ARTBOOK BLOG

RECENT POSTS

DATE 4/25/2024

The Strand presents Joshua Charow launching 'Loft Law'

DATE 3/31/2024

Behold the photographic work of Jay DeFeo, born OTD in 1929

DATE 3/30/2024

Seminary Co-op presents the Chicago launch of Danny Lyon's 'This Is My Life I'm Talking About'

DATE 3/15/2024

A gorgeous and compelling new exploration of bodega culture from rising star, Tschabalala Self

DATE 3/15/2024

Vintage girl power in ‘Las Mexicanas’

DATE 3/14/2024

Celebrate Pi Day with 'Einstein: The Man and His Mind'

DATE 3/12/2024

Kindred Stores presents Anita N. Bateman on 'Where is Africa'

DATE 3/12/2024

Hot book alert! ‘God Made My Face’ is NEW from Dancing Foxes Press and Brooklyn Museum

DATE 3/11/2024

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 presents the launch of 'Richard Nonas'

DATE 3/7/2024

Letterform Archive Press presents 'The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928–1930' with Gennifer Weisenfeld

DATE 3/7/2024

Visions of the Black figure in ‘The Time is Always Now’

DATE 3/7/2024

Rizzoli Bookstore presents Chloe Sherman and Noelle Flores Théard on 'Renegades: San Francisco, The 1990s'

DATE 3/6/2024

Yelena Yemchuk to launch 'Malanka' at Dashwood Books


IMAGE GALLERY

ARTBOOK Blog, D.A.P. Blog, artbook, art books, Distributed Art Publishers, Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994, Siglio, Cory Reynolds, Correspondence Art
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/10/2014

Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994

In the current issue of Bookforum, Albert Mobilio begins a major review of Siglio's new Ray Johnson books, "From our current vantage, it's not hard to acknowledge that one of the presiding spirits of early twenty-first-century art is Ray Johnson's. Collagist, painter, poet, and the originator of mail art, Johnson took up the appropriative strategies of Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns, infused them with John Cage's ideas about Zen and chance, and energized the mix with his own brand of deadpan Conceptualism. The art he made beginning in the early 1950s until his death in 1995 purposefully merged artist, art making, and art object in ways that were once disquieting but are now considered routine. The strong strain of performativity and self-reflexiveness—qualities that mark the work of artists such as Matt Freedman and Ryan Trecartin—was the animating force behind Johnson's collages and texts and, more pointedly, what he chose to do with them. Rather than show in galleries, he mailed his work (often multiple Xeroxes) to hundreds of people, and encouraged them to embellish it and send it out again. The republication of his artist's book The Paper Snake and the selection from his voluminous letters in Not Nothing are an opportunity to sample one of the most subversively witty intelligences to paste, draw, and type in the last half century." Featured image is reproduced from Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994.

Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994

Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994

Siglio
Pbk, 8 x 10 in. / 380 pgs / 45 color / 163 b&w.

$45.00  free shipping





Vintage Valentine

DATE 2/14/2024

Vintage Valentine

Forever Valentino

DATE 11/27/2023

Forever Valentino

Heads up!

DATE 8/13/2023

Heads up!