Practical | Peer Review Boards

Practical | Collage & Prototypes

 Big collages

Going from the quick tests I made in the sketchbook, I made some A3 collage 'posters' that were full of references to messages, and types of messages from throughout history.

I think collage is an appropriate choice of medium, as elements can be cut-up, rehashed, and dropped into new contexts. It also makes it possible to hide a lot of meaning and references within a mix of drawings, scans, photos, and words.

Proto-zines

To make the messages in the A3 pieces even more cryptic and confusing, I photocopied them on both sides and made some very fast mini-zines. Completely rearranging the order of the images and chopping them up created new combinations and meanings.

I would like to experiment with this further, as I think it truly becomes a subversive form of communication this way.

Oh So Pretty: Punk in Print 1976-80, Rick Poynor

A Punk's Progress, Toby Mott 

pg.17 - 'I appreciated the visual immediacy in punk graphics, which never seemed tired or dated.'

'The Mott Collection - a selection of which appears in the pages of this book - illustrates the energy, boredom, dynamism and diverse political social and class issues that were all part of punk.'

'It includes iconic images by now celebrated names, such as Peter Saville, Jamie Reid and Linder Sterling, but more important are the multitude of flyers and zines crudely cut and pasted by anonymous hands, whose raw, immediate aesthetic represents the urgency of this explosive DIY culture. The ideals of self-empowerment, motivation, action and common cause are evident throughout.'

Graphic Anarchy in the UK, Rick Poynor

pg. 21 - '[Punk's] Its blast of DIY anarchy flushed out the pipes to allow a whoosh of creativity that spread from music into the arts, fashion and media worlds on the 1980s and beyond.'

'This is a record of British printed material.'

'American musicians such as Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Suicide and Richard Hell feature when they visit the UK, but the graphic interpretations of these acts are done in local styles.'

'Mott concentrates mainly on disposable items - concert and promotional posters, flyers, fanzines, music papers and pop magazines - rather than more lasting artefacts such as record sleeves.'

'Their documentary value as cultural and sociological evidence is obvious enough...these relics give a vivid impression of punk's abrasive and uncompromising style.'

'Yet they are also graphic artefacts now deemed worthy of display in exhibitions and published collections like this one.'

'Punk's telltale devices - rough photocopied images, hand-drawn letters, ransom-note lettering, crudely cut and torn edges - have become a category in the history of graphic style, where they are seen to represent a deliberate flouting of the rules of professional practice.'

'Some of these raucous 'sites of resistance' (as academics have dubbed them) may have looked as they did, not in order to make any particular point, but because that was all that could be achieved using limited reprographic resources.'

'Their makers cared about the subject matter - the bands and the music - rather than the relatively arcane question of the meaning of graphic style.'

'In the early 1980s, graphic design would go seriously murky and textural as designers at labels such as 4AD sought a new aesthetic for visualising the dark, immersive grain of post-punk music.'

'An authentic living culture should have DIY entwined in its DNA.

pg. 22 - [while flyers for gigs - now valuable mementoes] '...are often by unknown hands.'

pg. 23 - '...collage and photomontage were the most potent tools for cutting up reality and constructing revelatory alternatives.'

'Punk was a moment of social and cultural insubordination when the established ways of forming a band, writing a song, dressing in the street, or laying out a page or a flyer were thrown aside.'

'The crucial thing was to participate, to make your own scene and not meekly accept what the market decided you should consume.'

'An authentic living culture should have DIY entwined in its DNA'

[Toby Mott's collection of punk ephemera is] an incitement to seize the moment, reject the obvious choices, find some like-minded collaborators and construct something challenging and new.'

The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture

The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Theodor W. Adorno
Edited by J.M. Bernstein, 1991, Routledge

Introduction

Practical | Sketchbook 1

The Unesco Courier | The Art of Writing, March 1964

I also picked up a copy of this magazine. It has some really nice visuals and interesting pieces of information. This could tie in with and possibly inform my practical work, as it relates to messages.

Projekt 4 | Sep 1973

I went to a book fair this weekend, and oddly enough I found an issue of the Polish design magazine Projekt, which I have looked at earlier in my research. Here are some extracts from the magazine..

Tutorial 2 | Individual Discussion

This tutorial was really helpful, just talking about my project out-loud let me figure out and make sense of all of my ideas so far.

I now have the basis of my practical work ready to start, as well as a number of people / references / things I could use as my case studies (Ray Johnson, Toynbee Tiles (?), Limner Journal, Zine culture...)

I have also focused down my research project to one area of the list of 'themes' - society. I think this is the most appropriate umbrella term, as it involves people and their interactions with the medium(s) of visual art / communication that I wish to explore.

Student action:

- Refine essay question
- Begin drawing together a plan, as well as a solid list of case studies
- Start the practical work

Practical | Messages

From my tutorial this afternoon, I thought that the buzzword that could inform the content of my practical word could be messages.

This ties in with my research up to now, which has looked at subversive visual communication, and the basis of this and the discipline of illustration is messages.

I plan to visually explore the idea of messages (what they are, how they are sent/received, what kinds exist, etc) which will hopefully form the basis of the imagery I generate.

I could also look into distributing these messages, and recording how I have done this, as well as any responses I get back. Some thoughts for now are:

- Public distribution (small photocopies, drawings, and/or collages left in public spaces)
- Digitally (a blog platform? a social media page? email?)
- Postal (through the post, exchanging with others)

I could even go as far as leaving an email / web address for people to respond to, as if to say "Hey, I found one of your images!"

At this point, I would like the practical work I make to be exploratory, process-led, and more about recording and documenting this side of the project.

However, nearer the end it may spawn a more finished product of sorts (e.g. a book, online publication, collection of images...)

Notes From Underground | Notes 2

THE POLITICS OF AUTHENTICITY

pg. 37 - 'It is a world of spin, promotion, public relations, and pseudo-events'

'An authentic individual, therefore, is one who cuts through the conventions of manners, norms, and communication and connects to his or her "real" self'

'Their cut-and-paste look is a graphic explosion unbeholden to rules of design'

pg. 38 - 'The excitement and enthusiasm of zines don't compensate for lack of professionalism, they are the replacement for it. Professionalism - with its attendant training, formulaic styles, and relationship to the market - gets in the way of that freedom'

'Saying whatever's on your mind, unbeholden to corporate sponsors, puritan censors, or professional standards of argument and design, being yourself and expressing your real thoughts and real feelings - these are what zinesters consider authentic'

'This celebration of the pure freedom to express helps explain the fact that traditional publishing practices are sometimes absent from zines'

'Instead of listing an issue number, a zine from Atlanta, fittingly called Decontrol, commands the reader to "make up your own number" '

pg. 49 - 'Zines are an individualistic medium, but as a medium their primary function is communication. As such, zines are as much about the communities that arise out of their circulation as they are artifacts of personal expression'

Notes From Underground, Stephen Duncombe (1997)

Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture

pg. 6 - 'Little publications filled with rantings of high weirdness and exploding with chaotic design'

pg. 7 - 'Against the studied hipness of music and style magazines, the pabulum of newsweeklies, and the posturing of academic journals, here was something completely different'

'In zines, everyday oddballs were speaking plainly about themselves and our society with an honest sincerity, a revealing intimacy, and a healthy "fuck you" to sanctioned authority - for no money and no recognition, writing for an audience of like-minded misfits'

'In an era marked by the rapid centralisation of corporate media, zines are independent and localised, coming out of cities, suburbs and small towns across the US, assembled on kitchen tables'

'They celebrate the everyperson in a world of celebrity. Losers in a society that rewards the best and the brightest'

'Zine writers form networks and forge communities around diverse identities and interests'

'...they redefine work, setting out their creative labour done on zines as a protest against the drudgery of working for another's profit'

The Duplex Planet, est. 1979
based on conversations and interviews with

residents of the Duplex nursing home in Boston

'Defining themselves against a society predicated on consumption, zinesters privilege the ethic of DIY, do-it-yourself: make your own culture and stop consuming that which is made for you'

'...the zine community is busy creating a culture whose value isn't calculated as a profit and loss on ruled ledger pages, but is assembled in the margins, using criteria like control, connection, and authenticity'

pg. 8 - 'In zines I saw the seeds of a different possibility: a novel form of communication and creation that burst with an angry idealism; a medium that spoke for a marginal, yet vibrant culture'

↓ ↓ ↓ COUNTER-ARGUMENT ↓ ↓ ↓

pg. 9 - 'I couldn't help but notice that as all this radicalism was happening underground. The world above was moving in the opposite direction'

'More disturbing was that zines and underground culture didn't seem to be any sort of threat to this above-ground world'

'Quite the opposite: "alternative" culture was being celebrated in the mainstream media and used to create new styles and profits for the commercial culture industry'

'No longer is there a staid bourgeoisie to confront with avant-garde art or a square America to shock with countercultural values; instead there is a sophisticated marketing machine which gobbles up anything novel and recreates it as product for a niche market'

'When the New York Times gushes over zines, when punk feminist Riot Grrrls are profiled in Newsweek, when "alternative" rock gets its own show on MTV, and when the so-called Generation X becomes an identifiable and lucrative market in the eyes of the editors of Business Week and Advertising Age, rebelling through culture becomes exceedingly problematic'


pg. 10 - 'What I want to argue...is that zines and underground culture offer up an alternative, a way of understanding and acting in the world that operates with different rules and upon different values than those of consumer capitalism'

'Zines are noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves'

pg. 13 - 'The hyperspecialization of zines - science fiction, punk rock, eight-track tapes, defunct Missouri garage bands - is a bit misleading, for unlike mainstream "niche market" periodicals, zines don't follow well-laid plans for market penetration or move purposefully in a defined direction courting profitable demographics'

pg. 14 - 'Zines meander and change direction, switching back, then back again, flowing wherever the publisher's interest takes them'

Dishwasher zine by Pete Jordan

'As zines are put together by hand using common materials and technology, they consequently look the part, with unruly cut-and-paste layout, barely legible type, and uneven reproduction'

'The decline in the cost of personal computers and the spread of desktop publishing capability to the smallest of offices have given more and more people access to equipment to put out professional-looking publications'

pg. 15 - 'Distribution is primarily person-to-person via the mail, though zines are also sold in some book and music stores and traded, sold, or given away at punk rock gigs, conventions, and activist conferences'

pg. 16 - 'What zines are expected to provide is an outlet for unfettered expression and a connection to a larger underground world of publishers doing the same'

pg. 18 - 'zines are done for love: love of expression love of sharing, love of communication'

'Zines are not the only cultural expression of love and rage lurking underground today. Though drawing from a different population - primarily urban, primarily black - and forged out of the distinct crucible of racism and poverty, the hip-hop subculture, through the voice of rap music, addresses issues familiar to the zine underground: "representing" yourself and community, staying true or selling out, and the search for a voice in a society that just doesn't listen'

pg. 19 - 'Although the world of zines operates on the margins of society, its concerns are common to all: how to count as an individual; how to build a supportive community; how to have a meaningful life; how to create something that is yours'

pg. 33 - 'Zines put a slight twist on the idea that the personal is political'

'They broach political issues from the state to the bedroom, but they refract all these issues through the eyes and experience of the individual creating the zine'

Subversion

from: Subversion (wiki article)

Theodor Adorno argued that the culture industry and its shallow entertainment was a system by which society was controlled through a top-down creation of standardized culture that intensified the commodification of artistic expression; in 1938 he said that capitalism has colonized every aspect of life so much that "every pleasure which emancipates itself from the exchange-value takes on subversive features"

• Aesthetic Theory - Adorno

• Subvertising

• Adbusters > Counter-culture

• Situationist International

• Culture Jamming

• Cognitive Dissonance

• Cultural hegemony

What is meant by...?

The peer tutorial last week brought up some questions. I think I will have to explore and/or define these in order to move forward with this idea.
______________________________________________________

What could subversive communication mean?

What are subversive forms of visual communication?

Is subversion a communicative method?
______________________________________________________

define: subversive
1) adjective: seeking or intended to subvert an established system or institution.

define: subvert
1) verb: undermine the power and authority of (an established system or institution)
destabilize, unsettle, overthrow, overturn
corrupt, pervert, warp, distort

origin: Old French subvertir, or Latin subvertere, from sub- 'from below' + vertere 'to turn'

The terms have a lot of political implications, however they can lend themselves to social or cultural subversion too. In this case creative, or artistic subversion maybe?
______________________________________________________

What does this mean in terms of visual communication / visual arts?

My interpretation of this is that it means adopting approaches to art and design that dismiss any particular attention to trends, design rules (e.g. arrangement, legibility), as well as concerns with the commercial, which could include appealing to a mass audience as well as making lots of money.

Could it be about communicating messages and ideas through subversive and unorthodox approaches and methods (for example, not a giant billboard in the middle of a city centre), as well as conveying unusual or unconventional themes and subjects?
______________________________________________________

I think I still have some clarifying to do, however here are some examples that come to mind when I think of possible types of subversive (visual) communication...

• Mail art
• Zines?
• Xerox art (aesthetic, distribution method, production method...)
• Culture jamming
• Guerrilla advertising/communication (Subvertising?)

Mail Art & The Correspondence School

Ray Johnson: The Present of Mail Art
Ina Blom, January 2008 [link]

'...Johnson had started it all in the mid-1950's, slowly building up a network of correspondents who would exchange objects and messages through the postal system.'

'Initially it was Johnson himself sending out small collage-like works to a mailing list, urging people to keep them, to add to them, to change them, to send them to others, to return to sender.'

'The initial network was named The New York Correspondance School (sic) - a spin or pun on the idea of artistic schools and the concomitant idea of art history as a succession of such schools.'

'...a technology and a communication medium which was just at that moment appropriated for artistic purposes.'

'But then mail art was seen as one of the new "communication arts", a form of media aesthetics that evolved alongside video art...'

'[mail art could be said to only have "a present"] - a present of communicational events, of uncontrollable exchanges, of things arriving and departing at unforseen times and places, thanks to the medium of postal system, which, just like television, could be seen to distribute "signals" across the boundaries of time and space.'

'[mail art]...could be seen to place itself squarely in the realm of social exchanges, that is the realm whose entire principle of circulation and reciprocity is kept in check by the system of gifts.'

The existence of exchange, of gift-giving, or sharing....'is what ensures the existence of true collectivity'

'[artistic] practices designed to intervene in social reality, to question existing social form or to try to form new types of collectives or to rethink collectivity tout court.'

'Johnson exploited the corresponding ambiguities of the modern postal system - a system founded on the premise that messages always reach their destination, but whose rich mythology is shot through with the anxiety provoked by the idea of non-received, displaced, returned and refused messages'

'At every level - from the semantic techniques deployed in his writings, to his organisation of visual material, to the idiosyncratic pragmatics of his mailing practice - Johnson evokes the same reality of associations promised and associations unmade, ruptured, dispersed,'

'...with Johnson there is never any guarantee of community, of the perfect social immanence of togetherness and understanding. Johnson reciprocates, but only through interruption.'

'He organized meetings and assemblies (of the NYCS members), but these meetings were without content or purpose'

ART / ARCHITECTURE; Dear Friends of Ray, and Audiences of One
NY Times, February 1999 [link]

'Ray Johnson perpetrated art that made its recipients work' <- subverts art!

'For 40 years, with the collaboration of the Post Office, he mailed out drawn, collaged and, in later years, photocopied confections concocted from visual puns, Pop Art references, the lives of friends, chance happenings and weird news items.'

James Rosenquist, artist and friend, '[Ray's work]...was a much more personal, private experience, a discovery kind of thing, not smack dab in your face'

Bill Wilson, retired professer, correspondent of Johnson 'Mail art meant that art should be free'

'An envelope from Ray was like a haiku, a moment of immediacy and indeterminancy, a particularly vivid moment outside the economy, outside the machinery of our culture. It was free.'

Andrew Hoyem, poet and publisher, Arion Press

'...The book never happened. Ray could be very coy, and it took me a long time to understand that the talking about it, the sending things back and forth, was the thing.'

------> THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE. NOT THE CONTENT. THE PLATFORM THAT IS DELIVERED UPON, HOW THIS SHAPES THE EXPERIENCE.

Ray Johnson and Mail Art

'What Happened? Nothing. New York Times, April 11, 1965.
Grace Glueck, 1965, [link]

'New York's Most Famous Unknown Artist' Is Now More Important Than Ever
Vice, Nathalie Olah, August 2014 [link]

'Flippant and funny, his collages, warped bunny drawings and defaced portraits of Rimbaud, James Dean and Elvis Presley have always attracted more left-field independent publishers and street artists.'

'Fans of Johnson's work don't just admire its aesthetic, but also the spirit in which he created it - avoiding the infrastructure of the traditional art world to instead distribute his works through the mail, which led him being hailed by some as the founder of the "mail art" movement.'

'Both artists [Warhol and Johnson] were concerned with the growing cult of consumerism - of images and logos being disseminated to the masses via fast-evolving interconnectivity.'

'...he functioned as a weaver of connections; not a networker, but a social network unto himself, albeit for the pre-digital age.'

'...Johnson would share images of a rapidly expanding pop culture with his own followers through his mail art.'

'Johnson's mail art can be traced back as early as 1958. Often inscribed with instructions such as, "please send to...", "please add and return to..."'

'They formed the basis of a postal network that Johnson later formalised with the help of friends and renamed the "New York Correspondence School".'

'...Johnson continually obstructed his own root to pop-stardom, preferring to create works whose meaning was intentionally difficult to decipher.'

'In short, he had absolutely no ambition of being packaged neatly, distributed to the masses and launched into celebrity.'

Tate Online
Art Term > Mail Art [link]

'Mail art is a movement based on the principle of sending small scale works through the postal service'

'Mail art began in the 1960s when artists sent postcards inscribed with poems or drawings through the post rather than exhibiting or selling them through conventional commercial channels.'

'It's origins can be found in Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters and the Italian futurists. But it was the New York artist Ray Johnson who, in the mid 1950s, posted small collages, prints of abstract drawings and poems to art world notables giving rise to what eventually became known as the New York Correspondence School.'

Ray Johnson: The Zen Master of the Social Network
Utne Reader, Tim Keane, 2014 [link]

'...the available platforms for sending mail and messages to others have proliferated far beyond the post office - voicemails, emails, SMS, tweets, tags, selfies, Instagrams, public profiles, video clips, news feeds...we are urged to communicate something, anything, even when we wonder whether all this 24/7 contact might amount to a whole lot of nothing.'

'He was an analog-era hacker who wove a worldwide web using this collagist mail art'

[talking about his letters in Not Nothing, selected letters published by Siglio Press, 2014]

'[Johnson's multimedia letters]...eliminate boundaries separating poetry, prose, drawing, and collage'

'..in their miscellaneous observations, and in their crazy-quilt graphics, these letters unfold without any logic or cogently expressed purpose'

'The letters drop random threads and pick them up later. Or they don't. They reiterate cryptic requests, spiral into carefully typed logorrhea, and end abruptly'

'Surrounded by clip art that ranges from cartoons to how-to-manuals to product labels, Johnson's text shifts into styles that include diary entries, testimonials, asides, copy edits, gossip, intended typos, and cataloging'

'Concealing meaning behind complicated written and visual assemblages, Johnson calls attention to letter-writing's artifice and to the medium's lack of transparency'

'He anticipates the inevitable misinterpretations and confusions on the part of the recipient'

'The postal project had an immediate sociological objective, as Johnson levelled hierarchies around celebrity that were then being established both locally and nationally.'

'Subverting the cliquish New York scene, he mailed letters out in equal numbers to the well-known, to the up-and-coming, to the completely unknown, and even to the dead'

'Often printed on letterhead stolen from public or private institutions, or typed on wrinkled notebook paper or the back sides of Chinese menus, the letters revel in Freudian slips, Joycean puns, intentional misspellings and malapropisms, arcane glyphs and charming anagrams'

'the letters exasperate as they entertain'

'the banal and the profound are mixed together'

[Elizabeth Zuba, editor of Not Nothing in the introduction] '...she explains Johnson's operative principle that language and visual data form enclosed systems of self-replicating "codes" that preclude original expression and prevent meanings beyond their sound and fury'

[regarding the artwork on the letters operating as...] '...a collaboration involving many people, correspondences in a humanistic sense as well as an aesthetic one - art as an open-ended undertaking, a shared state of being present to someone else rather than art as a hallowed object to be hung on a white wall.'

'The letters' mysteries can be approached by trusting intuition, free association, thoughtful hunches, multiple meanings or indeterminacy, and bridging the psychological gap between word and world.'

[readers of his letters are] 'lost in such a literary and pictorial fun house'

How to Draw a Bunny (2002)

directed by John Walter, found here.

"Correspondence art consists of the compression of ideas and images into envelopes"

"But, it gets to a point where..what can you do with it after you've done it? That's why I began putting everything into envelopes. I had this stockpile of material, so I just put them into envelopes and mailed them out to everybody everywhere"

"I'm very fond of the idea of the message, and the bottle, and the chance of it being found or never being found"

"But once again, that was a dilemma. What does one do with one's sculptures, or one's paintings, or one's drawings, so I solved that problem by chopping them all up into little pieces and mailing them to people."

A brilliant, lovely and amazing film!! Wow. Very inspiring and touching...

Tutorial 1 | Presentation & Feedback

Here are the slides for my presentation, outlining where COP3 began for me, as well as where it has ended up at this point in time.

 Peer + Tutor feedback

CONCERNS GOING INTO TUTORIAL

I was worried incase I had too many references and links, and that I was trying to shoehorn too many things that interested me into one project. Even though I am trying to be as exploratory as possible, I do worry that some of the connections and links I'm trying to make could seem tenuous or unrelated to one another.

THINGS TO TAKE AWAY

• Museums are no longer at the forefront of my project, infact, I have substituted this area entirely for Polish posters (namely their aesthetic and attitude, and how one feeds the other)

• What is a subversive form of communication? How can communication methods be subverted?

• Is your interest in Polish posters purely aesthetic, or grounded in context?
(My answer: Both! It is more about how this uninhibited attitude towards creativity and embedding artwork with the creator's sense of individualism provides for a more experimental, playful, 'out there' aesthetic)

KEY POINTS / NOTES
• Extreme individualism

• Expression → playful, imagination, experience

• Lo-fi → non-representational, subversive, rebellious

• Focus - subversive forms of visual communication

• Underlying currents of a manifesto here, from the attitudes of the Polish School of Posters as well as numerous artists, movements, visual phenomena that interest me
      ↳ Perhaps I could devise my own creative manifesto, and create work that abides by this ethos

• I want my practical to be process-led. Exploratory, ongoing, with drawing at its core but not necessarily as the only way of creating images

Lecture 1 | Intro & Organising Your Research Project

 

don't do this ↗

• Key word of COP3 is "individual"

• Your research should be something that allows you to find out more about you and your practice

• Research is formalised curiosity

• Up until a certain point, the research may still split off into multiple questions

• It's about looking at and arranging a range of source materials, and taking a different viewpoint on it all. Bringing it together in a new way

• Practical response can be content, process, or product lead and can be resolved in a number of ways, including product and/or proposal

both a good and a bad thing ↗

Ray Johnson

I like when I'm doing research, and I end up on a thread of finding lots of cool things with twenty different tabs open on the internet and I can feel my brain growing!!

* images and text extracts can be found on the Ray Johnson Estate.

I stumbled across the artwork of Ray Johnson. His work is very lo-fi in appearance and in its creation methods which usually involved collage, photocopying, and found ephemera. He is association with mail/correspondence art, as well as neo-dada.

Very much enjoying the small portion of this person's work and life that I've found out so far. He even has a signature character, sort of like myself. (see below)

 1. Ray Johnson with a banner made for his solo exhibition, 1991
2. This person I always draw, 2015 - ??

He was a 'pioneer of mail art', who primarily worked with collage, 'that quintessentially twentieth-century art form that reflects the increased collision of disparate visual and verbal information that bombards modern man.'

'Integrating texts and images drawn from a multiplicity of sources - from mass media to telephone conversations'.

His work moved beyond the confines of being purely visual, expanding into mail art, artist books, graphic design, even sculpture. 

'Johnson not only operated in what Rauschenberg famously called "the gap between art and life", but he also erased the distinction between them. His entire being - a reflection of his obsessively creative mind - was actually one continuous "work of art".

His works reflect his encyclopedic erudition, his promiscuous range of interests, and an uncanny proto-Google ability to discover connections between a myriad of images, facts and people.'

'By 1954, Johnson was making irregularly shaped "moticos", his name for small-scale collages upon which he pasted images from popular culture such as Elvis Presley, James Dean, Shirley Temple, and department store models.'

'Johnson's 1950s moticos anticipated Warhol's 1960s Pop imagery. However his attitude towards fame remained the antithesis of Warhol's. He continually dodged it and was dubbed "the most famous unknown artist" by Grace Glueck in a 1965 New York Times article in which she discussed his deliberate elusiveness.'

'Johnson carried boxes of moticos around New York, sharing them with strangers on sidewalks, in cafes, and even in Grand Central Station. He solicited and even occasionally recorded the public's response to his intricate creations.'

'From the early 1960s onwards, Johnson would reuse his "moticos", cutting them up to create tiny compositions that he glued onto small blocks of layered cardboard. He would then ink, paint, and sand these "tiles" or "tesserae", using them in his extremely complex collages...'

'Johnson incorporated meaningful texts into his work beginning in the 1950s - letters or fragments of words, names of celebrities, literary figures, and art-world denizens, both historical and current. He pointed his viewers towards marvelous connections between them and a world of metamorphosing glyphs that became part of Johnson's ever-expanding lexicon of texts and forms.'