ARTIST MONOGRAPHS

Ray Johnson

Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays


         

ACTIVE BACKLIST

Ray Johnson and William S. Wilson: Frog Pond Splash

SIGLIO
Edited by Elizabeth Zuba. Text by William S. Wilson.

This gemlike Ray Johnson book celebrates his friendship with writer and logophile William S. Wilson in pictures and words

Hbk, 5.5 x 7.25 in. / 88 pgs / 37 color. | 11/20/2020 | In stock
$29.95


That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson

SOBERSCOVE PRESS
Edited by Julie J. Thomson. Interviews with David Bourdon Jr., Sevim Fesci, Richard Bernstein, John Held Jr., Diane Spodarek, Randy Delbeke, Richard Pieper, Henry Martin, Sydne Didier, Weslea Sidon, Shirley Samberg, Clive Phillpot.

"I did one of my most bizarre lectures up at the Rhode Island School of Design. It consisted of my trying to move a piano across a stage, and people kept coming up to ask if they could help, and I said, 'Certainly not! I mean the point is that I can't move this piano, and I'm struggling to move it, and it's obviously not going to get moved across the stage, and I'm putting out a great exertion of energy, and I'm on a public platform, and you are all viewing me, which is the whole point of this thing.' I said, 'You figure it out.'"–Ray Johnson

Pbk, 7 x 8.5 in. / 200 pgs / 14 bw. | 9/4/2018 | In stock
$20.00


Ray Johnson

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY
Text by Brad Gooch.

Ray Johnson (1927–95) was a seminal Pop artist, a proto-conceptualist and a pioneer of mail art.

Clth, 6.75 x 9 in. / 192 pgs / 82 color / 5 bw. | 7/25/2017 | In stock
$50.00


Ray Johnson: The Paper Snake

SIGLIO

A sumptuous facsimile of a vertiginous artist's book from the founder of the mail-art movement

Hbk, 10.75 x 8.75 in. / 48 pgs / 48 color. | 7/31/2014 | In stock
$34.70


Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994

SIGLIO
Edited by Elizabeth Zuba. Text by Kevin Killian.

Pbk, 8 x 10 in. / 380 pgs / 45 color / 163 bw. | 7/31/2014 | Out of stock
$45.00


  

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

Ray Johnson

KARMA, NEW YORK

Hbk, 9.75 x 12.25 in. / 296 pgs / 296 color. | 1/27/2015 | Not available
$45.00


FROM THE BLOG



Celebrate 'Ray Johnson: Not Nothing' at the MoMA Library Wednesday Night

Seize your last chance to see 'Ray Johnson Designs' and join Siglio in celebrating the publication of 'Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson, 1954-1994' at the MoMA Library next Wednesday, September 24 from 6-8PM.
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Ray Johnson and William S. Wilson: Frog Pond SplashRay Johnson and William S. Wilson: Frog Pond Splash

Collages by Ray Johnson with Texts by William S. Wilson

Published by Siglio.
Edited by Elizabeth Zuba. Text by William S. Wilson.

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.



PUBLISHER
Siglio

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 5.5 x 7.25 in. / 88 pgs / 37 color.

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Catalog: FALL 2020 p. 63   

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ISBN 9781938221279 TRADE
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That Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray JohnsonThat Was the Answer: Interviews with Ray Johnson

Published by Soberscove Press.
Edited by Julie J. Thomson. Interviews with David Bourdon Jr., Sevim Fesci, Richard Bernstein, John Held Jr., Diane Spodarek, Randy Delbeke, Richard Pieper, Henry Martin, Sydne Didier, Weslea Sidon, Shirley Samberg, Clive Phillpot.

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).

PUBLISHER
Soberscove Press

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 7 x 8.5 in. / 200 pgs / 14 bw.

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Catalog: FALL 2018 p. 28   

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ISBN 9781940190204 TRADE
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Ray JohnsonRay Johnson

Published by Matthew Marks Gallery.
Text by Brad Gooch.

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.



PUBLISHER
Matthew Marks Gallery

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 6.75 x 9 in. / 192 pgs / 82 color / 5 bw.

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Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 65   

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ISBN 9781944929114 TRADE
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Ray JohnsonRay Johnson

Published by Karma, New York.

Pioneer of mail art and an early participant in both the Pop and Fluxus movements, Ray Johnson created complex, punning works that ingeniously combine text and image, celebrity culture and art history, wit and melancholy. Figures such as Mickey Mouse, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Michael Jackson and Calvin Klein models populate his many collages—a candid foreshadowing of current societal obsession. In the 20 years since his death, Johnson's work has become an increasingly accurate depiction of our fragmented and overstimulated society and includes some of the most recognizable imagery from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beautifully designed, this massive compendium includes 296 color reproductions of collages, drawings, interventions and other ephemera from Johnson's estate.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Ray Johnson (1927–1995) 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 and Charmion von Wiegand before embracing pop imagery, collage and mail art, producing thousands of collages and other works on paper. His life and death (by suicide, jumping from a bridge in Sag Harbor, Long Island) were the subject of the award-winning documentary How to Draw a Bunny (2002).

PUBLISHER
Karma, New York

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.75 x 12.25 in. / 296 pgs / 296 color.

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Out of print

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Catalog: SPRING 2015 p. 41   

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ISBN 9781938560828 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CAD $55.00

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STATUS: Out of print | 00/00/00

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Ray Johnson: The Paper SnakeRay Johnson: The Paper Snake

Published by Siglio.

Long out of print and unavailable to wider audiences, The Paper Snake is an essential work in Ray Johnson’s oeuvre and the second title published by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press, in 1965. Johnson describes the book as "all my writings, rubbings, plays, things that I had mailed to [Higgins] or brought to him in cardboard boxes or shoved under his door, or left in his sink, or whatever, over a period of years." A vertiginous, mind-bending artist’s book, The Paper Snake was far ahead of its time. In his essay "The Hatching of the Paper Snake," Higgins says: "I was fascinated by the way that the small works which Ray Johnson used to send through the mail seemed so rooted in their moment and their context and yet somehow they seemed to acquire new and larger meaning as time went along ... Since a book is a more permanent body than a mailing piece or even than our own physical ones, I could not help wondering what it would be like to make a new body for Johnson’s ideas as a sort of love letter or time capsule for the future." A collection of letters, little plays, tid-bits, collages and drawings, The Paper Snake connects disparate elements to unbed fixed relationships and forge new systems of meaning by means of scissors, paste and the American postal system.

PUBLISHER
Siglio

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 10.75 x 8.75 in. / 48 pgs / 48 color.

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Catalog: SPRING 2014 p. 34   

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ISBN 9781938221033 TRADE
List Price: $34.70 CAD $45.95 GBP £30.00

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Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994

Published by Siglio.
Edited by Elizabeth Zuba. Text by Kevin Killian.

Ray Johnson (1927–1995) blurred the boundaries of life and art, of authorship and intimacy. Correspondence is the defining character of all of Johnson’s work, particularly his mail art. Intended to be read, to be received, to be corresponded with, his letters (usually both image and textual in character) were folded and delivered to an individual reader, to be opened and read, again and again. Johnson's correspondence includes letter to friends William S. Wilson, Dick Higgins, Richard Lippold, Toby Spiselman, Joseph Cornell, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Robert Motherwell, Eleanor Antin, Germaine Green, Lynda Benglis, Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Christo, Billy Name, Jim Rosenquist and Albert M. Fine, among many others. The subjects of his correspondence ranged from the New York avant-garde (Cage, Johns, de Kooning, Duchamp) to filmmakers such as John Waters, philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and writers such as Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore. This collection of more than 200 selected letters and writings--most of which are previously unpublished--opens a new view into the sprawling, multiplicitous nature of Johnson’s art, revealing not only how he created relationships, glyphs and puzzles in connecting words, phrases, people and ideas, but also something about the elusive Johnson himself. In a 1995 article in The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote: "Make room for Ray Johnson, whose place in history has been only vaguely defined. Johnson’s beguiling, challenging art has an exquisite clarity and emotional intensity that makes it much more than simply a remarkable mirror of its time, although it is that, too."

PUBLISHER
Siglio

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 8 x 10 in. / 380 pgs / 45 color / 163 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
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Catalog: SPRING 2014 p. 35   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781938221040 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CAD $60.00 GBP £40.00

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STATUS: Out of stock

Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.

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