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THE NEW YORK TIMES
"Review: Recalling Ray Johnson, a Pioneer of Mail Art"
By Ken Johnson

In the 1950s and ’60s, Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a busily active and influential Fluxus-type participant in the New York art world. After he was mugged at knifepoint in 1968, he left the city for the relative seclusion of Long Island, ultimately settling in Locust Valley, where he devoted himself with nearly obsessive fervor to mail art: sending, receiving and recycling usually small-scale works on paper via the United States Postal Service.

Along with 10 of his witty, densely layered collages, this small, engrossing show features dozens of altered versions of several basic images or “templates,” which Mr. Johnson mailed to friends and strangers, including many well-known artists, asking them to change the image and return it to him. One template is an outline of his own profile, to which Ad Reinhardt added small penciled letters at the lips, spelling “silence.” Chuck Close turned it into his own self-portrait by means of gridded fingerprints.

Another template is a small cartoon face with the instructions “Add Hair to Cher,” which one clever unknown sender altered by adding the letters “e” and “s” to Cher, spelling M. C. Escher’s surname. Other templates include “Bill de Kooning’s Bicycle Seat,” “Philip Guston’s Bat Tub” and a photocopied photograph of Arthur Rimbaud.

This year, the arts group Performa initiated a posthumous continuation of Mr. Johnson’s enterprise, inviting people to mail in altered templates like “Andy Warhol Head” and “Add Hair to Cher.” Hundreds of these often amusing variations can be viewed in binders at Feigen. They leave you to wonder what Mr. Johnson might have done with social media had he lived into the Internet Age.