his pletely obliterated by a small, heavily own work, and several he would make silhouettes collaged abstraction made of cut and painted of, including William Burroughs, John Ashbery, paper. The whole “Burroughs disk” is then Ann Wilson, and May Wilson. All of Hujar’s pasted onto a hexagonal diamond-shaped board. subjects radiated allure and outsiderness, the The lower left side says “RAY” in large integrity of their work and vision separating block letters, superimposed over a BUDDHETTE them from the mainstream. Including his own UNIVERSITY stamp and loopy script reading self-portrait within his book, Hujar created “evening gown.” As a portrait of Burroughs, his tribe, a bohemia that drew the periphery it hardly coheres beyond the maniacal formal into the center. resolution Johnson has brought to bear in The boldest conceptual move that Hujar putting it all together with the precision of made, which was also the most criticized upon a jeweler fitting precious stones into their its release, was joining the pictures he had facets, repeatedly polished to a twilit gleam. taken in 1974 and 1975 with those of corpses These images and texts have entered the head in Palermo catacombs photographed in 1963. of Johnson’s collage from without, as alien These skeletons, in various stages of decay, intrusions, as if from one of Burroughs’s are still clothed, often with desiccated flesh stories. But perhaps in waging this pictorial describing the bare bone. Despite the apparent war on coreference between each signifier binary, the photographs do not fall on either and their sets of relations, Johnson’s portrait side of a life and death divide. Instead, they offers a means of getting from that inside propose to live somewhere in between, where back out. life and death, appearance and disappearance, Peter Hujar knew Ray Johnson from the are interpenetrated. The book declares that New York art world of the 1960s. In 1975, Hujar the downtown celebrities, those famous selves, decided to photograph Johnson for his project almost all of whom are also now dead, are just Portraits in Life and Death (1976).48 In assem- a temporal and cultural shift away from the bling this book, Hujar considered not only the anonymity of the cherished cadavers. strength of the individual images, but also As in Hujar’s book, death was a persistent what the artists and writers inside signified, theme in Johnson’s work. Frequent appearances and furthermore, what it meant conceptually to of skulls, memorial drawings that list birth gather them together. Hujar had been interested and death dates of various figures — including in the dynamics and representations of groups Yukio Mishima, Diane Arbus, Judy Garland, (what he called “tribes”) since the 1960s and Frank O’Hara — and news clippings describ- and would go on to make a number of portraits ing violent deaths hidden within various of collaborators and friends together. The collages are just a few ways Johnson addressed people Hujar photographed did not necessarily mortality. This was concretized in a series form a group, outside of the framework of of thirteen pages Johnson mailed individually

42 WHAT A DUMP 43 Jarrett Earnest but collectively dubbed “A Book About Death” suspended along a looping chain of allusion between 1963 to 1965. One titled “Page 5 A Book and reference. For an artist so driven to About Death” in curling script is filled with a map the shifting boundaries of groups — akin grid of hand-drawn postage stamps, each bearing to Hujar, DeSana, and General Idea — within a wonky configuration of the name “Andy Warhol.” Johnson’s collages every portrait is also, Beneath a cartoon ouroboros, another page, now inescapably, an irresolvable group picture. called “A Boop About Death,” bears the creepy declaration: “Mary Crehan, 4, choked to death on a peanut butter sandwich last night.” In 1973, he proclaimed the death of the New York Correspondance School in the pages of FILE, on the same page as the “What a dump” drawing, titled “Deaths New York Times”: In 1984, Jimmy DeSana had to have his spleen Dear Deaths: VIIIremoved, an indirect result of having acquired The New York Correspondance School, the recently named AIDS virus. The surgery and described by critic Thomas Albright in diagnosis profoundly changed his work. Instead “Rolling Stone” as the “oldest and most of the stark chic of his downtown portraits, influential” died this afternoon before or the candy-colored lighting of his friends’ sunset on a beach where a large Canadian bodies treated as props in domestic interiors, goose had settled down on its Happy the work became increasingly abstract. He’d Hunting Ground, was sitting there obvi- take images and cut them up, rearrange and ously very tired and ill and I said dramatically light them with artificial colors, to it “Oh, you poor thing.”49 then rephotograph them, to be printed as small lush Cibachromes. Repeatedly, he cut lash- Johnson went on conducting the Correspondance like wedges curled out of a face, a gesture school meetings and mailings. But the thematics that recalled the leather fetish masks of the of loss, death, and destruction were embedded Submission photos. When his friend Laurie within his collage techniques themselves. Simmons asked him about this shift in his work, To make a portrait of someone’s face is one he explained: thing, but to cut that face up, to mutilate it, to occlude it, to splatter it with paint, I was thinking about the kind of nothing- obscuring the eyes and mouth, is another thing ness of life and how to make a photograph entirely. Defacement is Johnson’s chief mode of nothing.... That ambiguity interested and it is within that active process that the me — that there was that ambiguity, and deepest sense of his continual negation of how far I could go. Could people actually identity and the individual self resides. As figure out what it was? How far could Burroughs and Gysin described, and as Johnson I take the object, collage it, destroy illustrates, identity is always a kind of it and rephotograph it. I think my life collaboration between the past and future, changed a lot, and that changed my way

44 WHAT A DUMP 45 Jarrett Earnest of looking at things. I didn’t want to LOVE, the four letters arranged in a square joke about sexuality. I wanted to talk stacked two by two. The group changed “LOVE” about death and nothingness, the way that to “AIDS,” generating the image in many forms I perceived death.50 and color relations, including paintings on canvas, wallpaper, posters wheat-pasted on This community of artists and writers who city streets and subways, and the Spectacolor were each other’s collaborators and audi- boards that light up Times Square. They named ences, a finely wrought web of intergenerational each iteration and the project itself as a interconnection formed through decades-long whole Imagevirus. The name is adapted from experiment into ways of being, was decimated William Burroughs’s concepts of language and as if overnight. The nuanced instability of images as viruses, which influenced General queer culture was violently forced into defini- Idea’s earliest collaborations. As their AIDS tion — medically, legally, socially — by its logo moved through the world, Zontal and Partz own destruction. Within a span of five years, were becoming increasingly sick with AIDS. Brian Buczak, Peter Hujar, John Dowd, Jimmy General Idea’s Imagevirus cycled DeSana, Duncan Smith, and David Wojnarowicz promiscuously through the culture, traveling were all dead of AIDS-related illnesses, along internationally through many contexts, just with countless others. With them went lifetimes as planned, provoking a myriad of reactions of knowledge about alternate ways of living as it went along. Many young gay activists and making in relationship with one another; back in New York hated it; they didn’t under- the loss to our culture is not quantifiable, stand why it was so cool and impersonal, surpassing the total works they were never able the seeming antithesis of the “personal is to make, with the greater loss of an essential political” imperatives that were necessary to audience fluent in layers of cross-reference their fight. Was this some kind of cruel joke? and close reading they provided for each other, To turn “LOVE” into “AIDS”? The activists of which is the prerequisite for the existence ACT UP and Gran Fury, a generation younger of any form of artistic meaning. than General Idea, failed to see these works In 1986, Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz, and within the context of a decades-long critique AA Bronson of General Idea had just relocated of mass media and the fixed identities it to New York, continuing their collaboration, tosses up to be sorted along the battle lines and caring for friends dying from complica- of representation.51 General Idea returned tions with AIDS. After twenty years of artistic to their mail art and magazine roots, inserting and intellectual work examining the way media a special multiple — a grid of thirty-five images function and travel, once more they perforated Imagevirus postage stamps — into did what they do best: introduce an image as an issue of the Swiss art magazine Parkett diagnostic intervention. In their long-standing in 1988.52 Ray Johnson pasted one of these struggle against copyright, an iteration stamps onto the surface of a collage, embedded of legally defined and monetized “identity,” into inky torrents — the final gesture in an General Idea took on a famous artwork that artistic exchange blurring distinctions of could not be copyrighted: Robert Indiana’s authorship and self that spanned a quarter

46 WHAT A DUMP 47 Jarrett Earnest century. Zontal and Partz died in 1994, just thirteen rocks, each engraved with a selection five months apart. of letters that could be assembled to spell In the midst of so much irrational loss, “NO/T/H/IN/G/RAY/J/SAG/HA/R/B/OR” — a physical in January 1995, Ray Johnson leapt off a bridge cut-up and anagram that could be arranged and into the frigid water of Sag Harbor. His body rearranged endlessly. He set alongside them was found on the shore the next day. Art- a mechanical bunny the couple found in Venice world friends were shocked and confused. Some that can be wound up and made to hop around. interpreted it as a last performance piece, For the other memorial, Hendricks took one the ultimate “nothing.” Others close to him stone, the size of a head, on which he had remained shattered by something so inconceiv- engraved the single word “nothing.” able, though clearly premeditated. By then, Johnson had essentially stopped coming into the city for at least a decade, refusing almost all attempts to exhibit or sell his work over that time, although he did maintain active friendships through phone calls and correspon- dence. One persistent aspect of Johnson’s art, interviews, and performances is the way the work denies a personal inner life, as though “Ray Johnson” only existed outside, in the world he built through his work. Or, perhaps, inside and outside had switched places, had become indistinguishable from one another, were the same thing. Without a doubt, that world so long in the making was rapidly disappearing. On the first anniversary of Johnson’s suicide, Geoffrey Hendricks — his longtime friend, of the shaving and beard-cutting per- formances in the 1970s, among so many others — drove out to Sag Harbor with his partner, Sur Rodney (Sur), to gather rounded stones from beneath the North Haven Bridge where Johnson jumped to his death. As he had for so many friends and lovers, Hendricks wanted to make a kind of memorial for Johnson using those rocks in some way. The car sagged under their weight on the drive back into Manhattan. They sat in Hendricks’s West Village garden until the right idea arose. Eventually, Hendricks used them to make two sculptures. One consisted of

48 WHAT A DUMP 49 Jarrett Earnest Acknowledgments Cunningham Cameron, Luis Camnitzer, Candystore, Cynthia Carr, Holland Cotter, Ed De Luca, The recollections and insights of many people Raymond Foye, Coco Gordon, Jay Gorney, Johanna flow through this essay, in ways that would Gosse, Nancy Grossman, Anastasia James, Randy be impossible to footnote with any preci- Kennedy, Carol Lees, Nicholas Martin, Marc sion. Much of the information comes directly Mayer, Duane Michals, Helen Molesworth, Laila from interviews I conducted over the phone, Pedro, Lee Relvas, Ugo Rondinone, Raphael Zoom, or email in late 2020 and early 2021 Rubinstein, Kenneth E. Silver, William J. with AA Bronson, Robin Lee Crutchfield, David Simmons, Joel Smith, Vincent Trasov, Robert Ebony, Scott Mednick, Michael Morris, Peter Warner, and Martha Wilson — thank you all. Schuyff, Laurie Simmons, and Sur Rodney (Sur). For their unwavering belief in my work, I am grateful that they trusted me with their and for the invitation and support to realize stories and hope I’ve done justice to the this project, I’d like to thank David Zwirner histories they carry. as well as the exhibition dream team of Josh First and foremost, my gratitude goes Brown, Robert Goff, David Leiber, Ryan Markgraf, to Frances Beatty, Alexander Adler, and the Jaime Schwartz, Aly Weiner, and Lucas Zwirner. phenomenal Maria Ilario of The Ray Johnson Estate, who opened untold doors and several hundred drawers, envelopes and boxes (several times), to make this exhibition possible in its fullest form. Ray Johnson is lucky to have them ensuring his legacy. For help gath- ering and lending the materials that make up this project, I would like to thank Stephen Koch, Jeffrey Fraenkel, Ola Dlugosz, and the Peter Hujar Archive; Alissa Friedman, Danielle Bartholomew, Salon 94, and the Jimmy DeSana Trust; Indra Tamang, Allen Frame, and the Estate of Charles Henri Ford; Anneliis Beadnell, P.P.O.W., and the Estate of David Wojnarowicz; the Geoffrey Hendricks Estate; Elizabeth Dee, Anastasia Clarke, and the John Giorno Foundation; Barbara Pollitt, Pavel Zoubok, and the Foundation; Yoko Ono and Connor Monahan; Mark Bloch; and Adam Welch and the National Gallery of Canada. Many artists, scholars, and curators provided information essential to my research and writing, including Vince Aletti, Betsy Baker, Fern Bayer, Nayland Blake, Alexandra

50 WHAT A DUMP 51 Jarrett Earnest Notes May 1968, reproduced in Image Bank 1969– 1977 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2019), p. 96. 1 Yukio Mishima, Madame de Sade, trans. 15 Michael Morris, “Ray Johnson,” in Donald Keene (New York: Grove Press, Concrete Poetry. Exh. cat. (Vancouver: 1967), pp. 30–31. University of British Columbia Fine Arts 2 For more on the relation between Alvin Gallery, 1969), accessed http://vancouver- Lustig and Ray Johnson, see Julie J. artinthesixties.com/archive/12. Thomson, “The Art of Graphic Design: 16 Morris, “Ray Johnson.” Lustig, Albers, Johnson, and the 1945 17 Istvan Kantor, “Introduction,” in Brain in Summer Session,” The Journal of Black the Mail (Montreal: Publications Vehicule Mountain College Studies 6 (2014), Art, 1979), pp. 9–10. accessed online. 18 Quoted in The Search for the Spirit: 3 Graham Robb, Rimbaud: A Biography General Idea 1968–1975, ed. Fern Bayer. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), p. xiv. Exh. cat. (Toronto: Art Gallery of 4 Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: Ontario, 1997), p. 36. HarperCollins, 2010), p. 27. 19 Reproduced in The Search for the Spirit, 5 Smith, Just Kids, p. 27. p. 51. 6 Quoted in Robb, Rimbaud, p. xiii. 20 The Search for the Spirit, p. 90. 7 Quoted in Robb, Rimbaud, p. 178. 21 The Search for the Spirit, p. 80. 8 Cynthia Carr, Fire in the Belly: The Life 22 FILE Megazine 1, no. 4 (December 1972), and Times of David Wojnarowicz (New York: n.p. Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 133. 23 FILE Megazine 2, nos. 1–2 (May 1973), n.p. 9 The complexity of this project and the 24 Benjamin Kahan, “On Ray Johnson’s histories of its interpretations are Sexuality, Loves, and Friendships: An further discussed by Anna Vitale in Our Interview between William S. Wilson Rimbaud Mask (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling and Benjamin Kahan,” Angelaki 23, no. 1 Presse, 2018). (2018), pp. 86–87. 10 Dennis Cooper, Little Caesar #5 (Los 25 Reproduced in Fanzini Goes to the Movies, Angeles: Little Caesar Press, 1978), p. 1. ed. John Dowd and John Jack Baylin 11 “Rimbaud in New York,” in Little Caesar (self-pub., Vancouver, 1974), n.p. #11 (Los Angeles: Little Caesar Press, 26 Jimmy DeSana, “New York’s Ten Best 1980), pp. 157–167. Dressed,” FILE Megazine 3, no. 2 12 David Wojnarowicz’s full series Arthur (Spring 1976), pp. 56–57. Rimbaud in New York was first printed as 27 Dawn Eagle, “Nine Dressed Ones,” FILE gelatin silver prints for his exhibition Megazine 3, no. 2 (Spring 1976), p. 55. In the Garden at P.P.O.W., New York, 28 “Chronology,” in Jimmy DeSana, ed. William November 3–December 1, 1990. S. Bartman (Los Angeles: ART Press, 1990), 13 Alvin Balkind, “Michael Morris,” Artforum p. 43. (May 1968), p. 70. 29 Interview with Jimmy DeSana by Laurie 14 Letter from Ray Johnson to Michael Morris, Simmons, in Jimmy DeSana, ed. William S.

52 WHAT A DUMP 53 Jarrett Earnest Bartman (Los Angeles: ART Press, 1990), 43 “The Letters of Ray Johnson,” FILE pp. 4, 7. Megazine 2, no. 3 (September 1973), 30 William Burroughs, “Introduction,” in pp. 42–43. Submission: Jimmy DeSana (Stuttgart: Fey, 44 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed 1980), n.p. by Mike Nichols (1966). 31 Brion Gysin, “Cut-Ups: A Project for 45 Mark Bloch, “Rayocide: 67 Paragraphs Disastrous Success,” in William S. on the Death of Ray Johnson,” originally Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind prepared for Lightworks magazine in (London: John Calder, 1979), p. 46. 1995, accessed http://www.panmodern.com/ 32 “Interview with William Burroughs,” in rayjohnson/rayocide.html. The Third Mind, pp. 5–6. 46 Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: 33 William Burroughs, “The Cut-Up Method of A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Brion Gysin,” in The Third Mind, pp. 31–32. Classicism,” The Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 34 AA Bronson, “Myth as Parasite/Image as (December 1957), pp. 279–290. Virus: General Idea’s Bookshelf 1967–1975,” 47 José Esteban Muñoz, “Utopia’s Seating in The Search for the Spirit, p. 18. Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johnston, and 35 Bronson, “Myth as Parasite/Image as Virus,” Queer as System,” in Cruising p. 18. Utopia: The Then and There of Queer 36 Letter with original draft of endorsement Futurity (New York: from William Burroughs to Mr. Peanut, Press, 2009), p. 118. November 25, 1974, reproduced in Image 48 Further discussion of the selection Bank 1969–1977, p. 229. by Joel Smith in “A Gorgeous Mental 37 John Giorno, Great Demon Kings: A Memoir Discretion,” in Peter Hujar: Speed of of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Life. Exh. cat. (New York: Aperture, Enlightenment (New York: Farrar, Straus 2017), pp. 25–28. and Giroux, 2020), pp. 173–174. 49 “The Letters of Ray Johnson,” FILE 38 Giorno, Great Demon Kings, p. 172. Megazine, p. 43. 39 Geoffrey Hendricks, “Unfinished Business,” 50 Interview with Jimmy DeSana by Laurie unpublished note, Geoffrey Hendricks Simmons, Jimmy DeSana, p. 27. Archive. 51 For a full explication of this genera- 40 Geoffrey Hendricks, interview by Linda tional dynamic, see Gregg Bordowitz’s Yablonsky, August 17–18, 2016, transcript, brilliant book-length essay General Idea: n.p. Oral History Program, Archives of Imagevirus (London: Afterall Books, 2010). American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 52 General Idea insert for Parkett no. 15 Washington, DC. (1988). 41 Hal Fischer, The Gay Seventies (San Francisco: Gallery 16, 2019). Written on the occasion of Ray Johnson: WHAT 42 Duncan Smith, “Reflections on Rhetoric in A DUMP, curated by Jarrett Earnest, at David Bars,” in The Age of Oil (New York: Zwirner, 525 West 19th Street, New York, April Slate, 1987), pp. 106–107. 8–May 22, 2021. Essay © 2021 Jarrett Earnest

54 WHAT A DUMP 55 Jarrett Earnest