A Most Substantial Loot: Holland Cotter Reviews Not Nothing at New York Times

He's taking over! Site of Ray Johnson's most recent habitation? Why, it's the New York Times dear hearts, where Holland Cotter has these kindnesses to say about the recently published Ray Johnson phantasmagoria, Not Nothing (Siglio Press, 2014):

Born in working-class Detroit in 1927, he was turning out elaborately illustrated letters to friends even in high school. From 1945 to 1948, he studied abstract painting with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in Asheville, N.C. There he met John Cage, who nudged his interest in Zen Buddhism, and the sculptor Richard Lippold, who became his lover. By 1949, Johnson was in New York City. Slight, bright and wired, he networked through the art world; Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol became his friends.

[...]The Siglio book, edited by the poet Elizabeth Zuba, spans most of this history. The first entries, from the mid-1950s, are pure text, blocks of single-space typed prose. Gertrude Stein’s cut-and-paste approach to language is an obvious influence, jazzed up by Johnson’s penchant, verging on compulsion, for associative wordplay and puns.

Even when his work was text-intensive, though, he had an eye alert to shaping it visually. In a second 1950s piece composed of lists of isolated phrases — “Virginia gets tomahawk,” “regards têtes” — he slanted the lists diagonally across the page and turned half the phrases upside down, a graphic that could have been realized only by a radical reimagining of what a typewriter could do.

Johnson had his art heroes — Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters, Allan Kaprow, the Fluxus founder George Maciunas — whom he acknowledged in his correspondence work, placing their names alongside those of pop stars, art world potentates and personal friends. Name-dropping, if that’s what this was, is a recurrent feature of Johnson’s art, but it’s different than Warhol’s celebrity chasing.

Like Warhol, Johnson had an appetite for glamour and the politics of who-knows-who. But he was impatient with hierarchy. Warhol was a worshiper, Johnson a collector, a cataloger. In his work the same plane of importance is occupied by Marcel Duchamp, Anita O’Day and Toby Spiselman, a Long Island friend. It’s hard to imagine Warhol heading up an Anna May Wong fan club, but Johnson did. There’s a sense that for him all names are equivalent in value, are all collage elements, all “nothings,” or rather somethings, equally useful and even soothing in their sameness. [...]

Take a gander over yonder! Not too early to start a holiday wishlist for this gem.