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.