RAY JOHNSON at WHITNEY MUSEUM

                                                                

Ray Johnson Exhibition Organized by Wexner Center Premieres at Whitney Museum
A major exhibition of work by collagist and mail artist Ray Johnson {1927-95), organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts, will premiere at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York on January 14, 1999. Ray Johnson: Correspondences is the first significant museum presentation to examine selections from the five decades of work that earned Johnson his legendary reputation. A progenitor of pop art and a major force in the development of mail art, especially through the activities of his "New York Correspondence School," Johnson was a potent and influential presence in the art world from the 1950s to the 1990s. The exhibition will remain on view at the Whitney Museum through March 21, 1999, in the Mildred & Herbert Lee Galleries on the second floor. It will be presented at the Wexner Center, The Ohio State University's multidisciplinary contemporary arts center, from January 28 through April 14, 2000.
" Ray Johnson: Correspondences promises an incisive and much overdue critical examination of this important, though deliberately elusive, American artist," noted Sherri Geldin, Director of the Wexner Center. "We are especially pleased that the exhibition will premiere at the Whitney Museum, given Johnson's long- standing {if sometimes long-distance) engagement with the New York art community over several decades. Ray Johnson was in many ways the quintessential artist's artist-respected and admired by peers for his protean imagination and singular practice, but largely unknown beyond the confines of the art world."
"The Whitney is an especially fitting venue for the art of Ray Johnson, not only because he exhibited here and had a long involvement with New York, but because his work is so American-in its freshness, its open engagement, and its refusal to be easily characterized," commented Maxwell L. Anderson, Director of


the Whitney Museum. "We are pleased to open this exhibition of Johnson's extraordinary work, and to bring him to a broad audience."
Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition includes early paintings (1949-51 ), a full range of collages (1953-1995), objects, silhouette portraits, mailings from Johnson's New York Correspondence School, and documentation of his performances, including his "nothings," the artist's response to happenings, The exhibition is being organized by Donna De Salvo, the Wexner Center's curator at large, who has a particular interest and expertise in the art of the 19505 and 19605. "My research on the intersection between pop art and abstract expressionism first sparked my interest in Johnson's work. Through collage, Johnson created visual structures suggesting some of the chaotic and chance occurrences found in everyday life, a preoccupation of many artists working in the 19505. His investigation of structure also extended beyond the art object to include its systems of distribution and presentation, a major theme of conceptual art. He accomplished all of these things while stubbornly resisting easy categorization, and it is our hope that this exhibition conveys something of the incredibly rich and kaleidoscopic world he created,"
In developing Ray Johnson: Correspondences, De Salvo has worked closely with the artist's estate, represented by Richard L. Feigen & Company. Many of the exhibited works are drawn from the estate: some have never been previously exhibited; others have not been shown publicly since the 19505 or 19605. Other lenders to the exhibition include some of Johnson's long-time correspondents, as well as private and public collections.
Throughout his career, Johnson commanded enormous respect from fellow artists as an extraordinarily original talent, but he never attained the popular fame of such contemporaries and colleagues as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns,or Andy Warhol.New ork Times Critic Grace Glueck once refered to him as"New York's most famous unknown artist",a comment Johnson later recycled into his work.

The exhibition takes as its central theme Johnson's understanding of all that is entailed in the notion of correspondence-among visual elements, ideas, people, and events, and between the object and its recipient. His collages incorporate texts and images from newspapers, magazines, comic strips, and mail art, along with references to popular and cultural icons as diverse as Elvis Presley, Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo,

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David Bowie, Marianne Moore, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp. Intricately structured and woven from fragments of everyday life, these works are intimate, perplexing, and visually stunning. Less formally complex but equally marked by Johnson's strong graphic sensibility are the mail art projects he distributed to numerous artists, writers, critics, curators, collectors, and others, many of whom never met the artist. He is credited with essentially establishing mail art as a genre, and his New York Correspondence School was the subject of a 1970 exhibition organized by Marcia Tucker for the Whitney Museum.
"Through his mail art, Johnson formed a complex, 'pre-digital' creative network that was also a highly playful enterprise," noted De Salvo. "Even though many people in the art world have heard of Ray Johnson, or even received mailings from him, few know the range and depth of his collage work."
Johnson's work, like that of Marcel Duchamp, reflects a complex and integrated system in which each part informs and influences the others. Key to his aesthetic was a profound consciousness of the complexities surrounding language and the problematic relationship of textual signs and meaning. By mixing fragments of texts and images within the highly formal structures of his collages, or through the meetings and fan clubs of the New York Correspondence School, Johnson dissected the ways in which meaning itself is constructed. He also challenged the nature of commerce in art-the systems by which art is marketed, distributed, and collected. The late critic David Bourdon, one of Johnson's many correspondents, commented, "Johnson's mail-away art can't be bought or sold but only received-whether the recipient wants it or not." His work has attracted renewed and escalating attention since his death, and his explorations of communication systems, the complexities of language, and the nature of reference make his art strikingly relevant today
A 224-page monograph on the artist accompanies the exhibition and will be available in early spring. Copublished in hardcover and softcover editions by the Wexner Center for the Arts and Flammarion and also titled Ray Johnson: Correspondences, it is edited by Donna De Salvo and Catherine Gudis and designed by Barbara Glauber of Heavy Meta. An overview by De Salvo and texts by Mason Klein, Lucy Lippard, Henry Martin, Sharla Sava, Wendy Steiner, Jonathan Weinberg, and Bill S. Wilson address the many facets of

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Johnson's life, work, and career. The essays situate his works in a broad art historical and cultural context and explore issues of portraiture, the relationship between text and image, and the institutions involved in the creation, distribution, and assessment of art. The book also includes an extensive, illustrated chronology compiled by Muffet Jones.
Ray Johnson: Correspondences was organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts.
The exhibition is presented with the support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Judith Rothschild Foundation, and the Wexner Center Foundation.
The Wexner Center, a "national laboratory for the arts," is a contemporary arts center dedicated to the visual, performing, and media arts with a strong commitment to the creation of new work. Its home, designed by Peter Eisenman and the late Richard Trott, has been acclaimed as a landmark of postmodern architecture. Since its opening in November 1989, the Wexner Center has presented an ambitious program of exhibitions, performances, films; and video screenings.
The Whitney Museum of American Art is the leading advocate of 20th-century and contemporary American art. Founded in 1930, the Whitney Museum emerged out of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's active role in supporting the American artists of her day and, over the course of 67 years, the museum's holdings have grown to include approximately 12,000 works of art representing more than l' 700 artists. The Permanent Collection is the preeminent holding of 20th-century American art and includes the entire artistic estate of Edward Hopper, as well as significant works by Marsh, Calder, Gorky, Hartley, O'Keeffe, Rauschenberg, and Johns, among others. The museum's signature exhibition is its Biennial, an invitational show of work produced in America in the preceding two years.
On view at the Whitney Museum: Directions .
Brice Marden
Seton Smith
Hindsight
Duane Hanson
Gary Hill
Through March 28, 1999
Through March 28, 1999
Through April 4, 1999
December 17, 1998 February 21' 1999 December 17, 1998 February 28, 1999 December 17, 1998 March 21' 1999