Untitled (Water is Precious)

“Water is Precious Use It Wisely,” declares the headline in a newspaper clipping at the top of this work by Ray Johnson. The line adds a playful if ambiguous twist to the manipulated photograph below it—Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Brussels (1932)—encouraging us to read the two men pressed against a wall as, possibly, urinating. Extending the game of joke by juxtaposition, Johnson situated the upper bodies of these men atop the lower torsos and legs of three men carrying Western-style handgun holsters. Above the men, in the collage’s top right corner, Johnson planted a more oblique reference to water: a fragment of a flyer that he designed with small silhouetted forms he called moticos. Johnson coined this term in 1955 and applied it to a variety of experimental works he was making from complete collages to their component parts. The term is an anagram of the word osmotic, which describes the movement of fluid across a membrane. Johnson’s collaged headline thus slyly references the presence (and preciousness) of water as a central metaphor within his practice.