Ray Johnson
Bill Berkson on Ray Johnson at The Meeting for Ray Johnson
Things came in the mail. It was a great time for mail. I don’t know what I did with the things Ray Johnson sent—threw them in the wasetbasket probably, or if I held onto them, took them to Andreas Brown at the Gotham Book Mart for book money.
A Meeting for Ray Johnson: The Minutes by Kevin Killian
The Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco hosted an evening on November 22 dedicated to Ray Johnson that was a full of reminiscences, exegeses, digressions, surprises, and “moticos” cocktails, thoroughly enjoyed by the packed house, including the four men in fedoras on the front row.
Dick Higgins: “A book is . . . a phenomenon of space and time and dimensionality”
In this series of quotes, Dick Higgins, the singular publisher, poet, and artist, disturbs traditional notions of art and literature. For Higgins, the experience of the unknown offers “a point in a new trajectory of satisfactions.”
Ray Johnson, Ray Johnson, Billy Ray Johnson
If Ray Johnson had more than just the phone book in 1967…
Ray Johnson: “Something nearly always leads to an apparently disparate other.”
Clive Phillpot on the BOMBlog: “My take on Ray’s mail art, as well as his reliefs and drawings, is not so much to find them addressing the present but rather that something from the past occasionally detonates into my present.”
Mail Art for Neophytes, Part Two: Ray Johnson
“It might be correspondence art’s function to not have meaning. I like the idea of nothingness. I begin with no plan. I face the void.”