Hyperallergic Puts Ray Johnson in New York School Spirit

At Hyperallergic, Edward M. Gómez considers recent light cast on artist Ray Johnson. To accompany a show at Matthew Marks this summer, for instance, the gallery published Ray Johnson, "an illustrated volume that documented that presentation and also serves as a stand-alone, compact introduction to the artist’s creative trajectory, aesthetic outlook, and life story. It features an insightful essay by the poet and author Brad Gooch, who is well known for his 1993 biography of the American poet and curator Frank O’Hara." Gómez talked to Gooch on the phone recently, and learned that "it might make more sense to think about [Johnson's use of language in] relation to the spirit of the New York School of poetry." More:

Gooch was referring to the group of American poets of the 1960s that included, among others, O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and the recently deceased John Ashbery. Collectively, their writings were influenced by surrealist and abstract-expressionist art, and other modernist tendencies. Gooch added, “In Ray’s works you find a mix of the queer-campy, the jokey, the knowledgeable; they’re not pretentious but they have a considerable aura. There’s an intimate quality to his work.”

Some of those characteristics of Johnson’s collage- and drawing-based art are in evidence in the selection of his works featured in Josef and Anni and Ruth and Ray, the inaugural group exhibition now on view at David Zwirner’s latest New York venue — his third — which has just opened in an elegant townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

It is being presented in cooperation with Adler Beatty, a new art advisory company founded by Frances Beatty and her son, Alexander Adler. Beatty, the longtime head of Ray Johnson’s estate, had also focused on the artist’s oeuvre for many years in her previous work for Richard L. Feigen & Co., the gallery that, until recently, had been housed in the new quarters shared by her firm and Zwirner’s just-opened outpost.

This 26-piece survey, along with archival photos and artists’ letters, examines works made by Josef Albers and Anni Albers, as well as those of the California-born, Japanese-American Ruth Asawa and of Johnson, a prodigiously talented only child who was born and brought up in Detroit, Michigan, where he began his formal artistic training at a local technical high school.

Read on at Hyperallergic.