Ray Johnson: Correspondences

This is the catalogue for an important retrospective of Ray Johnson’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art from January 14 to March 21, 1999. The exhibition was organized by Donna De Salvo and later traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where it was shown from September 17 to December 31, 2000.

The catalogue includes the following essays:

“Correspondences” by Donna De Salvo

″‘To Be Sad, Because I Was Once a Child’: The Collages of Ray Johnson” by Mason Klein

“The Webmaster’s Solo: Ray Johnson Invites Us to the Dance” by Wendy Steiner

“Ray Johnson Fan Club” by Jonathan Weinberg

“Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School: The Fine Art of Communication” show more by Sharla Sava

“Special Deliverance” by Lucy Lippard

“Ray Johnson: The One and the Other” by William S. Wilson

“Should An Eyelash Last Forever?: An Interview with Ray Johnson” by Henry Martin

The volume also includes an Introduction by De Salvo and Catherine Gudis, a Foreword by Sherri Geldin, and a selected chronology, exhibition history, and bibliography by Muffet Jones, former Ray Johnson Estate archivist.

In 1995, the resolutely reclusive Ray Johnson reemerged into the spotlight when he died in a mysterious and spectacular way, leading to the discovery of thousands of works of art in his house. Drawing upon this vast trove, Donna De Salvo, the Wexner Center's Curator at Large, has organized Ray Johnson: Correspondences, the first comprehensive exhibition to be mounted (with the complete cooperation of the artist's estate).
Like Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and later Andy Warhol and Jim Rosenquist, Johnson combined the signs and symbols of contemporary culture with the lessons of abstraction to develop a new lexicon of forms. A pioneer in the use of 'found' images and techniques of mechanical reproduction, Johnson created in 1955 what may have been the first informal happening.

Johnson first created 'mail art' in the fifties. These were part collage, part manifesto, part parody; he often instructed recipients to 'add to', 'return to', or 'send to', spawning an interactive art form, a continuous happening, that pre-figured electronic mail. Johnson was the nerve center of this pre-digital netscape that spread around the nation and, eventually, the world, which continues to flourish today.

By the eighties, Johnson was a legend in the artistic community. Ray Johnson: correspondences, offers the first opportunity for in-depth examination of the work of an artist who reflected and dissected many of the aesthetic, cultural, and theoretical preoccupations of the last forty years; a figure whose impact and influence will finally be made known. show less