* 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)
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.'
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