Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

006. Untitled (Moticos on floor)

For a short feature in the first issue of the Village Voice (26 October 1955), a reporter walked with Johnson as he approached strangers in Grand Central Terminal and asked them whether they knew what a “moticos” was. As seen here, Johnson also literally took moticos to the streets, staging crowds of them for the camera in disused spaces in downtown Manhattan. Few early moticos have survived intact: over the next several decades, in a practice he called Chop art, Johnson continually disassembled his work and used the fragments to create new pieces.

Elisabeth Novick
Untitled (Moticos on floor)
ca. 1955
Gelatin silver print
8 3/4 × 13 1/4 inches
The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of the Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy of
Frances Beatty; 2022.3:2
Elisabeth Loewenstein / ArenaPAL
© Elisabeth Loewenstein