Miriam Kienle on Ray Johnson, Mail Art, Censorship & Artistic Ownership

In this episode, Miriam Kienle, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Kentucky School of Art and Visual Studies, discusses her work on the artist Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson. Among other things, she describes Johnson's studies at Black Mountain College and relationship with Andy Warhol, as well as his invention of "mail art" or "correspondence art" in the early 1950s. She explains how the mail facilitated both communication and censorship, especially of sexual minorities, and how Johnson used the mail to establish artistic networks in which he circulated his "polysemic" collages, which he referred to as "moticos." She also discusses Johnson's complicated relationship to the art market and his contestation of the concepts of "authorship" and "the work."Keywords: gender and sexuality, critical theory, new media, curatorial studies, digital humanities Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.