I was too afraid to begin taking pictures from the street, so I began to take some pictures from Solonga’s windows. Through her windows, inside out inside Solonga’s loft. Unconsciously, I began to relate my photography of her apartment and possessions to those photographs I’d taken back in Amsterdam before departing for New York, those pictures taken of those homes and objects belonging to those people, those many people, who had died without any known friends or relations, those people who had died alone. Although, presumably, Solonga was still very much alive and would be returning at some point, some future point, and thus reclaim possession of her surroundings and her things, perhaps sometime next year, as Geert said possibly was probable. There was a stillness all around me that infused, or seemed to me to infuse, my images with loss, with death, with incalculable absence, impossible decrepitude, something archaic, something permanent that I could not exactly articulate in words, something that I felt, could feel, felt now, but that my images were presently beginning to lay out before me, allowing me to see in ways the naked eye could never capture, the clicking of my camera always signaling a rhythmic pause in my looking, an ocular breath, a caesura not dissimilar, at least in my perhaps not completely balanced imagination, to Emily Dickinson’s signature dashes, signaling a kind of pointing that was not a pointing, something like Gertrude Stein’s carafe, that is a blind glass, a seeing only darkly what escapes the naked eye, but something seen, nonetheless, and what is the naked eye if not the eye stripped back of its intuitive intelligence and wonder, so it’s a seeing now infused with intuitive intelligence and wonder, something that my mind could never figure, at least not without killing the image first, and stuffing it in words that poison it before it ever breathes.
And what exactly is this breathing but a flicker, something going in and out, something perhaps autoerotic, going in and out of itself, as I look at my images of these postcards, these framed postcards hanging over Solonga’s bed, sent to her just a few short years ago by the American artist Ray Johnson, shortly before his highly performative, very real, yet seemingly staged suicide in 1997. He jumped into the sea and died. And his art is now around us. And it is equally mysterious, equally hermetic as the artist’s death. He died alone, which was his choice. Exactly as he’d lived. He dived and died and lived. He is living now. Here. Inside these images of postcards that he sent.
The images get closer to the words than can the eye. The images of words making words into these images. Sequestering them in plastic. An image of an image of America’s sweetheart, Shirley Temple, done up in cap and matching outfit, seemingly in leather. She seems to look directly at the viewer. And pointing down above her from the left there is an upside down bunny head, one of Johnson’s signature bunny heads, with the name of the American artist and critic, John Coplans, and the date 10.25.86 written also upside down beneath it, nay above it, on the card. A shapely naked beach bum with his back to us before her. And there is a long upside down toothbrush with its bristles positioned to the left of his private parts. Private parts remaining private. Out of frame though inside the frame (but hiding). Parts that can’t be seen but only imagined. Only Shirley Temple seems to be arriving at a closer look. And we arrive at her arrival and depart.
There is no greeting of Solonga here. There is no signature. But only images of images for her to look at, ponder over, possibly interpret. It is a confluence of images he’s packaged as a thing. And Solonga liked it well enough to hang it up above her bed. Perhaps this image of the beach bum with his backside in her dreams, the way this image has begun to fuse itself into my own. Beaches, imaginary beaches, beautifying city in my dreams. A backside so different, certainly, from those images John Coplans took of himself and made, in the 1980s, into a series of photographs. Garish black and white images of a not so healthy middle age. A masculine frontality that unpleasantly confronts the viewer, and unlike the shapely naked beach bum on the postcard sent by Johnson, leaving nothing to the imagination. Stripping the imagination. There is nothing for Shirley to look at and for us to imagine. These photographs are death. I look at them and I see death.
Ray Johnson put together a book about death between 1963 and 1965, a book consisting of thirteen unbound pages, a book he titled A Book about Death, whose first page spells out its title as ‘A Boop about Death.’ In ‘A Boop about Death,’ says William Wilson, possibly Johnson’s most perceptive commentator, ‘Ray did not want handwriting or print to be so transparent that the surface could be read for content, and then discarded after it had served its purposes.’
Perhaps Ray Johnson saw death when he sent this postcard to Solonga, this postcard with its upside down bunny head pasted in, and floating above–no, actually below (though actually there is no ‘actually’) John Coplans’ name, for here up and down have been made literally and figuratively the same, as equivalent as life and death.
I take my final image of this postcard and I sip my tea.
marginalamericannotes.com 