Galleries • Weekend
Not Nothing: Selected Writings By Ray Johnson, 1954-1995, recently released by Siglio Press, is edited by poet and translator Elizabeth Zuba, with an essay by poet and novelist Kevin Killian. Coinciding with its appearance is a reprint of The Paper Snake, a slim volume of Johnson’s writings originally published in 1965 by Something Else Press, which was founded by Johnson’s close friend and correspondent, poet Dick Higgins. The participation of three poets in bringing Johnson’s word-works into print is not coincidental, and while Not Nothing will make absorbing reading for those interested in mail art, Fluxus, Pop, Conceptualism, the legacies of Dada and Surrealism, the reception of Duchamp, or the downtown New York scene in the years spanned by Zuba’s selection, the two books will likewise be a pleasure for anyone beguiled by language-and-image as a field of play. For, while the increased availability of Johnson’s letters, notes, and statements subtilizes our understanding of this legendarily well-connected yet enigmatic artist, his flattened logorrheia is also just fun to read. Where else do Gertrude Stein and Andy Warhol seem to collaborate on a lewd, somehow hobo-ish children’s book? How is it possible that a such a sizeable chunk of an artist’s archive should be so redolent of sensibility, yet so purged of confessional ego? Zuba writes in her introduction: .....-»
http://hyperallergic.com/135170/man-of-letters-ray-johnson-art-in-motion/
I Is an Other: The Mail Art of Ray Johnson
Ray Johnson in his Suffolk Street apartment, 1967 (photo by William S. Wilson. Courtesy Ray Johnson Estate. Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co.)
Ray Johnson disappeared near Sag Harbor just over twenty years ago. But if we refer to the artist by the art, he’s still among us. In the last ten years, Johnson’s work has been presented in twenty-six solo shows and featured in 125 group exhibitions. In 2014, Siglio Press published Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994 and Ray’s lost 1965 classic The Paper Snake. Earlier this year, Karma produced the enormous compendium Ray Johnson.... -»
Anonymous Ray Johnson silhouette drawing, possibly by Ray Johnson (c. 1980s) (© The Ray Johnson Estate. Courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co.)
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Man of Letters: Ray Johnson Art in Motion
Cover of “Not Nothing: Selected Writings By Ray Johnson, 1954-1995” (2014), Sigilo Press (all images courtesy Sigilo Press)
http://hyperallergic.com/135170/man-of-letters-ray-johnson-art-in-motion/
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