“When I write about Ray [Johnson]’s art in relation to his life, at least two massive problems emerge:

1) To look at a part of a collage and trace it to its past causes the wholeness of the collage to disintegrate, and each portion to lose that part of its meaning which is its bearing upon the other parts as Ray arranged them. One can have the work of art, or one can have its sources. In tracing the work to its sources it is lost, because as analysis disintegrates the whole into parts, the parts lose their meaning, which is the bearing of part upon part in the construction of a unified work of art.

2) To look at a part of a work of art by Ray Johnson, and to follow from it toward his drowning, is to subsume the work in a larger whole, a final act of his life. But the images in the collages are hypothetical, and the work of art is more than just material or physical. It exists as it is perceived at a certain focal plane, and its wholeness is an aesthetic illusion, available to none of the sciences, and probably to no animal but humans. But Ray’s drowning is not hypothetical, it is categorical. While as an event it gathers many images which Ray has used in his art, and which he has acted upon in his life – hanging out around water – it is not a work of art or an aesthetic illusion, and it is not hypothetical.”

(William S. Wilson, With Ray: The Art of Friendship, p. 30.)