BOOK REPORT: RAY JOHNSON C/O
H ORA NGE IN ER WIT T COV , FRON N C/O
It’s a wonderful thing that museums continue to create well-produced exhibition catalogs. Blockbusters come and go, but what remains after these shows are gone are the collected photographs, images, and essays reproduced, printed and bound in the volumes that carry the exhibition title. To that end, I present for your consideration Ray Johnson c/o, a marvelous monograph available in advance of the exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago of the same name.
K
By JASON PICKLEMAN
RAY JO
HNSO
Edited and curated by Caitlin Haskell and Jordan Carter, Ray Johnson c/o measures 9-inches wide, 12-inches tall, and has a spine width of just more than 1-inch. With a soft cover, artfully folded, the 376-page body feels casual in the hands thanks to the recurrent use of a kraft-color text weight sheet (possibly 70#) that is gently textured on one side, but smoother on the other. It is interesting to note that the images printed on this paper have different levels of clarity and snap depending on which textured side the work is reproduced: just look at the differing density of the black ink on pages 6 & 8, for example. Not that this matters, as Johnson’s work only rarely relies on reproductive verisimilitude. Suffice it to say, the kraft-colored pages give the catalog the air of a vintage store find, a retro suggestion of aged paper and graphic pluck. What is not printed on this kraft paper is printed on an uncoated natural white text weight sheet (possibly 80# with modest show-through). These two papers alternate every 8, 16, 24 or 32 pages creating the visual equivalent of skip and hum. I mention this because the experience of looking at this book is constantly framed by this design decision. The kraft colored pages are mostly dedicated to vintage-looking reproductions of Johnsonian ephemera: letters, collages, drawings, envelopes—the remains of an epistolary exchange. The natural white text pages contain twenty-one short essays, easily digestible, and amounting to a veritable “Ray Johnson Reader”, which, in total, present a strikingly spot-on overview of one of the most wily artists of the 20th Century. The book and exhibition chronicle the 55 year artist-collector relationship between Johnson and his patron/archivist William S. Wilson (commonly referred to, and written as: Bill). The collection spans many thousands of works which were painstakingly saved, filed and inventoried by Wilson. Organized into a series of more than 175 three-ring binders containing transparent plastic sleeves, the collection has entered the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection and will be on view this November. The exhibition in the Modern Wing promises to be an eye opening affair luxuriating in the flotsam and jetsam of aged paper, hand-addressed envelopes, canceled stamps, and cheeky turns of phrase. Johnson’s artwork is all play. Suggestion, innuendo, and mischief seem to be Johnson’s creative repartee. Conventional images are often captioned or titled in such a way as to develop new readings, often sly, humorous, or tawdry. Along with an ever-growing cadre of personal glyphs (bunnies, ducks, snakes, buttons, phalluses), Johnson détourned the most conventional source material into the equivalent of visual koans with attendant instructional dictates. Though he showed with the New York gallery Feigen for many years starting in 1967, the bulk of Johnson’s artistic practice 42 | CGN | Fall 2021
