Search results for ""Author Ray Johnson""

A sumptuous facsimile of a vertiginous artist's book from the founder of the mail-art movement Long out of print and unavailable to wider audiences, The Paper Snake is an essential work in Ray Johnson’s oeuvre and the second title published by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press, in 1965. Johnson describes the book as "all my writings, rubbings, plays, things that I had mailed to [Higgins] or brought to him in cardboard boxes or shoved under his door, or left in his sink, or whatever, over a period of years." A vertiginous, mind-bending artist’s book, The Paper Snake was far ahead of its time. In his essay "The Hatching of the Paper Snake," Higgins says: "I was fascinated by the way that the small works which Ray Johnson used to send through the mail seemed so rooted in their moment and their context and yet somehow they seemed to acquire new and larger meaning as time went along ... Since a book is a more permanent body than a mailing piece or even than our own physical ones, I could not help wondering what it would be like to make a new body for Johnson’s ideas as a sort of love letter or time capsule for the future." A collection of letters, little plays, tid-bits, collages and drawings, The Paper Snake connects disparate elements to unbed fixed relationships and forge new systems of meaning by means of scissors, paste and the American postal system.

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"I did one of my most bizarre lectures up at the Rhode Island School of Design. It consisted of my trying to move a piano across a stage, and people kept coming up to ask if they could help, and I said, 'Certainly not! I mean the point is that I can't move this piano, and I'm struggling to move it, and it's obviously not going to get moved across the stage, and I'm putting out a great exertion of energy, and I'm on a public platform, and you are all viewing me, which is the whole point of this thing.' I said, 'You figure it out.'"–Ray Johnson Ray Johnson (1927–1995) was a singular artist, for whom life and work were inextricably linked. Born in Detroit, Johnson attended Black Mountain College before moving to New York, where his work anticipated Pop art and he was active in early Fluxus circles. Best known for his collages and Mail art activities, including his New York Correspondence School, he operated fluidly in a wide range of modes. For Johnson, everything and everyone were potential material for his art—any form could become a space for artistic activity—and the form of the interview proved no exception. That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson brings together a selection of eleven interviews and conversations from 1963 to 1987 that offer unique access to Johnson’s distinctive thinking and working methods. These materials, which include exhibition ephemera, an oral history, radio transcripts, and magazine articles, are marked throughout by his humor and close attention to language. Gathering these exchanges for the first time, That Was the Answer serves as an exceptional introduction to Ray Johnson as well as a resource for those who are interested in gaining deeper insight into the artist and his kaleidoscopic body of work.

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This gemlike Ray Johnson book celebrates his friendship with writer and logophile William S. Wilson in pictures and words A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2020 Dubbed "Ray Johnson's Boswell," writer and logophile William S. Wilson was one of legendary artist Ray Johnson's closest friends and biggest champions. He was also perhaps Johnson’s most trusted poetic muse and synthesizer of referents and references. The influence was mutual: throughout their lifelong friendship, begun when both men were in their twenties, writer and artist challenged and enriched one another’s work. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of Ray Johnson works from Wilson's archive at the Art Institute of Chicago, Frog Pond Splash embodies the energy, expansiveness and motion of their work and their friendship. Editor Elizabeth Zuba has selected short, perspicacious texts by Wilson (from both published and unpublished writings) and collage works by Johnson to create juxtapositions that do not explicate or illustrate; rather, they form a loose collage-like letter of works and writings that are less bound than assembled, allowing the reader to put the pieces together, to respond, to add to and return to the way Johnson required of his correspondents and fellow travelers. Taking its title from Wilson's haiku equivalence of Johnson's process, Frog Pond Splash is a small book but many things: a collage-like homage to their friendship, a treasure chest of prismatic "correspondances," as well as an unusual portrait of the disappearing, fractured Johnson through Wilson's words. Zuba's nuanced selection and arrangement of images and texts in this sumptuous little volume honors Johnson's "open system" (which rejected closed and consistent meanings, codes and symbols) in its open, associative, and intimate playfulness.

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Ray Johnson (1927–1995) blurred the boundaries of life and art, of authorship and intimacy. Correspondence is the defining character of all of Johnson’s work, particularly his mail art. Intended to be read, to be received, to be corresponded with, his letters (usually both image and textual in character) were folded and delivered to an individual reader, to be opened and read, again and again. Johnson's correspondence includes letter to friends William S. Wilson, Dick Higgins, Richard Lippold, Toby Spiselman, Joseph Cornell, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Robert Motherwell, Eleanor Antin, Germaine Green, Lynda Benglis, Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Christo, Billy Name, Jim Rosenquist and Albert M. Fine, among many others. The subjects of his correspondence ranged from the New York avant-garde (Cage, Johns, de Kooning, Duchamp) to filmmakers such as John Waters, philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and writers such as Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore. This collection of more than 200 selected letters and writings--most of which are previously unpublished--opens a new view into the sprawling, multiplicitous nature of Johnson’s art, revealing not only how he created relationships, glyphs and puzzles in connecting words, phrases, people and ideas, but also something about the elusive Johnson himself. In a 1995 article in The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote: "Make room for Ray Johnson, whose place in history has been only vaguely defined. Johnson’s beguiling, challenging art has an exquisite clarity and emotional intensity that makes it much more than simply a remarkable mirror of its time, although it is that, too."

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