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...mugged. The afternoon came had been preceded by several days of mail--articles, drawings and photocopies of works he had asked me to send along to people I'd never heard of before.
Dressed in a navy T-shirt and dungarees, bald and smiling, Ray Johnson was not what I'd expected. He appeared with a rose vase as a gift, stoppered with a Taittinger champagne cork. Extremely curious--but purposeful, and, as I was to learn, deadpan by design. It was, after all, a vase for a Rose. Ray wanted only black coffee and we sat drinking cups of the stuff in my kitchen. Our conversation roamed from his exegesis on synchronicity, the Dadaists, and an oral history on the "exquisite corpse," to a meeting with art critic Robert Pincus-Witten at Gagosian Gallery. Ray showed a group of collages to Pincus-Witten, on the floor of the gallery, beneath one of Warhol's Elvis silkscreens then showing at Gagosian. Ray told me: "Andy gave me that." I don't know if Ray felt the Warhol silkscreen was stolen from him, or if he wanted it back. I had my doubts about both. I couldn't imagine a legal battle. I was to find out Ray was more interested in the social geometry, the correspondance of this one-on-one exhibition o f his work...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from C: International Contemporary Art
Visit to Nutsy's: Randy Gladman to Tom Sach's studio., March 22, 2003
Keeping fluid in a common place: Karen Henderson's Gallery Cameras., March 22, 2003
Ihor Holubizky & Jon Tupper on Asia Pacific Triennial., March 22, 2003
The art of noise: Merzbow., March 22, 2003
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