Ray Johnson's Anti-Archive

This essay explores the work of “New York’s most famous unknown artist,” Ray Johnson, contending that his complex relationship to sadomasochism provides a key switch point for Pop’s sexual and racial imaginary. In the register of sex, Johnson’s sadomasochism contests the stability of the relationship between homosexuality and Pop (theorized by Kenneth E. Silver, Jonathan D. Katz, Richard Meyer, and Douglas Crimp), offering instead a queerer object that opens out new models of collaborative artistic production. In the register of race, sadomasochism enables Johnson to articulate a monochrome world (particularly in relation to the blackface of his bunny portraits), attempting to void the binarized color-line’s fissuring force. While this strategy from our contemporary vantage feels politically suspect, I see it is part of a larger project of political and social reparation whereby the explicitly sadomasochistic themes of Johnson’s work imagine a rebuttal to and reconfiguration of the racist exclusionary forces of the art world

Aesthetics · Art · Human sexuality · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sadomasochism · Sociology · The Imaginary · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Gender Studies · Law

• Masked Voices

  Craig M Loftin, Craig Loftin•Masked Voices•2012

  Incluir item

• Frank Bowling and the Appetite for British Pop

  Michelle Bonczek•Third Text•2008

  Incluir item

• Artists, Mythologies and Media -- Genius, Madness and Art History

  G Pollock•Screen•1980

  Incluir item

• Celibacies

  Benjamin Kahan•Celibacies•2013

  Incluir item

• Deviations

  Gayle Rubin, Gayle S Rubin•Deviations•2012

  Incluir item

• Touching Feeling

  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michele Aina Barale et al.•Touching Feeling•2003

  Incluir item

• Turn the Beat Around

  Earl Freeman, Elizabeth Freeman•differences•2008

  Incluir item

• Publics and Counterpublics

  Michael Warner•Public Culture•2002

  Incluir item