-The Arts Fuse
Ray Johnson was an enigmatic and reclusive artist who emerged as part of the Fluxus New York scene in the early 1960s. The movement’s ethos was to use everyday materials to challenge what is considered art. His work encompassed collage, mail art, performance, photography, repurposed found objects, and artist books.
Johnson is best known for his foundational role in instigating the mail art movement. He meticulously (and obsessively) collaged together newspaper clippings and photos from gay physique magazines along with pictures of dead celebrities, advertisements, and personal letters to create what he called ‘moticos.’ He mailed them to friends, art world colleagues, and sometimes strangers. He encouraged ‘on-sending” by asking recipients to “please send to…” or “please add to and send to…”
Miriam Kienle’s Queer Networks: Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art analyzes this body of work through an academic lens. She argues that the artist’s mail art used camp and homoerotic imagery, as well as insertions of innuendo, to create coded queer assemblages — radical statements that were distributed through the postal service during pre-Stonewall days. In addition, his list of addressees, which including prominent LGBTQ contemporaries, can be seen as a precursor to algorithmic networks of the 21st century.
While Kienie’s thesis is astute, she focuses on only one component of this artist’s oeuvre. Johnson’s collages are extraordinary, but his performative acts, which the artist called ‘nothings,’ were just as radical. There are those who believe that his 1995 death by suicide should be considered as his final performance. Johnson told a friend a few days prior “he was working on the biggest work he’s ever done in his life.”
Posthumously, Johnson left behind a vast archive. Over three thousand photographs found in this cache were shown in the 2022 Morgan Library & Museum exhibition Please Send to Real Life: Ray Johnson Photographs.
Kienle’s perceptive centering of queerness in Johnson’s artmaking would illuminate this work as well.