During
the formative years of his artistic education, in the late '40s, Ray Johnson
attended Black Mountain College
in North Carolina. While he was there, Johnson studied design, colour and
painting under the former Bauhaus teacher, Josef
Albers. Others on faculty included John
Cage, Merce
Cunningham and
Buckminster Fuller, and when Johnson moved to New York he would maintain many
of these same contacts. Throughout his life, Johnson's work continued to reflect
the particular and relatively unified aesthetic orientation which had emerged
at Black Mountain. This post-war ecological orientation - whose central tenets
were popularized by the youth counter-culture of the late 1960s - continues
to be influential in contemporary cultural politics.
During the 1960s, for Johnson, mail
art would gradually become the most suitable form in which to express
the aesthetic position that he had acquired at Black Mountain. Certain characteristics
- talk of emptiness, commitment to process and movement, use of disjunctive
association and collage, resistance to an explicitly political stance, and
an interconnected collaborative practice - express the formation of that era.
In 1968 when Johnson saw a painting
entitled The Problem of Nothing
made by a young Canadian artist named Michael
Morris reproduced in Artforum, he responded immediately with a
letter explaining his engagement with nothing. In response to the
Happenings of the 60s, Johnson had advocated 'Nothings.'
This was the beginning of a connection which would continue until the end
of his life. In an interview from the late '60s Johnson explains why he kept
the walls of his apartment blank, saying "I think the void is very - well,
I think one must face the void or live in it to feel free." A recurrent paradox
surfaces in the work: although spontaneous experience may with great effort
be reduced to an awareness of 'nothing', it will never precisely cease to
exist.