Pavilion Lautania Valley, Foreigners Here And Elsewhere Ray Johnson Retrospective “NOTHING / NOIHTNG”

[Giovanni Bonanno]

Pavilion Lautania Valley

Foreigners Here And Elsewhere

Ray Johnson Retrospective “NOTHING / NOIHTNG”

Presentation by Sandro Bongiani

With the collaboration of the Ray Johnson Archive of Coco Gordon, Colorado (USA).

Salerno, 5 April 2024

 

That of Ray Johnson as an authentic "stranger" remains a proposal decidedly on the margins of the wide-ranging official art system, thanks to the capillarity of the postal medium in various countries around the world. He was long considered by critics in the 1960s to be “New York's most famous unknown artist” and a performance pioneer in the use of written language in visual art. A research that even includes fragments of life objects. Ray was "an assiduous collector of things found and recovered" to be put back into the circuit of communication and art, giving them a new life. The associations of things and the processes in which they actually happen were the basis of visual communication, a sort of investigation understood as an absolutely temporary "work in progress", which can never have a definitive conclusion.

A practice that is in some ways transversal and at the same time deviant and not very credible in the eyes of the official art system, based essentially on the contamination between the different expressive tools: collage, photography, recovered objects, drawing, performances, happenings and written texts, frequently using the obscure play on words, such as, for example, “SEND” reorganized as “ENDS”, or, “NO THINGS” became “NOTHINGS”, with a sort of operation, in which “puns are not just a playful thing” , an end in itself, but another different possibility of freeing oneself from constraints and impediments and relying on the invention and creativity of the word, also supported by collaborations through postal delivery.

In the word “Nothing” as in Jeff's collage - writes Coco Gordon - there is no letter “I”, in which “Martin Friedman” is written under the toes, sometimes he does not write the letter three times “I,” or adds “No I” like the one sent to Chuck Welch. In my personal experience with Ray, he had written "NO I" on the occasion of my exhibition at the CHA SOHO Gallery in 1982 on the invitation to the trap work for piano, writing the word “noihtng” on a small piece of paper, by placing it as a birthday present for John Cage with 70 red bloody pistachios in paper on the wall of the Gallery. Perhaps he was trying to secretly communicate his passing with an "i" by writing "Noihtng" even on the back of my t-shirt, saying not to lose it because it was very good. important... In this hidden way he already quietly announced to his friends his premature death which he then actually achieved in 1995 by throwing himself into the sea from a bridge in Sag Harbor, New York, and which critics have evaluated as the last testimonial and final work of this important American artist.

Ray said: “I just had to accept that out of a necessity of life I wrote a lot of letters and gave away a lot of material and information, and it was a compulsive action on my part, and as I did it, it became history. It's my CV, it's my biography, it's my story, it's my life." His projects include conceptually elaborate performances that dealt with interpersonal relationships and formal disorders, he said: "I am interested in things and things that disintegrate or disintegrate, things that grow or have additions, things that arise from things and processes of the way where things really happen to me. According to Coco Gordon, “her works are never single absentee mail art operations, but arise from small stories, from encounters with other people, from relationships and spontaneous reflections capable of triggering new and new contributions. actions to creative thought" thus giving complete autonomy to communication and making this new way of expression totally free, outside of any scheme imposed and pre-established by cultural power and consequently by the official art market.

He is often associated with the Fluxus group for the usually minimal-conceptual character of his projects; the Fluxus group was a lively international movement which in that period stood out for a series of neo-Dadaist actions and interventions. We must point out that Ray Johnson was never part of "Fluxus", but he still shared the same problems and the purely experimental "underground" with many artists of this group. Forerunner and convinced individualist. enigmatic and at the same time transgressive presence of contemporary American art, in 1948 he moved to New York, starting a production of geometric works, thus joining the "Group of American Abstract Artists", and then in the mid-1950s he dedicated himself to collage, producing hundreds of small works that he called "moticos", almost a sort of "Pop Art" anticipating the research that a few years later would be successfully implemented by Leo Castelli with the historical American group. We don't know if he was fully aware of the innovative and revolutionary scope that he was bringing to art. Today, several years later, he appears to us as one of the most original and influential characters, and at the same time, a great solitary pioneer of visual art, influencing the future of art and also becoming the point of reference for new generations of young artists.

Johnson has always preferred to work on small formats, thus precluding the support of the large official art market, often refusing to exhibit or sell his work. Moreover, the art market prefers large dimensions and a production created specifically to be "commodified" in a commercial sense, and therefore has little interest in this situation. One might say, a completely "transversal" research compared to the proposals carried out in that period by other authors, which welcomes different expressive means with interventions that in fact created friction as Guglielmo Achille Cavellini also did, almost in the same period, in Italy using writing, behaviour, conceptuality and even irony knowing full well that this was the only possible path to take. Ray didn't really like being called a mail artist, nor even being considered the pioneer of Mail Art, but he thought he could create a new working group "Pre Pop Shop" between Black Mountain and Pop Art. According to him, art is life , moreover, even the word "Moticos" used very often derives from the word osmotic, a specific quality characterized by a mutual influence, an exchange between individuals, an interpenetration of ideas, attitudes and cultural realities, in short, a new way of thinking in a decidedly fluid and evolving process that is revealed in a timely manner by examining the writings and performative actions "Zen Nothings" carried out by the American artist. Today, 29 years after his death, his experimental work from the 1960s onwards is considered by critics to be an integral part of the Fluxus movement and even an original precursor of American Pop Art.

 

Ray Johnson (1927-1995)

Born on October 16, 1927, in Detroit, Michigan, his early life included sporadic lessons at the Detroit Art Institute and a summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. In 1945, Johnson left Detroit to attend the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina. During his three years in the program, he studied with a number of artists, including Josef Albers, Jacob Lawrence, John Cage and Willem de Kooning. Moving to New York in 1949, Johnson became friends with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, developing an idiosyncratic form of Pop Art. Over the following decades, Johnson became increasingly committed to performance and Zen philosophy, merging artistic practice with life. On January 13, 1995, Johnson committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in Sag Harbor, New York, then swimming into the sea and drowning. In 2002, a documentary on the artist's life called How to Draw a Bunny, makes us understand his research work. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.