CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/13/2014

Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994 in The New York Times

In the August 11 New York Times, Holland Cotter writes, "With his death in 1995, the American artist Ray Johnson left a vapor trail of interest that has grown and grown, far beyond what might be expected from a career that, from a conventional viewpoint, traveled the byways of art and produced inscrutable, disposable things. Johnson’s most physically substantial works are the collages he made from the 1960s onward, as chunky as mosaics and clotted with visual and verbal information pulled from pop culture, advertising, art history and a personal database of arcane references. He is most widely known, though, as the founder, or at least most avid practitioner and promoter, of mail art, an art movement literally about movement, about the transit of art, in the form of letters, postcards and drawings, through the postal system. Because Johnson’s mail art is epistolary, and likely considered more of a reading than a looking experience, its visibility in museums is fairly low, which makes the arrival of Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson, 1954-1994, from Siglio Press, a real boon. But more than filling a gap, the book crackles with intellectual energy, with enough drawings and mini-collages embedded in its reproduced texts to hold even a nonreader’s attention. Most important, it fills out the picture of what and who Johnson was: a brilliant, uncontainable polymath, an artist-poet, the genuine item."