What do you think?
Rate this book
Ray Johnson: Correspondences
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 1, 2021
This is a catalog of Ray Johnson's exhibition at the Whitney and elsewhere in 1999. Mr. Johnson famously intentionally drowned himself on January 13th in 1995 at the age of 67. For a man whose turned his life into his art, his suicide with its nods to the number 13 and the preparation he did of his art work in anticipation of his death seems like the perfect end.
My interest in Mr. Johnson came with reading the recent Gopnik Warhol biography because he gets a mention as collaborating with Andy. Ray Johnson also investigated celebrity in the context of Pop Art well before Warhol but Johnson wasn't interested in capitalizing or exploiting his work in this regard.
I didn't come to Johnson through Duchamp but there are definite ways in which Johnson extends the Duchampian project of keeping ideas and in particular subversive ideas imbedded in artistic expression. Like Duchamp, Johnson stopped 'painting' early in his career and became more interested in collage, performance art and collaborating with other people through what he called the 'New York Correspondence School' where he would send postcards or collages to friends and strangers and give them instructions on what he wanted them to do with his art or who he wanted them to send it to. Also like Duchamp, he looked to language as a way to arrest causal relationship and expectations.
There is a visionary quality to Ray Johnson that speaks deeply to me. Like with Duchamp, I don't think it's possible to completely grasp the mystical aspect of their human projects. In the past, to the extent that I saw myself as an artist it was as a writer. Now after the last couple years and exploring Duchamp, I see my life as art which for me means to bring a level of intentionality to more things that I do. For example, I would take a walk for physical and mental health. Now I also take a walk to see my environment differently as containing the stuff to make art. Another example is my journal project where I take an entry or several from past years and use art to express what I'm saying from the distance of many years later. This experience is only for myself and yet that adds another layer of my lived experience. There is so much more to say about all this but Ray Johnson along with Marcel Duchamp help me to bring more art into my life. For that I am so grateful for their lives and their art.
My interest in Mr. Johnson came with reading the recent Gopnik Warhol biography because he gets a mention as collaborating with Andy. Ray Johnson also investigated celebrity in the context of Pop Art well before Warhol but Johnson wasn't interested in capitalizing or exploiting his work in this regard.
I didn't come to Johnson through Duchamp but there are definite ways in which Johnson extends the Duchampian project of keeping ideas and in particular subversive ideas imbedded in artistic expression. Like Duchamp, Johnson stopped 'painting' early in his career and became more interested in collage, performance art and collaborating with other people through what he called the 'New York Correspondence School' where he would send postcards or collages to friends and strangers and give them instructions on what he wanted them to do with his art or who he wanted them to send it to. Also like Duchamp, he looked to language as a way to arrest causal relationship and expectations.
There is a visionary quality to Ray Johnson that speaks deeply to me. Like with Duchamp, I don't think it's possible to completely grasp the mystical aspect of their human projects. In the past, to the extent that I saw myself as an artist it was as a writer. Now after the last couple years and exploring Duchamp, I see my life as art which for me means to bring a level of intentionality to more things that I do. For example, I would take a walk for physical and mental health. Now I also take a walk to see my environment differently as containing the stuff to make art. Another example is my journal project where I take an entry or several from past years and use art to express what I'm saying from the distance of many years later. This experience is only for myself and yet that adds another layer of my lived experience. There is so much more to say about all this but Ray Johnson along with Marcel Duchamp help me to bring more art into my life. For that I am so grateful for their lives and their art.
Displaying 1 of 1 review