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How to Draw a Bunny, a 90 minute feature film on the artist Ray Johnson, won the Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, and recently the Prix de Public at the famed Recontre Film Festival in Paris. How to Draw a Bunny was named as one of the 10 Best documentaries of last year in the Village Voice annual critic’s poll and was nominated for a 2003 IFP Spirit Award for Best Documentary.
How to Draw a Bunny explores the fascinating, often hilarious, and always enigmatic world of artist and underground icon Ray Johnson. A "Pop Art mystery movie", the film is framed by Johnson's mysterious suicide on Friday, January 13th, 1995, the puzzling circumstances of which left both his intimate admirers and the general public wondering if this was a final "performance". Little has been written about him, yet the man who many have dubbed "the most famous unknown artist" was considered a genius whose career spanned nearly fifty years and whose collages have been exhibited in major museums around the world.
Ray Johnson, "collagist extraordinaire, correspondent of the first rank, and founding father of mail art" who has until now eluded biography, was at Black Mountain College 1945 -1948. He went to New York and, along with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, played an early, pivotal role in the development of Pop and performance art. Johnson's inimitable, often irreverent blend of art, humor and life prompted comparisons to Duchamp. Johnson created extraordinary collages and invented mail art, but it was his life that was really his art. As Billy Name says in one of the interviews: "Rauschenberg was a person making art, so was Andy (Warhol). Ray wasn't a person. Ray was art. . . That's why he's an artist's artist. . ."
Ironically, Johnson's death in January 1995 permitted the first glimpse of the work he had been doing for some twenty-five years. Johnson's death threw him into the spotlight, perhaps by design. Artists, collectors, critics and eccentrics that knew him suddenly felt compelled to come forward to tell their particular "Ray Johnson story." New York Times critic Roberta Smith announced, "Make room for Ray Johnson, whose place in history has been only vaguely defined … Johnson's beguiling, challenging art shows the true complexity of such an achievement... [The work] has an exquisite dexterity and emotional intensity that makes it much more than simply a remarkable mirror of its time, although it is that, too."
"As both investigated and represented by filmmakers John Walter and Andrew Moore, How to Draw a Bunny is itself a collage of photographs, art works, interviews and letters, home movies and video, that flow at the viewer like a jazz ensemble. With exceptionally toned care and construction, the filmmakers penetrate into a "rabbit hole of an art world wonderland" and reveals not only an artist's fragmented life but also the universe of his peers, friends, critics, and colleagues. With interviews from Roy Lichtenstein and Christo, Chuck Close and James Rosenquist, and the artist himself, the film offers a real understanding of the origins of present-day art and the confusions of the postmodern world, as well as the experience of an artist who wore many different faces and treated the art scene as a game without a prize."
-Geoffrey Gilmore, The Sundance Institute
Further Information:
Special Features will Include:
-A photo gallery of 76 pieces of the work of Ray Johnson.
-From the Cutting Room Floor
-The Ray Johnson Memorial Show
-Commentary Track wtih Director John Walter and Producer/Cinematographer Andrew Moore
| Catalog Number: MC-284 |
Type: Feature |
Genre: Art / Artist |
| Copyright: 2000 |
Length: 90 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: All regions |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: |
UPC: 031398163862 |
| Label: Palm Pictures |
This title is available in Europe for Wholesale - List Prices: £19.99 / 29.98€
Wholesale Purchasing:
Program MC-284 is available for wholesale from Microcinema DVD. Contact info[at]microcinema.com or call at +1-415-447-9750
Exhibition:
Microcinema is not authorized to represent this title for exhibition. Write us for this contact information.
2006-09-28 Rediff
By Jeet Thayil
John Walter’s How To Draw A Bunny is the kind of movie that creates as much mystery as it resolves. What it does well is answer the obvious question. How do you make a movie about "the most famous unknown artist in the world", as The New York Times once called Ray Johnson?
Easy: you make a whimsical, avant-garde, Dada-documentary collage. You title it How To Draw A Bunny. You get jazz drummer Max Roach to compose the score. And you interview a who’s who of Johnson’s contemporaries such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Chuck Close.
The star of How To Draw A Bunny is the unlikeliest character in a roster of them. He is the Sag Harbour detective who was assigned to investigate Johnson’s mysterious 1995 death. The detective tells Walter’s camera that Johnson was found with more than a thousand dollars in his pocket; that his corpse was found with his arms crossed on his chest; that he was last seen by two schoolgirls who said he was seen doing a "strong" backstroke away from land; that his suicide had been meticulously planned.
Johnson jumped off a bridge into the cold waters of Sag Harbour at the age of 67. He staged his death as one more happening in a life full of them. Except that Johnson called his happenings "nothings". He was endlessly fascinated by the number 13. He chose to die on January 13, 1995, and the figures in his age add up to 13.
Born in 1927 in Detroit, Johnson was the first to experiment with such things as mail art, a medium that became commonplace many years after his initial forays. He created the New York Correspondence School, a network of poets and artists connected mostly through the postal system.
He would send artwork to his friends through the mail. Those friends --- Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, John Cage, Andy Warhol and Willem de Koonig among others --- became major figures of the art movement. Johnson, somehow, did not.
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His collages included images of Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse. Warhol and Lichtenstein would become famous for using the images Johnson was the first to pick up on. Johnson was considered by many to be the first Pop Artist. He was heralded as an innovator and influence but that iconic status never seemed to translate into success as measured in the conventional ways.
Of course, conventional success was not something Johnson ever courted. He delighted in destroying his work. He owed allegiance to no school, no mentor. He would haggle over the price of a work of art that he would then impulsively give away.
Johnson’s trademark bunny head is used as a visual motif in the 90-minute film. Directed and edited by Walter and produced and photographed by Andrew Moore, How To Draw A Bunny coincides with renewed interest in Johnson’s amazing work. A Ray Johnson exhibit opened in New York the same week as the movie started its run. Tragically, it was the first serious retrospective of Johnson's work ever held.
| 2006-09-28 The Seattle Times
By Jeff Shannon
If there was any question that Ray Johnson would achieve immortality in the art world, John Walter's fascinating documentary "How to Draw a Bunny" puts all doubt to rest. One look at Johnson's life and legacy is enough to convince even skeptical critics that Johnson's name will echo with those of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and other luminaries of the pop-art revolution. And yet, many reading this paragraph are probably wondering, "Ray who?"
Johnson never went out of his way to provide an answer. His death by drowning in January 1995 was ruled a suicide, prompting fellow artists to suggest that death was merely his final performance piece, as mysterious as the 67-year life that preceded it. When authorities videotaped the contents of Johnson's rarely seen studio in Long Island, N.Y., they found a neatly organized archive of Johnson's works and works-in-progress; in his chosen obscurity, he'd never stopped creating. A large portrait of Johnson faced out from one wall of boxes, one of several indications that Johnson had meticulously planned his demise, leaving clues for those best equipped to decipher them.
In life, Johnson was baffling to his contemporaries, but "New York's most famous unknown artist" was a captivating presence to all who knew him. His art — most notably the playful collages and "mail art" that Johnson is best known for — reflected his prankster personality. "How to Draw a Bunny" takes its title from the rabbit-eared doodle that was Johnson's trademark and recurring motif, as identifiable to Johnson as soup cans are to Warhol.
Combining home video of Johnson, visual surveys of his work and testimonials from artist friends (including Christo, Chuck Close, Morton Janklow, Lichtenstein and others), Walter and producer/cinematographer Andrew Moore craft a documentary portrait that asks at least as many questions as it answers, tracing Johnson's trajectory from his bright youth in Detroit, to his art study at the legendary Black Mountain College, to his emergence as a "collagist extraordinaire" who shunned the gallery scene that would surely have earned him a fortune.
Instead, Johnson used the postal system to distribute his art and, perhaps, to ensure his immortality. It's only fitting that a postal clerk is among Walter's interviewees, having known Johnson as well as anyone through his mountains of mail.
Johnson's star has posthumously risen, along with the value of his "Chop Art," as he preferred to call his collages. Without forcing any guesswork or passing any judgment on a man who by all accounts was engaging but unknowable, "How to Draw a Bunny" serves as worthy tribute to a true original, an "artist's artist" for whom life itself was a singular mode of expression.
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