Art-world irony from Ray Johnson

Alex Sainsbury has made an astute choice, opening his beautiful, not-for-profit gallery in Spitalfields with the first British exhibition of the important but overlooked American pop artist Ray Johnson.

The renovated Huguenot mansion is filled with Johnson’s modestly-sized collages, which bristle with casual elegance, personal anecdote and art-world irony.

Born in 1927, Johnson more or less invented the genre of mail art ­— big in the Sixties, now mostly forgotten — in which artists posted small works of art to each other. Today, that process feels rather outdated but not the idea behind it, which was to create a new low-fi kind of art without a trace of grandiosity or commercialisation.

He sold work to foreign collectors from a motel room he rented by the half-hour. He apparently torpedoed his chance to exhibit at Gagosian in 1990 by telling the dealer that his collages cost a $1million each. He committed suicide in 1995 by swimming out to sea.

A contemporary of Warhol, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Johnson shares these artists’ pop iconography and love of worn-away surfaces, while building his own intriguing world of symbols and textures. There are dollar bills, Lucky Strike packets and photographs of Shirley Temple.
Around these images, Johnson glued on little cardboard tiles of abstract textures, which had been chopped up from earlier works he junked.

There are mysterious icons in black ink which can sometimes be identified as swans, underpants, faeces or penises. The meanings of the works remain elusive but as you peruse them over the three floors of the gallery, you will pick up a sense of the maverick and obsessive brilliance of this artist and of the art world and gay subculture he moved in.

Johnson is contemporary art’s Jack Kerouac and his collages seem to form one long rhythmic sentence.

Ray Johnson: Please Add to & Return
Raven Row
E1