Ray Johnson's "nothings" and queer cultural production
 

Ray Johnson proposed "nothings" as an alternative to "happenings"
 
"an attitude as opposed to a happening"
 
José Esteban Muñoz refers to this as a "queer utopian practice"
 
His analysis: "This performative insistence on 'the nothing' (the not there) over the presentness of the happening (what is there) is both queer and utopian. Utopia is always about the not quite here, or the notion that something is missing. Queer cultural production is both an acknowledgment of the lack which is endemic to any heteronormative rendering of the world, and a building, a 'world making,' in the face of that lack"
 
Kienle notes also that there is "something [...] antagonistic about these events," that they are "searching yet oppositional in tone"

> from Miriam Kienle's Queer Networks: Ray Johnson's Correspondence Art (2023)

> tagged with #homosexuality, #utopia, #art

> created June 30, 2026 at 12:28:29 PM


> part of unfinished everything


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unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell

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