Ray Johnson

I’d love to hear about your curation process. How did the idea for this exhibition originally come about? What was it like working with the Ray Johnson Estate? How did you select the specific pieces?

Because all the curatorial research was done during the pandemic, it strangely forced me to work in a very Ray Johnsonian way—cold-calling strangers, asking them to go into their storage unit to find an answering machine tape with old Ray Johnson voice messages on it, as one example; or getting someone to photograph specific pages out of a rare catalogue they had and email them to me, as another—basically convincing people to inconvenience themselves for this project. Every single thing in the show, every bit of information I pulled together, had to be located that way, often asking for something I didn’t really even know how to articulate, but casting around until they remember something they have in a drawer or someone else they know I should talk to. In my writing on art, I believe that the language and form should match the art that it’s about; I guess I never thought of a curatorial process following the same edict, but in this case it made perfect sense. I borrowed work from a number of artists’ estates for this show, and they all were beyond helpful. It was humbling the lengths they went to in making this happen, to arrange getting me access to the stuff, so in many ways the whole show feels like a collaboration in the truest sense. I think the past year has made people more openhearted in some ways, and the driving desire for connection at a remove in Ray Johnson’s work made it an ideal subject for the time.

Did you learn anything new or surprising about Johnson during the development of this show?

It began just by looking through the art and ephemera at The Ray Johnson Estate and asking them to pull out the weirdest things they had—stuff people don’t look at or show. Soon I gave the archivist there a list of key words I was interested in and they pulled everything they had that might be related: things like fisting, Arthur Rimbaud, false eyelashes, Greta Garbo, William Burroughs, gay porn, and so on. That initial request brought back sixty boxes of stuff from the estate’s storage. Looking through it, the first surprising thing was how explicitly queer Ray Johnson and his work was—that isn’t something that really gets discussed! But it was undeniable. The second was realizing how involved he was with radical queer artists of the 1970s, like General Idea or Jimmy DeSana, and then I spent a lot of time trying to reconstitute and retrace their friendships and relationships through their art and letters and publications. I wrote a zine to accompany the show that tells all that history I pieced together through interviews and ephemera.

I read that there are some never-before-exhibited works in this show. Can you tell me a bit about what those pieces are, and why this is the first time they are being displayed?

Interesting question. I think in some cases it’s benign neglect, because the kinds of dominant stories about American art in the 1950s and 1960s wanted only a certain kind of art that fit within its parameters. Another reason, inseparable from the first, is internalized and institutionalized homophobia, that museums and academics didn’t want to deal with queerness, and as I said, Ray Johnson is a very queer artist. Maybe an additional facet is that Ray Johnson is a pretty complicated artist—there is just so much work and it’s all layered and it was disbursed far and wide. A lot of the collages that haven’t been seen are his later, more obsessive and heavily collaged works—they are darker, visually and thematically, scatological, filled with sex and death stuff alongside pictures of people like River Phoenix—that do not fit the popular image of Ray Johnson. I’m also including a bunch of stuff that isn’t considered “art”; for instance, some of his clothes that he painted on, like a black leather jacket with neon Mickey Mouse heads painted on it, and a selection of his original silhouette drawings, which have never been shown because they get considered as just patterns for his portrait collages, but I think there is a compelling case to be made for seeing them as a complete conceptual artwork, as he did, calling them the “Silhouette University.”

For those interested in learning more about Johnson and his work in addition to this exhibition, what would you recommend?

The Art Institute of Chicago is publishing a beautiful catalog to accompany their big Ray Johnson show called Ray Johnson c/o, which I think is the single best introduction to all his major themes and projects, written by great scholars as mini-thematic essays. Soberscove Press, also based in Chicago, published the enormously helpful book of Ray Johnson’s collected interviews called That Was the Answer. It’s a fabulous read, like witnessing a free-form performance piece as it unraveled across decades. Last, I would say that Siglio press has been committed to making really good Ray Johnson books, especially important is the selected writing compendium called Not Nothing. Of course, the documentary How to Draw a Bunny (2002) is an art-school classic at this point (that’s where I saw it) and it’ll give a great introduction.