Ray Johnson

A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2020

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.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of Ray Johnson works from Wilson's archive at the Art Institute of Chicago, Frog Pond Splash embodies the energy, expansiveness and motion of their work and their friendship. Editor Elizabeth Zuba has selected short, perspicacious texts by Wilson (from both published and unpublished writings) and collage works by Johnson to create juxtapositions that do not explicate or illustrate; rather, they form a loose collage-like letter of works and writings that are less bound than assembled, allowing the reader to put the pieces together, to respond, to add to 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 an unusual portrait of the disappearing, fractured Johnson through Wilson's words. Zuba's nuanced selection and arrangement of images and texts in this sumptuous little volume honors Johnson's "open system" (which rejected closed and consistent meanings, codes and symbols) in its open, associative, and intimate playfulness.

Ray Johnson (1927–1995) was a singular artist, for whom life and work were inextricably linked. Born in Detroit, Johnson attended Black Mountain College before moving to New York, where his work anticipated Pop art and he was active in early Fluxus circles. Best known for his collages and Mail art activities, including his New York Correspondence School, he operated fluidly in a wide range of modes. For Johnson, everything and everyone were potential material for his art—any form could become a space for artistic activity—and the form of the interview proved no exception.

That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson brings together a selection of eleven interviews and conversations from 1963 to 1987 that offer unique access to Johnson’s distinctive thinking and working methods. These materials, which include exhibition ephemera, an oral history, radio transcripts, and magazine articles, are marked throughout by his humor and close attention to language. Gathering these exchanges for the first time, That Was the Answer serves as an exceptional introduction to Ray Johnson as well as a resource for those who are interested in gaining deeper insight into the artist and his kaleidoscopic body of work.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Ray Johnson (1927–95) studied under Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and worked as a painter early in his career, exhibiting alongside Ad Reinhardt before embracing pop imagery, collage and mail art, producing thousands of collages and other works on paper. His life and death were the subject of the award-winning documentary How to Draw a Bunny(2002).

Always one to throw sand in the gears of art-world institutions, he tended to circulate his work either in truly alternative spaces (like sticking up out of the uneven floorboards of a warehouse downtown) or through the US Postal Service. Throughout his life, Johnson sent collages, drawings and less easily categorized forms of printed matter to friends, colleagues and strangers. Already in 1965, Grace Glueck described Johnson as “New York’s most famous unknown artist.”

Though his work resists efforts to pin it down, Johnson can be said to have found a particularly useful medium in collage. Collage allowed Johnson to reflect—but also to participate in—the modern collision of visual and verbal information that only became more frenzied as the 20th century wore on.

This volume collects 42 collages made by Johnson between 1966 and 1994, most never exhibited or published before, with a new essay by writer Brad Gooch, who first came into contact with Johnson when he began receiving unsolicited mail art shortly before the artist’s death. The collection of works in this volume shows the artist at his most expansive, combining art history with celebrity, word with image and the personal with the universal.