Ray Johnson's Robin Gallery: Queer publicity network as counterpublic

In the mid-1960s, the artist Ray Johnson circulated publicity for an imaginary gallery that he called the Robin Gallery. A pun on the Reuben Gallery, where the first happenings took place, I contend that Johnson’s Robin Gallery was a virtual happening, designed to disrupt the instrumentalization of communication networks with queer viral tactics. As the press had begun to sensationalize the happenings and commercial galleries were displacing the experimental spaces that had originally staged these events, Johnson’s deployment of art world marketing commented on the commodification of New York’s downtown scene and the role of publicity in the process. Furthermore, the artist’s elusive publicity was designed to resist the policing of dissident sexualities as well as emergent forms of social control in the nascent network society of 1960s America. Examined in this context, I argue that Johnson’s Robin Gallery produced a counterpublic through queer modes of being and belonging. With advertisements, announcements, and publicity stunts, Johnson creatively sidestepped both censorship and commodification, while framing identity as mutable and multiple yet modulated by the networks in which it operates.