Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994
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 This collection of more than 200 selected letters and writings--most of which are previously unpublished--opens a new view into the sprawling, multiplicitous nature of Johnson’s art, revealing not only how he created relationships, glyphs and puzzles in connecting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."
Featured image is reproduced from Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
BOMB Magazine
Trisha Low
Not Nothing is a display of ashes. It is made for looking but, because of its reformulation of the social into a tangible maze, I prefer to torch and snort it. An experimental privacy manifesto invading my nasal passages. The documents it contains corrode things out of things—items more perverse than the baloney out of the sandwich, chomping out the meat upon which our artistic economy sustains itself. A cauterized performance of the direct mail campaign that weighs against our rabidly luxe social field. Corresponding fishing hole gradually dried up. No more nose bleeds.
Kaleidescope Magazine
George Vasey
When Ray Johnson famously committed suicide by swimming out to sea in 1995, he left behind a conflicted legacy. Johnson was a pioneer of Pop, Conceptual and Mail art, yet the artist refuted all of these terms. He was an increasingly reclusive figure who, to paraphrase writer William S. Wilson, “made art that was not about social comment but of sociability,” exploring new interfaces between his work and its audiences (and collaborators). His methods were temporal as much as they were spatial — lacking finality, Johnson’s practice embraced contingency and process over a finished product. These strategies resist the exhibition form, and one can see how the intimacy and transportability of the book might offer the perfect platform for his often diaristic work. This year Siglio Press has brought together over 200 selected letters and writings — most of them unpublished — for Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson, 1954-1994 and re-published The Paper Snake by Ray Johnson, an artist’s book from 1965. Designed by Dick Higgins and envisaged as an experimental solution to compiling and exhibiting Johnson’s works, The Paper Snake offers a selection of elliptical poetry, drawings, collages and rubbings. With introductory essays, and designed with an attuned sensitivity to the original material, the two new publications will introduce a new generation to the restless work of Ray Johnson.
Hyperallergic
Francis Richard
For, while the increased availability of Johnson’s letters, notes, and statements subtilizes our understanding of this legendarily well-connected yet enigmatic artist, his flattened logorrheia is also just fun to read.
The New York Times Arts & Leisure
Holland Cotter
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 importantly, it fills out the picture of what and who Johnson was: a brilliant, uncontainable polymath, an artist-poet, the genuine item.
Vogue.com
Mark Guiducci
Full of seemingly mad illustrations and poetically esoteric lists, the entries in Not Nothing almost explicitly demand artists to pick up where Johnson left off and continue the conversation.
The New York Times
Holland Cotter
The artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) is best known for his collages, dense with images pulled from pop culture and personal obsessions. But his most radical work was his New York Correspondence School, devoted to the circulation of mail art - in the form of letters, postcards and drawings - through the postal system. Because much of the work in this epistolary mode isn't visual art in the usual sense, we don't see it much in exhibitions, and Siglio has come to the rescue with an extraordinary volume of Johnson's letter-essay-poem collages. Here he is at his witty, scary artist-poet best, and there is no one like him.
The Improbable
John Gibbs
Perhaps this book’s greatest accomplishment is that it not only clues a reader into the myriad thought processes of an artist like Ray Johnson, but—by way of correspondences—sheds light upon the mindset and artistic leanings of an entire generation of artists and thinkers.
Art in America
David Ebony
The writings also convey the colorful, staccato delivery that characterized Johnson's unique manner of speaking that was so much a part of his elusive persona.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
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. continue to blog
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. continue to blog
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." continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 8 x 10 in. / 380 pgs / 45 color / 163 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 GBP £40.00 ISBN: 9781938221040 PUBLISHER: Siglio AVAILABLE: 7/31/2014 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: WORLD Except France
Not 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."
