A Book about Ray

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.Table of Contents
Key to abbreviated references in notes
Notes on image credits
Prelude
1 The Other Ray Johnson
Presenting Ray Johnson. What’s in a name?
2 What Is a Moticos?
1945-1965. Homeless forms: from Black Mountain to A BOOK ABOUT DEATH.
3 ICE
1964-1967. Crystallizations: correspondence art and mosaic collage.
4 Fan Club
1963-1968. Fame as a form of art, fame as a form of death.
5 Ray Johnson’s History of
1969-1973. The art world viewed from outer space.
6 Silhouette University
1973-1980. Shadow institutions and throwaway gestures.
7 The Curtain Opens
1980-1995. “I do not exits”: Ray Johnson’s memory theater.
Coda
Acknowledgements
A selective bibliography of writings on and by Ray Johnson
Additional works cited
IndexIncluded 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


"Ellen Levy brings Johnson’s life and art into a cohesive if somewhat unorthodox form in her biography of the artist, A Book about Ray. Beginning with the premise that not all stories must be told chronologically, Levy approaches Johnson’s life in the form of a fugue, each chapter serving as a repository for variations on a theme, with stories and anecdotes that spiral out from a central examination of the elusive qualities of Johnson’s work...Levy allows her writing to follow Johnson’s conviction that the details of biography be used lightly, and only to invite something more complex and vital to emerge. More a curated archive of the artist’s words and works than formal biography, A Book about Ray captures the fleeting immediacy of Johnson’s work, processing the enormity of his complex practice yet resisting any urge to codify."
—Brooklyn Rail

"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“To survey the densely entangled life and work of Ray Johnson, one needs an agile and surefooted guide like Ellen Levy. Building in new directions on the unfinished work of scholar and archivist Bill Wilson, Levy has coaxed out of letters, mailers, and collages a cohesive Ray—an artist as profound, prolific, and slippery as they come. Her book is an achievement of the first order and a fabulous read.”
—Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Director of Ray Johnson Collection and Research, The Art Institute of Chicago
 
“I was a bit player in Ray Johnson’s world of enigma and constant surprises for three decades but only now, reading Ellen Levy’s masterful exegesis of both his public and private life do I feel I know him. She seamlessly connects his life performance to the web of allusions in his work and reveals the full scope of his germinating influence on pop art as well as being the genius who turned the US Postal Service into an art medium. Though he was famously unknown in his lifetime because he defied the art ‘market,’ Levy’s A Book about Ray ensures he is now both famous and fully known. Brava!”
—Michael Findlay, Director of Acquavella GalleriesEllen 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.