“Ray Johnson’s Anti-Archive: Blackface, Sadomasochism, and the Racial and Sexual Imagination of Pop Art”

My essay reconsiders the racial and sexual politics of Pop Art through the work of Ray Johnson. The first part of my essay revisits José Esteban Muñoz claim that “next to no people of color populate the world of Pop Art, as either producers or subjects. Representations of people of color are scarce and, more often than not, worn-out stereotypes.” Instead, I argue that “New York’s most famous unknown artist” Ray Johnson imagines Pop as an almost exclusively black art, one whose producers and subjects populate the world of Pop Art as a majority and utopically strive to eliminate the forces of racism. In particular, I attend to Johnson’s claim that his “rabbits and portraits” are in “blackface.” The second part argues that sadomasochism is a particularly important kind of blackface for Johnson (one enacted in the wearing of skin-like black leather). Following Elizabeth Freeman who argues that sadomasochism’s historical consciousness opens a space for reworking historical trauma, I argue that the explicitly sadomasochistic themes of Johnson’s work imagine a rebuttal to and reconfiguration of the racist exclusionary forces of the art world.

This visit is co-sponsored by The Department of Art, the Queer Studies Research Workshop, the Leslie Lohman Queer Art Lecture Series, and the H.I. Modernisms Research Workshop.