Abstract
Deploying various forms of art world communication (commercial, bureaucratic, and interpersonal), Ray Johnson made a portrait of the curator Samuel J. Wagstaff during the mid-1960s that unworked the singular and unified image of his subject and emphasized identity as contingent upon a person’s position in their social network. Although many have noted the networked character of Johnson’s mail art practice—wherein participants were connected to each other with and through continually circulated collaged correspondence—few have explored it in relation to contemporary network theory and none have examined how it relates to portraiture of the period. By analyzing the remains of Johnson’s portrait of Wagstaff housed at the Archives of American Art, I argue that Johnson transformed the genre by representing personhood as an embodied and open system that resists discrete categorization and total disclosure, particularly regarding gender and sexuality.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2020
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1086/711971
Related Content
An accompanying video is available online from the journal.
Repository Citation
Kienle, Miriam, "Facing Others: Ray Johnson’s Portrait of a Curator as a Network" (2020). Art and Visual Studies Faculty Publications. 9.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/art_facpub/9
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Archives of American Art Journal, v. 59, no. 2.
© 2020 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.
The copyright holder has granted the permission for posting the article here.