Frog Pond Splash

by Ray Johnson & William S. Wilson

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.

Frog Pond Splash intends to suspend and magnify their relationship as well as provide an intimate portrait of the fractured, disappearing Johnson that only Wilson could render, through an also diffuse lens. Editor Elizabeth Zuba (Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson, 1954-1994) has selected collage works by Johnson that span the many stages of Ray’s work in his almost forty years of friendship with Wilson “ordered not by chronology, but by their own morphogenetic correspondence”* and paired with short, perspicacious excerpts of texts by Wilson (from both published and unpublished writings including Wilson’s manuscript on Ray Johnson). These juxtapositions do not explicate or illustrate; rather, they form a loose collage-like letter of works and writings that allow the reader to put the pieces together, to respond, and to add 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 a satellite to the exhibition of Ray Johnson works from Wilson’s archive at the Art Institute of Chicago next year (Ray Johnson c/o, January 23 – March 23). Zuba’s nuanced selection and arrangement of images and texts in this sumptuous little volume honors Johnson’s “‘open system,’ an undefined surface of indeterminate immediacies and immediate indeterminacies (and the rejection of any closed or consistent meanings, codes, language, or sequence)” in its associative and intimate playfulness, and in its gem-like refractions.

Genres: Art

88 pages, Hardcover

Published November 20, 2020

Reviews

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The first principle about Ray's art is that anything isolated is beautiful, albeit opaque. The second principle is that meaning awakens in that isolated beautiful thing when it is juxtaposed to something like it."

I'm not crying you're crying.

[Andrew Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

An assembly of deeply satisfying Ray Johnson collages interleaved with the analyses / meditations / provocations of his lifelong friend William Wilson. It's an apt shuffle, though I admit to some ambivalence about the texts. Wilson has a ponderous style – "brainy Bill Wilson" J Ashbery called him – which can tend to the dry, the pedagogic, the art-critical. Example sentence:

"At issue in his use of phone books for pressure on his glued papers is an image of mash and of mashing."

A gloss from the German? No – that's the original English.

There's a conceptual density here, but it often lacks the elegance, efficiency and surprise of Johnson's work. At best, it introduces a useful vocabulary to color and reveal Johnson's practice. At worst, it's repetitive and didactic, and there's a bit of a trustee posture from Wilson as he, ironically, argues for open-access and inexhaustibility across the oeuvre. A devotional, occasionally hagiographic, voice emerges – something one can admire in the friendship, though as a reader, the compound body of work feels gatekept – made, in pairing, more [remote-removed] than [intimate-immediate] as his champion would have it.

Still, an interesting project. And the format is handsome and right-sized, and the selection and reproduction of collages really lovely.

[Erik Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

"He hadn't seemed interested in where I had come from, or anything about me or my background, but only in the immediacies of my speech--the words I had to improvise in his apartment because I was seeing collages and a style of life I had not seen before. With Ray, one either was spontaneous or one was not going to hold his interest for very long. Ray's remarks threw me off balance, and if I improvised a remark to restore my balance--taking off from something concrete and actual in the room with us--he paid attention."

[Lex Smith]

I don’t think I can really rate this one, as I wouldn’t be sure what exactly I was rating (it’s as much of an art project as anything else). I did not know who William S. Wilson was before reading this book, and it turns out that despite reaching critical acclaim, his books now seem to have sort of faded away from the literary canon. It’s possible this was purposeful on his part, but I’m not sure. Will have to do more research on both Bill and Ray for sure.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful collection of Johnson's collages and longtime friend and critic William Wilson's texts about the artist's vision, history and personal life. Great for thumbing through by the window.