ARTIST OVERVIEW

In the 1950s, in a period increasingly given over to monumental abstract expressionist painting, Ray Johnson (1927-1995) chose to work on a small, individualized scale, sending out images and texts to friends and fellow artists by way of the U.S. Mail. Intending this to be a collaborative effort, Johnson would often request from the recipients that they "add to" or "send on" the work to another, before returning it to the artist. Thus, Johnson single-handedly created an entirely new method of art making, dubbed "Mail Art." After a few years, Johnson established the "New York Correspondance School" [sic] in 1962 as a network for these transfers and transformations to be carried out on a larger scale.
 
Having studied at the fabled Black Mountain College in the 1940s with Joseph Albers, and meeting such forward-thinking contemporaries such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Johnson was uniquely prepared to offer a conceptual alternative to the hegemony of high-modernist abstract painting. Johnson would later organize “meetings” of the NYCS, bringing people together as often as not to witness "nothing." More conceptual events followed, in which Johnson alone would "perform" an activity, often mundane or nonsensical, before a group of assembled people. In tandem with his Mail Art and performance pieces, Johnson, over the decades, amassed a body of work in collage, developing the visual language that would become uniquely his own.
 
Moticos (Johnson's made-up anagram of the word osmotic), transformations of cut images from magazines from which inked silhouettes were made, as well as the silhouette project of the 1970s, in which Johnson traced the shadow-projected outlines of notable personages, were two innovations that arose from his extended work in collage. Puns and word play were also central to Johnson's art, and its refusal to be tied to specific or stultifying meaning. Johnson was, at heart, an arranger-a composer of visual and textual fragments, a figurehead for a correspondence-based school of art, and a recycler from the twin streams of high and popular culture. By turns highly sociable and misanthropic, Johnson lived alone surrounded by the neatly organized materials he had accumulated for his moticos. Performance, both as method, and as subject, was a constant for Johnson, and some have interpreted his suicide by drowning at age 67 as the final act of a life that he was always in the midst of performing.
 
Johnson's influence continues to be felt today with the continuing evolution of Mail Art, a vibrant and persistent art form that has been revivified with the advent of the Internet.