Queer Networks

Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art

Miriam Kienle

How the queer correspondence art of Ray Johnson disrupted art world conventions and anticipated today’s highly networked culture

"Brilliant and revelatory . . . conclusively demonstrates that Johnson’s work existed in, and interacted with, an intricate web of theoretical, sexual, political, and aesthetic concerns, most of which have never been broached in previous work on the artist. The result is a crucial contribution to thinking about Johnson, postwar culture, and queer politics and aesthetics.”

—Anthony Grudin, author of Warhol's Working Class

“Finally, we have a book-length, deeply researched account of Johnson’s queer ways of making and communicating. Queer Networks establishes Johnson as an inescapably centrifugal figure for the history of queer art.”

—David J. Getsy, author of Queer Behavior

Once regarded as “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” Ray Johnson was a highly visible outlier in the art world, his mail art practice reflecting the changing social relations and politics of queer communities in the 1960s. A vital contribution to the growing scholarship on this enigmatic artist, Queer Networks analyzes how Johnson’s practice sought to undermine the dominant mechanisms of the art market and gallery system in favor of unconventional social connections.

Utilizing the postal service as his primary means of producing and circulating art, Johnson cultivated an international community of friends and collaborators through which he advanced his idiosyncratic body of work. Applying both queer theory and network studies, Miriam Kienle explores how Johnson’s radical correspondence art established new modes of connectivity that fostered queer sensibilities and ran counter to the conventional methods by which artists were expected to develop their reputation.

While Johnson was significantly involved with the Pop, conceptual, and neo-Dada art movements, Queer Networks crucially underscores his resistance to traditional art historical systems of categorization and their emphasis on individual mastery. Highlighting his alternative modes of community building and playful antagonism toward art world protocols, Kienle demonstrates how Ray Johnson’s correspondence art offers new ways of envisioning togetherness in today’s highly commodified and deeply networked world.

Queer Networks

ART HISTORY/MEDIA STUDIES

$34.95 Paper ISBN: 978-1-5179-1163-8

$140.00xx Cloth ISBN: 978-1-5179-1162-1

$34.95 Retail e-book ISBN: 978-1-4529-7027-1

DECEMBER

296 pages 108 b&w illustrations 7 x 9