I must have met Bill Wilson, one of the most lucid and most challenging conversationalists, some time in the early 1990s. His career as a fiction writer was apparently behind him, despite his novel and collection of short stories (respectively Birthplace, North Point Press, 1982, and Why I Don’t Write Like Franz Kafka, Ecco Press, 1975) having been published by prestigious publishers and well received. He would have been just rekindling his sideline in art criticism, mainly dormant since 1978. In the ‘90s he published incisive and original writings on the work of Mel Bochner, Dan Flavin, and Eva Hesse, among others, not to mention Matisse and Picasso. The latter eliciting from him the reflection that “a problem with criticism and scholarship is that people think they know what a wall is…yet not see what a wall is for Picasso, who took pictures off walls, and who regarded the picture hook as the enemy of painting,” typical of his ruthless focus on overlooked material or rather phenomenological fundamentals. From 2000 through his death in 2016, his publications were almost exclusively about the work of his friend Ray Johnson. I can’t help wondering if his relative dearth of publications didn’t something to do with his having set himself a demand for rigor that not even he could satisfy. Anyway, there should have been more of his writing, which a more intelligent world should have required of him regardless of his diffidence. So you see why I was so happy when the admirable Siglio issued Frog Pond Splash: Collages by Ray Johnson with Texts by William S. Wilson—the texts, twenty-some-odd paragraphs, being drawn from both published and unpublished sources. Bill appears to have foreseen this book, though that may be an illusion generated by the shifter “these,” though perhaps he only ever imagined it as closed: “If these pages were bound into a book with hard covers, with its pages printed on two sides, the book qua closed book would seem to have an interior meaningfulness which meant more than the surfaces of material paper.” And despite their appearing as fragments, as if to match the fragments that make up the collages with which they are juxtaposed, Wilson’s notes here do follow a method: “allowing myself to be cryptic in order to allow you space to work out your own interpretations.” For me to sit with Bill’s brief enigmas as they concern Johnson turns out to be all the more illuminating in that I could never quite fathom his devotion to an artist whose work I have never been able to see as other than minor. I think what Bill says about Johnson the person speaks to the effect the art had on him: “With Ray, one either was spontaneous or one was not going to hold his interest…. I was hearing words used as I had never heard them used before…with the clearest focus on odd and intimate details which, the more they were seen in close-up, the more indeterminable or large in meaning they became.” He felt this art challenging its receiver (rather than the other way round): étonne-moi. His analytical intellect found unforeseen but welcome trial in Johnson’s synaptic leaps. As the book’s title suggests—it’s an extreme condensation of a poem by Bashō—Johnson’s “ideogrammic method” (to borrow Pound’s phrase) as a collagist had something in common with the technique of haiku, where the abutting signifiers open up what Andrea Zanzotto called “abysses, as unfathomable and inscrutable as they are irresistible,” or as Bill puts it, “the feeling…of trapdoor after trapdoor opening, and of me falling through into reality.”
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Frog Pond Splash: Collages by Ray Johnson with Texts by William S. Wilson, edited by Elizabeth Zuba, is published by Siglio, Catskill, New York, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.