Exhibitions, Italy, Salerno, 11 May 2022
OPHEN VIRTUAL ART GALLERY SPACE
"Ray Johnson Project, Sustainable Marginal Relations"
The Bongiani Art Museum Collection is pleased to inaugurate the collective exhibition entitled "Ray Johnson Project, Sustainable Marginal Relations" curated by Sandro Bongiani at the Ophen Virtual Art Gallery in Salerno and simultaneously with the 59th Venice International Biennale 2022. with an “add to & return” project created by Ruggero Maggi in 1987 with 72 selected works from the Amazon Archive in Milan. For this project Ray Johnson had written on the back of an invitation to one of his exhibits at the Nassau County Museum a phrase, when ever prophetic… other than the empire of Mr. Bezos' distribution chain! Ruggero Maggi writes: Ray had already got into the habit for years of sending his images by post inviting the artists to intervene in the spirit of the New Correspondance School. The "bases", sent to the artists, as I call them, were basically four in which the artists were asked to intervene and send back, "add to & return", using the images that Johnson had sent me in the mid-80s. It still surprises me today that some of these sheets, after years of postal journeys, return to the sender! 60 years after the birth of Mail Art (1962) another important event in Italy dedicated to the American artist Ray Johnson considered by critics in the 1960s to be "the most famous unknown artist in New York and a pioneer of performance and the use of written language in visual art. A practice based on the contamination between collage, photography, drawing, performance and written text supported by post. His projects include conceptually elaborated performances that dealt with interpersonal relationships that arise from small stories, from encounters with other people, from spontaneous relationships and reflections capable of triggering new contributions and new actions to creative thinking ". According to Ray Johnson, art is life, after all, even the word "Moticos" used very often derives from the word osmotic, a specific quality characterized by a reciprocal influence, an exchange between individuals, an interpenetration of ideas, attitudes and cultural realities , in short, a new way of thinking in a decidedly fluid and evolving process that reveals itself in a timely manner by examining the writings and performative actions “Zen Nothings” carried out by the American artist. Today, 27 years after his death, his experimental work from the 1960s onwards is considered by critics to be an integral part of the Fluxus movement and even an original forerunner of American Pop Art. Ray Johnson, in 1962, founded the New York Correspondance School of Art, a sort of correspondence art school in which the graphic drawings with the inclusion of stamps and collages were for the first time sent by post to acquaintances and even unaware recipients, giving complete autonomy to communication and making this new way of expression totally free, outside of any scheme imposed and pre-established by cultural power and consequently by the official art market. Precursor and rebellious soul, enigmatic presence and convinced individualist, transgressive, extroverted, disinherited and hermit of American art, he is often associated with the Fluxus group for the usually minimal-conceptual character of his projects however, we must point out that Ray Johnson has never done part of the “Fluxus”, but nevertheless shared the same problems and the experimental “underground” with many artists of this group. In the early 1960s, the legendary Johnson definitively devoted himself to Mail Art (the Postal Art), combining found objects with comics, advertising, letters and even painting and color. He said that "he loved to create works that combined word games, verbal and visual". Thus the postal art was born, essentially becoming an "artistic operation in progress" of exchanges between individuals, bypassing the institutional figures of the contemporary art critic and gallery owner.
Today, he appears to us one of the most influential characters of Mail Art and at the same time a great solitary pioneer of visual art. American, effectively influencing the future of art and also becoming the reference point for new generations of young artists.
Mail Art - writes Sandro Bongiani - is a sort of strange web of communications created by as many correspondents capable of overcoming the infinite geographical distances of the planet by concretely involving all the nations of the world in an impressive and gigantic mobile puzzle, always variable, perennially in motion. ". Postal art with its sprawling network of contacts now embraces the whole world; each tile is a micro-unit of a larger and more unpredictable macro-unit that represents a diversified universe of new poetic energies, a sort of great collective "meeting", in which "puns are not just a game", as rightly stated Alfred Jarry many years ago, but another different possibility of freeing oneself from constraints and impediments and fully dedicating oneself to invention and pure creativity. Mail Art, for many artists, is also freedom and above all love and brotherhood.
Artists present at this international exhibition of Mail Art:
Acosta Bentos, Uruguay I Andrej Tišma, Yugoslavia I Angel Borrero, USA I Angela and Henning Mittendorf, Germany I Anne King, Canada I Antonio Tregnaghi, Italy I Artpool, Hungary I B. Charpentier, France I Brad Goins, USA I Charles Francois, Belgium I ciTIZeN X, Canada I Cleasby, USA I CrackerJack Kid, USA I Creative Thing, USA I D. Jenkins, USA I Daniel Daligand, France I Daniel Plunkett, ND I Daniele Sasson, Italy I David Tiffen, England I Desireau, Italy I E. F. Higgins III, USA I Emilio Morandi, Italy I Ennio Carbone, Italy I Gaetano Colonna, Italy I Georg Mühleck, Germany I Gerard Barbot, USA I Gilberto Prado, Brazil I Giorgio Nelva, Italy I Giovanni Fontana, Italy I Giovanni Strada, Italy I Giuseppe Canzi, Italy I Guido Bondioli, USA I Guillermo Deisler, Chile I Harley, USA I Harry Fox, USA I Heino Otte, Austria I Herbert A. Meyer, Germany I Irja Lähteenmäki, Finland I Isao Yoshii, Japan I J! B ! B !, Spain I Jenny Soup, USA I John M. Byrum, USA I Jorge Carabal lo, Uruguay I Josè Van De Broucke, Belgium I Kees Oosterbaan, NL I Keith Bates, GB I Lancelot Bellini, Italy I Le Depli Amoreux Mensuel, France I Lothar Trott, Switzerland I Mágìco Verdún, Spain I Marcel Stüssi, Switzerland I Massimo Medola , Italy I Mike Bidner, Canada I Mike Duquette, Canada I Mogens Otto Nielsen, Denmark I Mukata Takamura, Japan I Mumbles, USA I Nenad Bogdanović, Yugoslavia I Oh Boy !, USA I Oronzo Liuzzi, Italy I Pascal Lenoir, France I Phosphorusflourish , USA I PLAGIaT, Denmark I PLUTØNIUM PRESS, Australia I R. & D. Kamperelić, Yugoslavia I Ray Johnson, USA I Rea Nikonova, Russia I Roberto Keppler, Brazil I Roberto Zito, Italy I Rocola, USA I Ronaldo Comix, USA I Rudi Rubberoid, USA I Ruggero Maggi, Italy I Ruud Janssen, NL I Salvatore Anelli, Italy I Salvatore De Rosa, Italy I Shigeru Nakayama, Japan I Shozo Shimamoto, Japan I Stewart Home, GB I Thompson, USA I Tim Mc Haughlin, Canada I Walter Rovere, Italy.
Biography of Ray Johnson (1927-1995)
Born on October 16, 1927 in Detroit, Michigan, his early life included sporadic lectures at the Detroit Art Institute and a summer at Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. In 1945, Johnson left Detroit to attend progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina. During his three years on the program, he studied with a number of artists, including Josef Albers, Jacob Lawrence, John Cage, and Willem de Kooning. Moving to New York in 1949, Johnson befriends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, developing an idiosyncratic form of Pop Art. Over the ensuing decades, Johnson became increasingly engaged in performance and Zen philosophy, merging artistic practice with life. On January 13, 1995, Johnson committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in Sag Harbor, New York, then swimming in the sea and drowning. In 2002, a documentary on the artist's life called How to Draw a Bunny, makes us understand his research work. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
AMAZON Archive by Ruggero Maggi | Ray Johnson / Project Add & Return1. series | 1987
We thank the AMAZON Archive in Milan created by Ruggero Maggi in 1979 for allowing the creation of this important exhibition dedicated to the American artist Ray Johnson.
BONGIANI ART MUSEUM COLLECTION
TITLE: Ray Johnson Project, Sustainable Marginal Relations
From 11 May 2022 to 30 June 2022
SALERNO
Opening 11 May 2022 h. 18:00
PLACE: Ophen Virtual Art Gallery Space
ADDRESS: Via S. Calenda 105 / D
HOURS: every day from 00.00 to 24.00
CURATORS: Ruggero Maggi and Sandro Bongiani
TELEPHONE FOR INFORMATION: +39 3937380225
E-MAIL INFO: bongianimuseum@gmail.com
OFFICIAL WEBSITE: http://www.collezionebongianiartmuseum.it/
"Ray Johnson Project, Sustainable Marginal Relations"
The Bongiani Art Museum Collection is pleased to inaugurate the collective exhibition entitled "Ray Johnson Project, Sustainable Marginal Relations" curated by Sandro Bongiani at the Ophen Virtual Art Gallery in Salerno and simultaneously with the 59th Venice International Biennale 2022. with an “add to & return” project created by Ruggero Maggi in 1987 with 72 selected works from the Amazon Archive in Milan. For this project Ray Johnson had written on the back of an invitation to one of his exhibits at the Nassau County Museum a phrase, when ever prophetic… other than the empire of Mr. Bezos' distribution chain! Ruggero Maggi writes: Ray had already got into the habit for years of sending his images by post inviting the artists to intervene in the spirit of the New Correspondance School. The "bases", sent to the artists, as I call them, were basically four in which the artists were asked to intervene and send back, "add to & return", using the images that Johnson had sent me in the mid-80s. It still surprises me today that some of these sheets, after years of postal journeys, return to the sender! 60 years after the birth of Mail Art (1962) another important event in Italy dedicated to the American artist Ray Johnson considered by critics in the 1960s to be "the most famous unknown artist in New York and a pioneer of performance and the use of written language in visual art. A practice based on the contamination between collage, photography, drawing, performance and written text supported by post. His projects include conceptually elaborated performances that dealt with interpersonal relationships that arise from small stories, from encounters with other people, from spontaneous relationships and reflections capable of triggering new contributions and new actions to creative thinking ". According to Ray Johnson, art is life, after all, even the word "Moticos" used very often derives from the word osmotic, a specific quality characterized by a reciprocal influence, an exchange between individuals, an interpenetration of ideas, attitudes and cultural realities , in short, a new way of thinking in a decidedly fluid and evolving process that reveals itself in a timely manner by examining the writings and performative actions “Zen Nothings” carried out by the American artist. Today, 27 years after his death, his experimental work from the 1960s onwards is considered by critics to be an integral part of the Fluxus movement and even an original forerunner of American Pop Art. Ray Johnson, in 1962, founded the New York Correspondance School of Art, a sort of correspondence art school in which the graphic drawings with the inclusion of stamps and collages were for the first time sent by post to acquaintances and even unaware recipients, giving complete autonomy to communication and making this new way of expression totally free, outside of any scheme imposed and pre-established by cultural power and consequently by the official art market. Precursor and rebellious soul, enigmatic presence and convinced individualist, transgressive, extroverted, disinherited and hermit of American art, he is often associated with the Fluxus group for the usually minimal-conceptual character of his projects however, we must point out that Ray Johnson has never done part of the “Fluxus”, but nevertheless shared the same problems and the experimental “underground” with many artists of this group. In the early 1960s, the legendary Johnson definitively devoted himself to Mail Art (the Postal Art), combining found objects with comics, advertising, letters and even painting and color. He said that "he loved to create works that combined word games, verbal and visual". Thus the postal art was born, essentially becoming an "artistic operation in progress" of exchanges between individuals, bypassing the institutional figures of the contemporary art critic and gallery owner.
Today, he appears to us one of the most influential characters of Mail Art and at the same time a great solitary pioneer of visual art. American, effectively influencing the future of art and also becoming the reference point for new generations of young artists.
Mail Art - writes Sandro Bongiani - is a sort of strange web of communications created by as many correspondents capable of overcoming the infinite geographical distances of the planet by concretely involving all the nations of the world in an impressive and gigantic mobile puzzle, always variable, perennially in motion. ". Postal art with its sprawling network of contacts now embraces the whole world; each tile is a micro-unit of a larger and more unpredictable macro-unit that represents a diversified universe of new poetic energies, a sort of great collective "meeting", in which "puns are not just a game", as rightly stated Alfred Jarry many years ago, but another different possibility of freeing oneself from constraints and impediments and fully dedicating oneself to invention and pure creativity. Mail Art, for many artists, is also freedom and above all love and brotherhood.
Artists present at this international exhibition of Mail Art:
Acosta Bentos, Uruguay I Andrej Tišma, Yugoslavia I Angel Borrero, USA I Angela and Henning Mittendorf, Germany I Anne King, Canada I Antonio Tregnaghi, Italy I Artpool, Hungary I B. Charpentier, France I Brad Goins, USA I Charles Francois, Belgium I ciTIZeN X, Canada I Cleasby, USA I CrackerJack Kid, USA I Creative Thing, USA I D. Jenkins, USA I Daniel Daligand, France I Daniel Plunkett, ND I Daniele Sasson, Italy I David Tiffen, England I Desireau, Italy I E. F. Higgins III, USA I Emilio Morandi, Italy I Ennio Carbone, Italy I Gaetano Colonna, Italy I Georg Mühleck, Germany I Gerard Barbot, USA I Gilberto Prado, Brazil I Giorgio Nelva, Italy I Giovanni Fontana, Italy I Giovanni Strada, Italy I Giuseppe Canzi, Italy I Guido Bondioli, USA I Guillermo Deisler, Chile I Harley, USA I Harry Fox, USA I Heino Otte, Austria I Herbert A. Meyer, Germany I Irja Lähteenmäki, Finland I Isao Yoshii, Japan I J! B ! B !, Spain I Jenny Soup, USA I John M. Byrum, USA I Jorge Carabal lo, Uruguay I Josè Van De Broucke, Belgium I Kees Oosterbaan, NL I Keith Bates, GB I Lancelot Bellini, Italy I Le Depli Amoreux Mensuel, France I Lothar Trott, Switzerland I Mágìco Verdún, Spain I Marcel Stüssi, Switzerland I Massimo Medola , Italy I Mike Bidner, Canada I Mike Duquette, Canada I Mogens Otto Nielsen, Denmark I Mukata Takamura, Japan I Mumbles, USA I Nenad Bogdanović, Yugoslavia I Oh Boy !, USA I Oronzo Liuzzi, Italy I Pascal Lenoir, France I Phosphorusflourish , USA I PLAGIaT, Denmark I PLUTØNIUM PRESS, Australia I R. & D. Kamperelić, Yugoslavia I Ray Johnson, USA I Rea Nikonova, Russia I Roberto Keppler, Brazil I Roberto Zito, Italy I Rocola, USA I Ronaldo Comix, USA I Rudi Rubberoid, USA I Ruggero Maggi, Italy I Ruud Janssen, NL I Salvatore Anelli, Italy I Salvatore De Rosa, Italy I Shigeru Nakayama, Japan I Shozo Shimamoto, Japan I Stewart Home, GB I Thompson, USA I Tim Mc Haughlin, Canada I Walter Rovere, Italy.
Biography of Ray Johnson (1927-1995)
Born on October 16, 1927 in Detroit, Michigan, his early life included sporadic lectures at the Detroit Art Institute and a summer at Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. In 1945, Johnson left Detroit to attend progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina. During his three years on the program, he studied with a number of artists, including Josef Albers, Jacob Lawrence, John Cage, and Willem de Kooning. Moving to New York in 1949, Johnson befriends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, developing an idiosyncratic form of Pop Art. Over the ensuing decades, Johnson became increasingly engaged in performance and Zen philosophy, merging artistic practice with life. On January 13, 1995, Johnson committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in Sag Harbor, New York, then swimming in the sea and drowning. In 2002, a documentary on the artist's life called How to Draw a Bunny, makes us understand his research work. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
AMAZON Archive by Ruggero Maggi | Ray Johnson / Project Add & Return1. series | 1987
We thank the AMAZON Archive in Milan created by Ruggero Maggi in 1979 for allowing the creation of this important exhibition dedicated to the American artist Ray Johnson.
BONGIANI ART MUSEUM COLLECTION
TITLE: Ray Johnson Project, Sustainable Marginal Relations
From 11 May 2022 to 30 June 2022
SALERNO
Opening 11 May 2022 h. 18:00
PLACE: Ophen Virtual Art Gallery Space
ADDRESS: Via S. Calenda 105 / D
HOURS: every day from 00.00 to 24.00
CURATORS: Ruggero Maggi and Sandro Bongiani
TELEPHONE FOR INFORMATION: +39 3937380225
E-MAIL INFO: bongianimuseum@gmail.com
OFFICIAL WEBSITE: http://www.collezionebongianiartmuseum.it/
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