AT ZWIRNER, RAY JOHNSON’S COLLAGES ARE ALSO THE VERY FLATTEST OF SCULPTURES THE DAILY PIC is “Untitled (Dear Shirley Temple,…
AT ZWIRNER, RAY JOHNSON’S COLLAGES ARE ALSO THE VERY FLATTEST OF SCULPTURES
THE DAILY PICis “Untitled (Dear Shirley Temple, Geldzahler),” (1956-1992), from the big Ray Johnson survey at David Zwirner in New York.
I did a little write-up on the show for the weekend New York Times, stressing the pieces that Johnson mailed out to other creatives on the (gay) margins of the art world, and the work those mailings did as “social sculpture.” But I didn’t have room for something else that struck me when I was in the show: The sheer, determined materiality of all the so-called “collages” that Johnson never intended to mail.
I say “so called” because those pieces are closer to very flat sculptures than to what we mostly call collage, which normally tries to move away from being an object and toward a status as pure, almost immaterial image. Johnson’s pieces, on the contrary, are usually built up as shallow reliefs, stacked into being from various thicknesses of card that only happen to have found images glued on to them. If you removed the images, you’d still be left with some kind of artwork — something like a cardboard abstraction by Ben Nicholson, perhaps.
I think this materiality was partly important to Johnson just because he came of age — and very briefly hit it big — in a postwar era when art was much about the stuff it was made from. (His art’s connection to the conceptual gambits of Pop Art is much overrated.) But I think Johnson also chose to work in relief to make clear his creations’ status as artist-crafted objects, and to set them apart from mere image culture. By making objects that had such very clear markers as art, he was the more clearly marked as an artist. And that made his practice as a mailer into art as well, which I think is where he wanted it to live.
If his collages were close to being sculptures, then the social sculpture he derived from them was all the more clearly art. ( Artwork © Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy the Ray Johnson Estate)
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