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Ray Johnson: The Paper Snake
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 "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.
- GenresArt
48 pages, Hardcover
First published May 31, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 18, 2017
Before I got this book, I asked a friend who already had it - what she thought of it. She said something like "to be honest, I was disappointed. I much prefer his collages to his writing". Despite these words I went ahead and picked up the book. My initial reaction was that my friend was correct. There are parts that are interesting, but for the most part - the book left me not terribly interested. My least favourite book about/by Ray Johnson of the ones I have. Sometimes it felt like they wanted to do a book like Joseph Pintauro put out in the 70s. Only those books are much more interesting and well put together. This is more like an artifact of some of Ray's writing.
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August 29, 2014818.54 J686p 2014
February 16, 2025
review of
Ray Johnson's The Paper Snake
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 16, 2025
There's a section at the end of the Dick Higgins edited A Something Else Reader, wch I read & reviewed fairly recently, where an academic reviews all the Something Else Press bks, almost exclusively favorably. The ONE bk I remember his not liking was this one. I quote:
"1965
Ray Johnson, THE PAPER SNAKE, 27 x 22 mm.
"Mainly made up of mock-dadaistic "poems" like "Last night it was raining in Chinatown and Albert M. Fine threw Judith Malina's shoes in the gutter," Johnson's THE PAPER SNAKE is one of the few duds in the Something Else stables. Johnson lacks that feather-quilted of inanity/insanity needed by the true avant-gardist. I feel that lots of Johnson is worked at, everydayness souped up into an attempt at the exotic" - p 326
Oh, well, my opinion of Johnson's work in general is much higher than that. Shortly before he, sadly, committed suicide, he & I had a brief correspondence. At the time I didn't think much of it but I looked at it again in the last yr or so & saw that he sent me a photocopy of him carrying a ladder. No big deal, right? Except that he was probably in his late 60s at the time & the ladder appears to be 12 ft & WOODEN. A 12' wooden ladder is heavy, Johnson was FIT. That means more to me now, at age 71, than it did when I was in my late 30s. If nothing else, this bk was lovingly laid out by Dick Higgins in 1964. Higgins was trying to express in lay-out what it was like to get things from Johnson pell-mell. He did an excellent job.
There's an insert in the front added to this edition by the republishers, Siglio, I don't have the original Something Else edition.
"Higgins, in his 1995 essay "The Hatching of the Paper Snake," says:
""Back in 1963 when, out of a mixture of desperation and naïveté, I founded Something Else Press in order "forever" to publish the best work which others could or would not, after my own Jefferson's Birthday/Postface (1964), my second proposed title was to be a sort of Ray Johnson sampler. Why? In the first place it was clear to me that his collages and other major works were among the most innovative pieces being done, on par say with the best of Johns and Rauschenberg, who were considered to be superstars of the time. . . . .["]"
[..]
"What I do is classify the words as poetry. Something Else Press published a book in 1965 called The Paper Snake. . . . [Dick Higgins had] saved all these things and designed and published a book, and I simply as an artist did what I did without classification. So when the book appeared, the book stated, "Ray Johnson is a poet," but I never said, 'this is a poem,' I simply wrote what I wrote and it later became classified.""
That appeals to me. Work that is 'unclassifiable' is often the work that's most interesting to me. I gather that Johnson's way of scattering his work widely didn't help him find an easy place in the Art World. Nonetheless, Johnson did, apparently, find a somewhat prominent place & even made some money.
& Siglio, the republisher, self-defines their purpose to produce "uncommon books at the intersection of art & literature" (p 2). I prefer work that's Beyond Category but I'm still impressed by Siglio's approach.
Here's an example of the kind of thing that Higgins included by Johnson, a brief letter to a well-known Surrealist:
"Dear Max Ernst,
"At the Central Park zoo, a sign misidentifies a crow." - p 8
I think this veering off in various communication directions is an important part of what distinguishes Johnson.
"Dear Dick Higgins,
I am now
in my frog
legs frogs
leg period.
Ray Johnson
P.S. I have 100 penguins in my bathtub." - p 13
On p 33 Johnson's text is turned sideways & there's a blue ink drawing in the upper left margin & a handwritten note in blue in the lower left margin:
"Dick Higgins,
I am writing
to you today
to say red,
yellow and
blue.
Ray Johnson" - p 43
I won't claim that this bk is an absolute favorite but I think Higgins communicates Johnson's playfulness admirably & that The Paper Snake is well worth having in one's personal library.
Ray Johnson's The Paper Snake
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 16, 2025
There's a section at the end of the Dick Higgins edited A Something Else Reader, wch I read & reviewed fairly recently, where an academic reviews all the Something Else Press bks, almost exclusively favorably. The ONE bk I remember his not liking was this one. I quote:
"1965
Ray Johnson, THE PAPER SNAKE, 27 x 22 mm.
"Mainly made up of mock-dadaistic "poems" like "Last night it was raining in Chinatown and Albert M. Fine threw Judith Malina's shoes in the gutter," Johnson's THE PAPER SNAKE is one of the few duds in the Something Else stables. Johnson lacks that feather-quilted of inanity/insanity needed by the true avant-gardist. I feel that lots of Johnson is worked at, everydayness souped up into an attempt at the exotic" - p 326
Oh, well, my opinion of Johnson's work in general is much higher than that. Shortly before he, sadly, committed suicide, he & I had a brief correspondence. At the time I didn't think much of it but I looked at it again in the last yr or so & saw that he sent me a photocopy of him carrying a ladder. No big deal, right? Except that he was probably in his late 60s at the time & the ladder appears to be 12 ft & WOODEN. A 12' wooden ladder is heavy, Johnson was FIT. That means more to me now, at age 71, than it did when I was in my late 30s. If nothing else, this bk was lovingly laid out by Dick Higgins in 1964. Higgins was trying to express in lay-out what it was like to get things from Johnson pell-mell. He did an excellent job.
There's an insert in the front added to this edition by the republishers, Siglio, I don't have the original Something Else edition.
"Higgins, in his 1995 essay "The Hatching of the Paper Snake," says:
""Back in 1963 when, out of a mixture of desperation and naïveté, I founded Something Else Press in order "forever" to publish the best work which others could or would not, after my own Jefferson's Birthday/Postface (1964), my second proposed title was to be a sort of Ray Johnson sampler. Why? In the first place it was clear to me that his collages and other major works were among the most innovative pieces being done, on par say with the best of Johns and Rauschenberg, who were considered to be superstars of the time. . . . .["]"
[..]
"What I do is classify the words as poetry. Something Else Press published a book in 1965 called The Paper Snake. . . . [Dick Higgins had] saved all these things and designed and published a book, and I simply as an artist did what I did without classification. So when the book appeared, the book stated, "Ray Johnson is a poet," but I never said, 'this is a poem,' I simply wrote what I wrote and it later became classified.""
That appeals to me. Work that is 'unclassifiable' is often the work that's most interesting to me. I gather that Johnson's way of scattering his work widely didn't help him find an easy place in the Art World. Nonetheless, Johnson did, apparently, find a somewhat prominent place & even made some money.
& Siglio, the republisher, self-defines their purpose to produce "uncommon books at the intersection of art & literature" (p 2). I prefer work that's Beyond Category but I'm still impressed by Siglio's approach.
Here's an example of the kind of thing that Higgins included by Johnson, a brief letter to a well-known Surrealist:
"Dear Max Ernst,
"At the Central Park zoo, a sign misidentifies a crow." - p 8
I think this veering off in various communication directions is an important part of what distinguishes Johnson.
"Dear Dick Higgins,
I am now
in my frog
legs frogs
leg period.
Ray Johnson
P.S. I have 100 penguins in my bathtub." - p 13
On p 33 Johnson's text is turned sideways & there's a blue ink drawing in the upper left margin & a handwritten note in blue in the lower left margin:
"Dick Higgins,
I am writing
to you today
to say red,
yellow and
blue.
Ray Johnson" - p 43
I won't claim that this bk is an absolute favorite but I think Higgins communicates Johnson's playfulness admirably & that The Paper Snake is well worth having in one's personal library.
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