Dia Chelsea is an oasis of sorts. Not only do they have great art shows, they have a bathroom and a bookstore. We were there to see the Chryssa show but I spent some time with this book on the Chicago Art Institute’s collection of Ray Johnson work, mostly collages and mail art. The book feels like the original Whole Earth catalog, one foot in the recycling bin, but the more I looked, the more I wanted to see.
Born in Detroit the same year as my parents, he doesn’t fit neatly into any movement but he heralded several simultaneously. A pop artist, earlier and more fluid than Warhol, a performance artist before the category existed and certainly a conceptual artist. He made fun of them all. A queer street artist well before Keith Haring. His collages looked like the best of the punk era a decade before they were born. He made fun of it all. He blew up a deal with Gagosian when he priced his collages at one million each.
At ease with appropriation, Johnson was quick to make connections between everything. As a student at the legendary Black Mountain College, his art was in dialog with his teachers, Joseph Albers and Robert Motherwell and his friends John Cage and Jasper Johns. He lived like a monk and made art with magazines, Xerox machines and the post office. In the sample spread above he spoofs the intellectual Abstract Expressionist, Barnett Newman.
Most of all I see my friend Rich Stim’s work in the humor. And the post cards that Pete and Shelley sent us over the years – rectangular pieces of cereal boxes with cryptic messages for the mailman to decipher before we tucked them away.
“Some people just didn’t get it, and other people like me thought he was an absolute genius,” said the painter James Rosenquist, with whom Mr. Johnson corresponded for years, often asking him to forward mailed artworks onto Willem de Kooning. “Sometimes I did what he asked and sometimes I just couldn’t part with them,” Mr. Rosenquist said, adding: “I really miss him because I accumulate all these strange things that I’d like to mail him, but I can’t because he’s not there.”
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