Ray Johnson's Art World

Richard L. Feigen & Co. is pleased to present Ray Johnson's Art World, on view November 7, 2014 through January 16, 2015. The exhibition pairs Johnson’s collage and mail art with works by his contemporaries John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, James Rosenquist, Edward Ruscha, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, and May Wilson. Ray Johnson's Art World provides a window into Johnson’s complex verbal and visual language, and reveals the ways in which Johnson's work parallels and confronts the work of his fellow artists.

Ray Johnson's Art World includes John Baldessari's Blasted Allegories (1978), an exploration into the complex structure of established rules and conditions governing the use and practice of image as language; Lynda Benglis's controversial 1974 Artforum spread, along with her sculpture Parenthesis (1975), consisting of two cast aluminum dildos in a velvet lined box; Yoko Ono's Cut Piece (1964), filmed by the Maysles Brothers, a performance in which the audience can approach her with instructions to use a pair of scissors to cut her dress; an Andy Warhol Large Cambell's Soup Can from 1964; and early collages by James Rosenquist, including A Drawing While Waiting for an Idea (1966), which represents an Eastern philosophical turn in Rosenquist's thought.

The exhibition complements Elizabeth Zuba’s Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson, 1954-1994, a collection of over 200 unpublished writings that provides a textual parallel to Ray Johnson’s Art World.
Ray Johnson was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1927. He began his artistic training at Cass Technical High School, and then at Black Mountain College from 1945-48. In early 1949, Johnson moved to New York City with fellow Black Mountain associates Richard Lippold and John Cage, as well as the avant-garde musician Morton Feldman. Johnson’s body of work spans many media, but he is most known for his intricate and complex collages, and his mail art project, The New York Correspondance [sic] School, a movement that utilized the postal system as a means of distribution outside of the commercial art world and that eventually reached international proportions. In 1968, Johnson moved to Long Island, New York, where he lived and worked in increasing isolation. While Johnson has remained relatively unknown, he was an influence on a friend of key art figures, including Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and Roy Lichtenstein. He is associated with several art movements and groups, such as Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and the Fluxus group. Johnson continued to produce work until his suicide in 1995, an act that many consider to be his final performance.