Untitled (Soprano)

This work’s central circular form consists of collaged strips from a playbill for a performance of The Bald Soprano (1950), an absurdist play by Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco marked by disorienting non-sequiturs and circuitous dialogue. As a student at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1945 to 1948, Ray Johnson took part in similarly unconventional performances. By the mid-1950s, when he made this work, Johnson was living in New York and collaborating with artists working in experimental dance and theater. Untitled (Soprano)’s radiating collaged forms evoke such interdisciplinary influences, giving it a sense of dynamism that exists somewhere between the stillness of painting and the movement and fleeting quality of performance.