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Imagine a perfect grid, like an ideal net. And then imagine pressures on that grid, like something pulling the grid of the net into different shapes, with varying distances among the nodes of the grid. Imagine a fluctuating recticulum, like a net on top of a pool of water. The ?School? of New York Correspondance School arose within a field, then separated to become its own field, and then spun off independent fields which are still spinning. For field, imagine a swimming pool of water, where a splash at one end reverberates and vibrates to the farther end. I think of the mail-art network as a field of rapports. Ray's early mail-art, as a network, was constructed first by people from within his field of friends and acquaintances?-the self-selected people who decided to participate. So he began with the people in his life with whom he enjoyed aesthetic rapports, but then the field and/or network became independent of Ray Johnson, and what happened was really no longer up to him. While he continued to extend the field his rapports to include more and more people, the independent field became fully autonomous, and tended to leave him behind, if only because he participated only on his own terms, which no longer governed the network. The autonomy is shown in the fact that Ray, as a founder of his network within his field, did not understand or appreciate what the network became when it developed itself and organized itself into an objectively separate and autonomous field. Ray was sensitive to Oedipus, as in his picture of Elvis as Oedipus, and indeed, Oedipal themes arise in the history of mail-art. Contemporary mail-artists understandably may reject him as a ?father? of the mail-art they do, and French mail-artists may find inconceivable his paternity of anything as chic as their ensembles. But they do so within a network that has a ?family resemblance? to Ray?s field of communications, his mail-art network.
However netting a Dragonfly may be a different story.</HTML>
