When Ray Johnson killed himself at the age of 67, the air of mystery surrounding his personality, life, and art only thickened.
Edward M. Gómez
Edward M. Gómez is a graphic designer, critic, arts journalist, and author or co-author of numerous books about art and design subjects, including Le dictionnaire de la civilisation japonaise, Yes: Yoko Ono, and The Art of Adolf Wölfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation. He has written for the New York Times, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, Salon, Reforma (Mexico), the Japan Times (Japan), and other publications. Edward is the senior editor of Raw Vision, the London-based, international, outsider-art magazine. He is based in New York and London.
Posted inArt
Olivia Munroe’s Art Goes Mystic
A funny thing happened to Munroe’s works on their way to finding physical form.
Posted inArt
An Artist Who Conveys Messages from the Dead
Self-taught artist George Kornegay created found-object environments for communing with the spirit world.
Posted inBooks
In Venice, With That Sinking Feeling
The book Migropolis: Venice, edited by Wolfgang Scheppe, examines the migrant and tourist crises afflicting Italy’s fabled “water city.”
Posted inMusic
Yoko Ono’s Music of the ’70s is Back
Three new re-releases showcase Ono’s technical innovations and vocal range, from screams, yelps, wails, grunts, and guttural bursts to ballads, Latin beats, and the blues.
Posted inArt
An Artist Couple’s Domestic Gesamtkunstwerk
The outsider artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein and his wife, Marie, created a miniature universe in their bungalow in a Milwaukee suburb.
Posted inArt
The Sexual Ambiguity of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls
An exhibition sheds new light on the Chicago recluse’s most provocative images.
Posted inArt
Minoru Onoda, Circle Master from Japan’s Gutai Group
Onoda daydreamed about the power of his dots and circles to poke a defiant thumb in the eye of “the world we are now living in.”
Posted inBooks
Molly Nesbit Chases the Big Ideas
“I’m interested in how ideas function in the world, in questions of practice, not just theory,” Nesbit told me. “I’m not interested in theory per se, but rather in thinking.”
Posted inArt
In Hiroyuki Doi’s Tiny Circles, Expanding Miniature Universes
Doi has written that “using circles to produce images” provided him with “relief from the sadness and grief” he felt following his brother’s death. Since that time, his circle motif has alluded to such themes as “the transmigration of the soul, the cosmos, the coexistence of living creatures, human cells, human dialog and peace.”
Posted inArt
Toshio Yoshida Emerges from Gutai’s Grasp
Even for viewers familiar with the diversity of art forms cooked up by the Gutai artists and the attitudes that informed them, much of what is on display in this Yoshida show may come as a surprise.
Posted inArt
Franklin Furnace at 40: Still Radical After All These Years
For Martha Wilson and her collaborators at the Franklin Furnace Archive in New York, the avant-garde spirit is alive and well, and as relevant as ever.