Retrospettiva di Coco Gordon “Timeless, Senzatempo” La natura tra performance e Exploding Books Opere 1958-2020

COCO GORDON /  SuperSkyWoman / Biography

Born 1938 in Genova Italy. After 25 years in a Duane St Tribeca NYC loft and 11 years in Huntington Bay NY. She also goes by the name Coco Go, a.k.a SuperSkyWoman

Alison Knowles opened Coco’s access to international Fluxus. Wanting to make her images in paper, they collaborated, making 10 years of handmade experimental papers together leading to the show Loose Pages at Emily Harvey Gallery, NY. For 5 decades Coco paralleled Intermedia and fluxus circles with her Solo shows curated by Lucio Barbera, Sandro Ricaldone, Rosanna Chiessi, Leonardi V-idea- Italy, Christine Jones-Vienna’s KunstKanzlei and the Stadtgalerie. Coco used SuperSkyWoman’s historic tuned in vision in shows at Sandra Gering, Gallery Onetwentyeight, Art-in-General and A taste of Art venues. Emily Harvey nurtured her art future in Italy & NYC. As SuperSkyWoman, Coco also originated Gruppo TIKYSK (Things I Know You Should Know) in 1994 as a ready shelter for healers, artists, experimental groups and her mud-woman, rock-woman, fingerprint in the universe events. At the 48th Venice Biennale for Oreste she and her Gruppo TIKYSK "Permed" 300 people’s heads, took part in the "Bunker" project and the poetry section.  At the 49th Venice Biennale she contributed to the "Markers" street-hung Banner project of the International Artists Museum with her SuperSkyWoman speaking with the people dialog, “with speed and micro circuitry we have more time to arrive too soon, Forget Coming". At the 50th Venice Biennale Coco joined the "Wandering Library" curated by Doran Polak’s Markers 4 Project with her book, The Infinite Bottom Line. For the 50th Venice Biennale she took part in two projects, one for Alan Bowman boiling her seven-pointed star paper to eat and brought Global Poetry Day to heal Ground Zero in NYC with her action, "You are Poetry" engaging shopkeepers and city workers for Karenina's poetry section. In the 51^st Venice Biennale she took part in Isola Virtuale curated by Achille Bonito Oliva with her poem Our Time Hour Time, and the performative poem “Book of Water” by Congelo. For the London Biennale’s draw__drawing she sculpted wild feet into action. For the 2005 Istanbul Biennale she was kidnapped by Sassu's Gruppo Sinestetico. For Agricola de Cologne, she was selected for the Violence festival, and invited as featured artist for Self-representation on the newmediafest.org site. For Klemens Golf she became a reporter for her home place in NYC and Chappaqua NY, creating a three-month outdoor slide show in Dusseldorf.

From a meeting at Matera in 1999, Congelo was formed by her merging Angelo Ricciardi of Napoli, Italy, whose many events and books together were created, including one of 80 dinners, Il Pane Non Si Butta and Patented events. Congelo is now placing barcodes on their encyclopedic correspondence, an edition of 5 boxed copies of which one is reserved for MOMA. Congelo took part in Jorge Luiz Antonio’s Visual and Electronic Poetry International Exhibition in Brazil; + Congelo & Coco in the Mexico Experimental Biennale. She created several works for Angelo’s Artline Do Not Cross published by 404 Arte Contemporanea, and joined many book projects.  Coco performed actions as SuperSkyWoman and exhibited In 2003 in a daughter/mother show with 90 year old mother Alisa, at the Pauline Oliveros Foundation's Deep Listening Space Gallery in Kingston NY. She made talking medicine wheels for the CACQM land art project in Quebec. She invented a watery Eyes Club meeting event as a memorial for her good friend and conspirator, the late Ray Johnson: a full moon gathering" at the Pollock Krasner House in East Hampton July 13^th, 2003. For Luc Fierens she was featured with 13 SuperSkyWoman dialogs in his project, "Cornucopia", became a howling SuperSkyWoman for his Cooperation Project 1, and was "Jane Doe glissando" for his Cooperation project 2. At Fun of Fun SuperSkyWoman pulled in a new tribe to Dance her Matisse dance with the animals around her 9/11 in butter “Talking Medicine Wheel” at the River Sile, while Congelo conscribed Renata & Giovanni Strada into performing their political "Book of Water". Coco has joined many Fluxus artists in collaborations of their works and hers. She created artist books in editions, including Knee published by Porto Dei Santi Press, 2000 that also includes Anne Waldman. Coco’s own small Press, TIKYSK, published Visioning Life Systems That Create Healthy Resources and Transform Waste: Artists Work from Their Permacultural Source (Water Mark Press, 2003) reviving her 1993 edition Assembling, Artists Work from Their Ecological Source, Med Art, NY. Coco’s books--Radical Food, Hip Hop Solarplexus, SuperSkyWoman and TIKYSK: Permaculture Getting to Know You (Foot Sq Space, 1997) trace her progression into superheroine with an "action plan". Dick Higgins rediscovered his alter-ego character "Camille" in Coco. Her show of 36 ecozoic earth salt installations, "il Sogno del Tempo" in Messina Italy 1990 manifests the thinking of Earth Philosopher, Thomas Berry, while catching irradiated potatoes from the marketplace of Messina into her floor installation to underscore Berry’s cosmological exploitations. Coco’s art introduced the dynamic Nature intelligence way of healing to create a surplus Permaculture ecology, exemplified with her "Infinite Bottom Line" of grasses she plaited from wherever she worked around the world, to “Kick up the Bottom Line”. Martin Krusche's Austrian Kultur site published her many SuperSkyWoman actions on his KULTUR web site as well as featuring her as Jane Doe. Coco's poetry "Interactiv’s" and artist books have grown to more than 100 books. In 1978 she began to use her paper instruments interactively. From mid 70’s-early 80’s she taught many artists how to create their own papermaking studios and equipment. Coco Go is known for her 70’s forward handmade paper inventions one can enter, wear, sound, inhabit: liquid pools, clothes, hammocks, feet & sounding instruments (drums, rainsticks, pillows, shakers, strummers. Her famous John Cage’s post-Alphabet performances inspired hairy life-sized piano sculptures that still morph as a series on visual music. She’s been by profession a papermaker/ permaculture designer/ publisher of Water Mark Press, W Space "Intimate" editions and gruppo TIKYSK's artist book editions. COCO’s Artists Books have been sold since the 80’s at PRINTED MATTER, NYC, Amazon and other online book venues.

Collections:  paintings, installations, paperworks

Provincia of Messina, American Craft Museum, Hobelix Libreria, Joseph Cornell Archive, Adelphi University, Marymount Manhattan, Nassau Community College, UWO Weldon Library Ontario, Otten Collection, Getty Center, Heckscher Museum, Univ of Delaware, Chiessi Performance Archive Cavriago Italy, Jean Brown Archive, Franklin Furnace Archives, Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive,  Braun Collection Germany, Robert Scott Small Library SC, Univ of Alberta Edmonton, Cozzani Collection La Spezia Italy, Nuvolone Collection Genova Italy, Luigi Bonotto - Bassano Del Grappa Italy, Joel Malin’s Duchamp Collection.

Artist Books in collections: 

MOMA Library NYC, Whitney Museum Library, Fogg Museum MA, Museum of Women in the Arts Wash DC, Smithsonian Museum, Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive, Provincia of Messina, Univ of Alberta Edmonton, Spec Collections UC Santa Cruz, Brown University Library, The Banff Centre Library Alberta, KunstMuseum Lenningen Germany, Getty Center, Vasari Futurist Collection Sicily, Heckscher Museum, American Craft Museum, Hobelix Libreria, UWO Weldon Library Ontario, Otten Collection, Univ of Delaware, Chiessi Performance Archive Italy, Jean Brown Archive, Franklin Furnace Archives, Braun Collection Germany, Robert Scott Small Library SC, Cozzani, Nebbia e Nuvollone, Malfatti, & Bonotto Collections, Museo Del Volo Padova Italy, Watari collection Tokyo, Umbrella Archive CA, El Archivero Mexico, Vancouver Art Gallery, Swedish Archive of Artist Books, Art Institute of Chicago Flaxman Library, Harvard U collection.

For Regina Vater teaching university in Brasil

I’ve organized for your reference- there are hundreds I love-they all relate to each other in the following categories: All Experimental and non-commercial

Time based performance actions (various media)

Baskets, also used as hats as casual performance

*Bush dialogs with SSW, large panels on cloth, prints, perfs, book

*Eat Your Hat, month perf crocheting hats set as food at table, My skin of myself & I eat hats.

*Feeling my hands”: first done in month long ’84 Looking at Carrot, used for Ear Inn poetry performance with Sari Dienes, book ed of 25.

*Eating miners’ lettuce in the burn, series self foto behind an apron reaching down like giraffe, Pender Island Vancouver BC, ‘94

*Earth Air Fire Water Disquieting seeds-variations, Dowling, 

Messina, Hobelix, first done as self-foto during Carrot perf Komoka Ontario next to a highway

*Finding tree root flower of my birth, 2005, cast with paper, self foto with root

*Fingerprint enlarged to 2 rooms + painting as plan for show, performance to take back one’s fingerprint on the universe, SuperSkyWoman book pull out page, pull & play, solo show, Firenze outdoor stage

First Online Art Com S.F. CA-newsworthy keyboard images October1991 11pp.

*Framed news of day set high in trees 1961

50-50 for Duchamp action+three Canadian artists on Saturna Island-book 

*LAM &Carrot- perf actions poems write-overs actions book ed 25

4’33” recording, Hops proj. commissioned sound work Steiermark

Loops and Knots –perf & book 

Piano actions –Sandra, Vienna piano cutting perf & my operas FAMLI-CHGallery - Ontario, Messina piano in tree, cleaning earth, wheat grows, video on harvestworks site.

Pollination of SSW, in SSW book and show Genova italy, Gallery Onetwentyeight NYC ‘98

*Refugee pc in CT-immigrantness

*Seeking Water-Self foto representation

*Setting Table Action on Cocktail party painting ‘65

Skywoman discovery 1991-95, lineage in book, Radical Food

*So Tired, Canada

*Splining the infinite bottom line-primal places

SuperSkyWoman actions- Da-da da stakes, Sandra Gering gallery…

Ecological/political community-based projects

Long lineage of Giving Nature its own voice in my work

Worms, Bird Music, talking with nature

*9/11 in butter action in my studio, recreated in Italy, Kultur site

*Arboretum Queriies-Asking Nature-

Austrian flag actions

Bean slit fotos(Carlo P)

Broken glasses found collection

Bush SuperSkyWoman dialogs

Bush Amazon woven 14-foot shawl 1991 to calm president-indigenous practice

Butterfly in genetic corn- action Italy, poem

*Chakra readings- drawings

*Dead-on-Arrival (DOA) 

Duchamp- Coco as Mona Lisa la Chimera, Ray as Mona Lisa

-Article by Mark block

Elevator pc Art in General sound mix Harvestworks with Al 

Food-self fotos, many series, actions, books, shows

Four-leaf clovers collecting

Framing reality

*Full moon event Casa Malaparte- Rosanna Chiessi, fluxus

*Fun of Fun Italy recycling actions-Matisse dance around my

9/11 butter installation with found nature

Gene Splicing- pull out chromosomes over texts

*Healing-“Let’s Perm” 3 SSW days at Venice Biennale with Italian healers

*Hello health-Corallo Napoli show 2005- 4 floors

*Hops works-the dreaming-the shoe found-the farmers-the 

painting with paper-the big arch over road-hopfield

sounds-the war room- installation Gallery Klinger

Austria-the book-Dream Bow revisited in Italy, SFAI

Iron on mushroom and silkscreen birdsong pieces, even a coverlet for a collector

Leaves love: for Jasa writing on leaves, and pc for Congelo

Masks from nature-webs-sand, to wear, shows

*Minnow trust-at River Spirit Arkansas - self foto

*No-More-Water pieces -over the years, Dowling College gallery NY, Messina

Nuclear pcs & poems- inulclear potatoes, mops, books

Raisins Berlin new marterials, zeroing in pattern from 1965

Salt/earth-60X80meters, replacing, rakings, rice falling+Le Onde show

*Seed Music window piece Galleria dell Occhio NYC, installations Italy

Stairway to paradise inverted, The __Reader

Subterranean paper panels- Show in a Serra

*Talking medicine Wheels- Mt. Tremblant

Tree actions-

*Turtle medicine wheels

Umbrella parts collecting

Visioning life systems 2003, permaculture life systems 1992

Windo©Peace at Sohozat living in window

Women Studio Workshop event in sprouts

*Wild Feet-Impermanence project Vianello, +Exit Art

*Writing on leaves-RE Italy

*You Are Poetry-Ground Zero- day giving away hundreds of poems to neighborhood businesses and service people, coming to terms with my injuries 9/11.

  

Concepts Ideas Used: Serious listening to Play with chance correlative consciousness, improv and invention, paying concentrated attention, living it.

Bleach-Things we pay for, thinking white, dead lakes, monoculture…

*Body Books- Body skin pcs shown Dowling & book

*Bye Buy- pcs 50+50, Tamara Lai works for “Sacrifice”

*Bush Zen sitzen -my body calming bush- large ptings & Chance Actions- Cracked brick, Pulp Pool pieces, tape

from shelves, holes in wood

Correspondence actions- Walkway1982 CHA, PK House, 

Ray J, Foot Sq Space mailings show

Copyright legs, poems

*Cuttings- from 1979-present Alison Knowles, BT Smith…

DOA 1983 RE, 1994 BMCC, Women & Nature, Safe Kill

Dream Giveaway-Real Artways- 200 dreams-installations

Freedom Wall-1980 using holes in my walls

*Future of Hands and Feet-HI Video with Sandra Semchuk

Hammocks-life size

 denim & jeans

 matrimonial

 shrunken flax hammock+ ties (stolen by organizer of show- Grumman Corp)

 words to lie in

 enter & fly with web feet & hands

 mentalita’ dell aredamento with two square watermelons

 hip hop spirit double hammock

green replacement piece with ties to hold in

two hammocks stacked-Arnfels Austria

Hammocks under appletree Sandra stuffing apples under bathing suit                 

*Health-cakra drawings, looking inside myself in piano, SSW

Dialogs, TIKYSK books

Musics Instruments sound pieces-gongs rainsticks, 

shakers, strummers, Matisse Dances

performed+ Alison Knowles with my sounding paper pillows & instruments, College of new Rochelle

She stole my idea ten years later for Drawing Room

I Ching – Umbrella throws

*It- Rockland Center for the Arts perf - Wall St Gallery LI

Swinging chairs U of Michigan installation Remade from“It”

*Kicking up the bottom line- show gallery 128 also timebased,  coins fall out of the dollar

Monuments for Intimate Use-exhibition-book-separate pcs.

Music Rooms- Messina, other shows & proposals

Pull and play action-painting, installations Genova Italy, in book

Radical Food- Manifesto, Vienna’s Kunstkanzlei, GreenMuseum

Safe Kill-words in carrots -giving DOA to others- Dick Hggins

Seeking Sustenance- self fotos- Vienna magazine article

Short sight- Kultur site dialogs & visuals+ in book

Skin-1984 project sent to 12 artists use & perform actions

*Substitute Abundance- self fotos, book

SuperSkyWoman- Peggy Guggenheim pics mom & me perf

SSW dialogs, many actions, shows, book

Tables in paper, galls, wine holding pocket tablecloth

TIKYSK born and introduced by critic Rinaldi

*Unframed Intelligence- concept that gives nature power

food on face Window pcs, Eating Tofu 7 pointed 

stars, metal boots in a reddened landscape-Attitude Art

Yarn/string writings & actions- Yarn Fuck, simple movement of familiar yarn when cut, making image that mirrors life- rifles on wall- yarn hangings Banff, Vienna, Crochet pieces as drawings in space

Concepts Ideas - drawings for

Guggenheim yarn throw nest- moving up & down the spiral till filled in

Collaborations:

Congelo (=Coco+ Angelo Ricciardi) projects & performances- Libro Di, Book of Water

*Artline, Birthday Johns, MOMA edition, *Leafletting

 Since 200-present-ongoing & artist books

*Golf “my town” -projections outside for 3 months

Self-Representation Agric -1958-present

Jane Doe-Kultur site zany actions and dialogs

*Rita D-book for Petit 100 Monkeys- poems

Anselm Hollo 10 howls for sweet fifteen and I Ching

RJ collaborations-boxes-paper works-letters-Ray tel. Calls-

How to Draw a Bunny- am in the movie

Leiss video for Ray J “Connections” am in the movie

Luc-“Cornucopia”, talking mask, score & postflux booklet

*Roberto Scala- lemon art 

Sassu-Worn contagion- in many Biennales 

Karenina- Global Poetry Day 2002

*Kohtopa Mir- Russian- peace Office

Rol -writings about art-NY reporter for art

Biennales & Festivals:

Bunker Project, Butterfly in genetic corn field poem    

London Biennal-Draw__-Drawing

I Sapori guide-Artways of Thinking guide/performances

Istanbul Biennale

*Mexican experimental poetry festival (Congelo)

*Spain festival Copliandia

SSW perf all day 2X Venice Biennale with powerful italian 

healers

4 Other Venice Biennale contributions, Markers, 

Wandering Library, poetry events, Peggy Guggenheim Museum Fluxus event

Art residencies:

2008, & 2019 Emily Harvey Foundation, Venezia

1996 Djerassi, my Ms: Where Dead and Warm meet- residency as writer  +time based paper burials 

1999 SuperSkyWoman Let’s Perm, Venice Biennale, for Oreste 

*2001, Markers Banners Project, Venice Biennale, Israel, Hungary, for Int’l Artists Museum

2003, Markers 4 “The Wandering Library”, Venice Biennale, For Int’l Artists Museum

2000, Banff- Tree installation/View a public art project-studio changes daily 

1993, Harvestworks recording studio time, URL site crated 

*2002 SFAI -9/11 residency- bear-zebra-chakra installations

1998,99,2000 Oreste- Matera, Montescalioso Cena+performance 85 people, artists working in the territory

Interactiv Books: *some published- my most innovative work! using

Bioregional - Zen - art content, one book involves others in collaboration to be made into a sculpture by cutting and folding pages to create a circle:

Predates the Fresh Cuts books of 2018-2020

correspondence events & books

*Pollock Krasner House- 2003 Coco RJ Full moon teary eyes club mtg & book

Laburnum poison tree installation, Prison Walks, Tender wash rocks, Magic Cloth

Action books &Project books

*Small Italian Opera italy merging loops & knots found with huge procession of paper through towns & poems about loss of enemies

*6 Dances for Paper Piano, perf at FAMLI Museum with red paper pool & black piano pulp wet offerings, poetry in motion

*KNEE (GINOCCHIO), Porto Dei Santi Press, Loiano, Italy August 2000 used as basis for Bush Paintings 2004-present

URL Sites 

Tamara Lai site http://tell-a-mouse.be/sacrifice/terre/Terra.htm

Kultur site http://www.van.at/howl/track/jane/ all my Jane Doe pieces for the site

Harvestworks residency grant & music piece & site works

Agricola de Cologne 

http://www.le-museedivisioniste.org/exhibitionhall/2002/edition05/cocoself.Htm

http://www.nmartproject.net/cur/mirror/index.html

Karenina *You Are Poetry

Cuscino per Sognare www.uncuscinopersognare.it

FFFO Fluxus http://xoomer.virgilio.it/n.waugh/secretfluxus/secretflux1.html

Art Magazines published pcs

New Observations 116, Artists on Art, Fall 1997, “Art Flora Fora Yr Right Actions” 

Chapter page capsules for The Eternal Networks (U Calgary Press) 1995

New Observations 106, Bookworks, May 1995, “Handmade Paper Books”

Ear Magazine - two issue 4-page piece on image scores by Cage, Corner, Higgins, & Knowles played by Margaret Tan, 1983-4.

Older series: 50’s-70’s

Paintings sculptures, sandcasts, pastels, cray-pas, prints, drawings,

*I am woman series 

*breast series-Heckscher Museum Show 

*under water series- done as correlative unconscious knowledge 

*animal man series- prints and sculptures in stone

*cat vigil series-pastels *peacock series *large poem series

lists  from 90’s very active period

Sounding instruments in paper- long lineage

Cuscino per sognare Rosanna

Rosanna projects in cavriago- guitar

Paper Skin on my body took shape of me

Dream shakers, pillow & coverlet -Japan

*Corallo Napoli show- mapping clearcut stumps & Vesuvius, SSW dialogs, turtle made from packaging paper, burl wood sounding instruments

*Matisse Dance-Cookie cutters

*Pull & play paintings (book SSW)

*Wax melt action, iron-ons

*Local Action Finding Balls & hitting tree for twigs, Hudson River photos

*Forest pcs, clearcut photos They Give Us They Take Away long poem for Quileutes

*John cage meetings, making his 70 Bday with pistachios in paper, then he had Bernie Toale make food slices in paper for him

*My pcs about Ray J in books

*My book published for Ray J Cutesie Pi

*Performance audio taped with flutes italy for Charlotte Moorman to give her - photos stolen by Italian artist Kurt Hoffer

*Holes in wall strips on holes in wall 1981

Ray Johnson/ New York Times

	Randy Kennedy's New York Times Article on Ray Johnson is Now Online Ray Johnson's Art World On view through January 16 Open tomorrow, January 10, 11-5
	Randy Kennedy's New York Times article Always on His Own Terms: Ray Johnson Defies Categories 20 Years After His Death is now online (text below). The article will appear in the Arts & Leisure section of the paper this Sunday, January 11. Ray Johnson's Art World is on view at Richard L. Feigen & Co. through January 16. Hours: Saturday, January 10, 11-5 Monday-Friday, 10-6 ALWAYS ON HIS OWN TERMS Ray Johnson Defies Categories 20 Years After His Death By Randy Kennedy, The New York Times January 8, 2015 Twenty years ago next week, the artist Ray Johnson jumped off a low bridge in Sag Harbor, N.Y., and backstroked placidly out to sea. Two teenage girls saw him plunge into the frigid water and tried to alert the police, but when they found the station closed they went to see a movie instead, a detail many of Mr. Johnson’s friends said would have delighted him. Why he took his life at the age of 67 — when he was healthy, had money in the bank for the first time and was one of the most revered underground artists of the last half of the 20th century — is a question none of those friends have been able to answer. (The poet Diane di Prima wrote angrily: “I can’t imagine what you thought you were doing/what was the point of jumping off that bridge/after so many years of playing it cool.”) But in many ways Mr. Johnson conducted his death exactly as he had conducted his life and his work — enigmatically, defiantly on his own terms and with an intense privacy that somehow coexisted with a compulsively public persona. Mr. Johnson heralded several art movements, almost simultaneously. He was making work that looked like Pop in the 1950s, years before his friend and sometime rival Andy Warhol did. He was a performance artist before there was a term for such a thing. He mined ground later occupied by Conceptual art (whose pretensions he loved to razz: “Oh dat consept art,” says a figure in one of his collages.) And he was the father of mail art, spreading his collages and Delphic text works through a vast web of fellow artists, friends and complete strangers, making him a one-man social-media platform for a pre-Internet age. But every time mainstream recognition approached, Mr. Johnson — who lived as frugally as a monk and played the art world’s holy fool — seemed to dance away. Courted in the 1990s by the pinnacle of commercial acceptance, the Gagosian Gallery, he turned even that courtship into farce by demanding a million dollars each for collages then selling in the four-figure range; they’ve since advanced only into five figures. “He was a guerrilla fighter against materialism and fame, and in a sense he’s still fighting today,” said Frances F. L. Beatty, president of Richard L. Feigen & Co., the gallery that represents Mr. Johnson’s estate. But the art world may be finally starting to conquer Mr. Johnson’s will to resist it. A spate of books, exhibitions and museum acquisitions has come along in recent months, as his work has been discovered, yet again, by a generation of younger artists, like Matt Connors, Hanna Liden, Adam McEwen and Harmony Korine. This time, as money and power loom ever more powerfully in art circles, it seems to be Mr. Johnson’s role as a heroic-comic Bartleby that makes him particularly attractive to younger artists. But the shape-shifting ways in which he operated outside art’s normal channels — through the post office, street performances and artist’s books — also resonate for 21st-century artists whose work fits uneasily into the conventions of museums and galleries. Continue reading the main story Performa, the performance-art biennial, is organizing a tribute to Mr. Johnson for its 2015 iteration, which takes place in November. One aspect will be the dissemination — through ads, mailings and websites — of Johnson material, like a silhouette of his profile that he mailed out during his lifetime and asked people to alter and send on. The idea, said RoseLee Goldberg, Performa’s founder and director, is to stimulate a similar kind of free-form exchange now, online, on paper, and through other means, with Mr. Johnson as presiding spirit. “We want to start it very early, so it will have time to grow extra arms and legs and heads,” she said. As correspondent and collagist, Mr. Johnson was manically prolific. Even now, bins, binders and file folders full of unseen and largely unstudied material reside in closets — and an unused bathroom — at the East 69th Street townhouse of the Feigen gallery, “the Ali Baba’s cave of Ray’s archive,” as Ms. Beatty calls it. (Some of that work is on display in a show at the gallery through Jan. 16, “Ray Johnson’s Art World.”) Waiting recently for a visit from curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who were interested in seeing some Johnson works for acquisition, Ms. Beatty flipped on a closet light to show floor-to-ceiling stacks of light-blue archival boxes. “You could happily, as far as I’m concerned, spend the rest of your life right in here,” she said. (A small army of doctoral students and scholars is indeed at work now sorting through his vast output.) Raised in a working-class family in Detroit, Mr. Johnson hit the ground running as an artist before he was out of his teens. In 1945, he ended up at Black Mountain College, the Modernist hothouse near Asheville, N.C., where he studied with Joseph Albers and Robert Motherwell and began friendships with John Cage, Jasper Johns and the sculptor Richard Lippold, with whom he was romantically involved for many years. After moving to New York and working as a studio assistant to the painter Ad Reinhardt, he began making works that he called “moticos” — possibly an anagram of the word “osmotic” — filled to overflowing with the pop-culture imagery from magazines, advertising and television that was starting to saturate society. Elvis Presley and James Dean surfaced repeatedly, like twin deities, and Mr. Johnson often took this work to the streets, displaying it on sidewalks and in Grand Central Terminal to generally perplexed passers-by. “Some people just didn’t get it, and other people like me thought he was an absolute genius,” said the painter James Rosenquist, with whom Mr. Johnson corresponded for years, often asking him to forward mailed artworks on to Willem de Kooning. “Sometimes I did what he asked and sometimes I just couldn’t part with them,” Mr. Rosenquist said, adding: “I really miss him because I accumulate all these strange things that I’d like to mail him, but I can’t because he’s not there.” Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story Influenced by ideas of chance and Zen Buddhism, Mr. Johnson came to develop a hieroglyphic-like language in which image and word melted into each other, a language so complex it cried out not for curators but military code-breakers. William S. Wilson, one of Mr. Johnson’s closest friends and a leading scholar of his work, recalled the almost religious gravity with which Mr. Johnson viewed not only making art but also putting it into the world. Mr. Wilson once drove Mr. Johnson to see the publisher Harry Abrams, who was interested in buying work. Mr. Johnson emerged from Mr. Abrams’s office in a fury with his briefcase of collages, Mr. Wilson said, “and flung himself on my lap crying because Abrams had asked him to throw in a 13th collage for free if he bought a dozen, as if Ray was selling eggs.” Of course, such a stance meant that developing a market for Mr. Johnson’s work during his lifetime was next to impossible, and in many ways his critical stature still suffers because of this. “He kind of landed by default in the book and ephemera world, and to a large extent that’s really where his work has been living,” said Brendan Dugan, owner of the NoHo bookstore and gallery Karma, which organized an exhibition of late Johnson work last fall. Mr. Dugan said he had been drawn to Mr. Johnson in part because of his avid following among younger, punk-influenced artists but also those whose work seems to have little affinity with Mr. Johnson’s, like Mr. Connors, an abstract painter who is featured in “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” on view now at the Museum of Modern Art. In an email, Mr. Connors said: “I am always very excited by artists who create their own very specific codes, languages and grammars. He’s speaking his own language and talking to and about specific people, but he also loves to share it with you.” The effect is “kind of like a queer and gossipy downtown Joseph Beuys.” For the show at Karma, Mr. Dugan was allowed to pore over reams of paper works in the Feigen archive, made by Mr. Johnson mostly in the last decade of his life, “and what I saw was a total discovery to me, because a lot of it was very raw and very punk,” he said. “Here was this guy in his 60s, and he’s still up to it, to the very end, pulling in new material from the culture and making this very weird stuff that feels very contemporary now.” Ms. Beatty, who struggled for years to get Mr. Johnson to agree to a major exhibition at the Feigen gallery, remembered that he called her three days before he died. “And he said, ‘Listen, Frances, I’m planning to do something big and after that, you’ll finally be able to do your show.’ And I had no idea what he was talking about, but I thought maybe he was actually giving in, after playing cat and mouse for so long. “Well, of course, little did I know, and that’s how it always was with Ray — how little did we know,” Ms. Beatty said, adding, “It was a lived-for-art life, 100 percent, all the way to the end.”