John W. Walter - How to Draw a Bunny (2002)

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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