A Book about Ray - by Ellen Levy (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This is a book about Ray Johnson, "New York's most famous unknown artist." Johnson was a collagist, performance artist, and practitioner of "correspondence art," a form he is said to have founded, which involves the circulation of variously altered missives among a web of mailers--a kind of proto-internet"--

Book Synopsis

The first full-career survey of the idiosyncratic life and work of Ray Johnson, a collagist, performance artist, and pioneer of mail art.

Ray Johnson (1927-1995), a.k.a. "New York's most famous unknown artist," was notorious for the elaborate games he played with the institutions of the art world, soliciting their attention even as he rejected their invitations. In A Book about Ray, Ellen Levy offers a comprehensive study of the artist who turned the business of career-making into a tongue-in-cheek performance, tracing his artistic development from his arrival at Black Mountain College in 1945 to his death in 1995. Levy describes Johnson's practice as one that was constantly shifting--whether in tone, in its address to potential audiences, or among three primary artistic modes: collage, performance, and correspondence art.

A Book about Ray takes an elliptical path, circling around rather than trying to arrest in flight the elusive artist and his purposefully ephemeral art. By crafting the book in this way, Levy evokes Ray Johnson's art in the moment of its making and draws readers into the artist's world, while making them feel, from the beginning, that they somehow already know their way around that world. In exploring Johnson's scene, readers will also encounter the artists who influenced him, like Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, and his friends and peers like Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. The work of such figures will look forever different in light of Johnson's subversive take on their shared aesthetic.

Suitable for readers both new to Ray Johnson and those already familiar with his work, A Book about Ray is a complete and vital portrait of an American original.

Review Quotes

Included in the New York Times's Best Art Books of 2024

"An extra-special artist deserves an extra-special book, and that's what Ray Johnson gets in Ellen Levy's "A Book About Ray." In the 1960s the art writer Grace Glueck called him "New York's most famous unknown artist," and he wore that distinction like a crown. Indeed, it shaped his life, which he conducted as a game of hide-and-seek -- largely through the medium of "mail art" -- with the art world and fame. For a long time the role of omniscient fugitive worked. But by the 1980s, he had pretty much lost his audience and moved to Long Island, where, on a cold day in 1995, he drowned himself, elusive -- no goodbyes, no whys -- to the end. Levy's biography respects the mystery without fastening on it. Instead, she works on evoking the performative character of Johnson's life in a biography that has a dancerly rhythm of feints and darts, goes off on tangents and doubles back, keeping her prose, like her subject, moving, changing. Like the life it records, the book is a brilliant turn in -- highest compliment -- a very Ray way."
--The New York Times, Arts

"Levy renders the life of Ray Johnson, the idiosyncratic pioneer of ephemeral and mail art, drawing inspiration for the tone of this survey from his stimulating and fleet-footed work."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A comprehensive survey with intelligent, thoughtful readings of key works, for both newcomers and those already familiar with Johnson's art."
--Library Journal

"By far the most complete framing of coyote trickster artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) to date, Ellen Levy's A Book About Ray engages with the work of the artist on his own terms...Her book includes ample color images, scattered as if collaged at times across the pages, and care has been taken to have the book resemble an art object itself, an experimental risk which pays off. Levy's eye-opening A Book About Ray mirrors Johnson's elusive disappearances even as it highlights what made this unique artist the phenomenon he was."
--Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Beautifully and copiously illustrated, Levy's book serves not only as a narrative of this intriguing, still mysterious life but also as a kind of archive of Johnson's body of work: a treasure trove as surprising, multi-layered and erudite as its trickster subject."
--e-flux

"Ellen Levy's beautifully conceived textual deep dive in seven chapters (plus a coda) is a worthy testament to the notoriously elusive Ray Johnson. Constructed with care--from the choice of typeface to the display of ephemera--A Book About Ray takes its 'elliptical path' around Johnson's journey, from his arrival at Black Mountain College in 1945 to his death in 1995. Levy's 'art story' exegesis about Johnson's work and life pops and crackles and almost sings its histories: Ray's elaborate games, tongue-in-cheek missives, erratic gestures, and his subversive art of disappearance. This is a fine read packed with many encounters and art world cameos (from Ruth Asawa to Andy Warhol), and a vital portrait of the 'famously unknown' American original who turned the US Postal Service into an art medium."
-- Herbert Pföstl, Book Consultant for the New Museum Store

About the Author

Ellen Levy is the author of Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts as well as essays on poetry, visual art, theater, and film. Currently a Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, she has also taught at Vanderbilt University and the School of Visual Arts in New York.