history and theory
Bill Wilson
history and theory September 01, 2001 03:56AM |
<HTML>This messageboard offers an opportunity for a novel kind of history. A history of mailart will be able to draw on comments about mailart posted by mailartists. To prime the pump, I want to suggest some themes for comments which are of interest now, but which might also be testimony for the future. Much of this note focusses on the concept of WORK in a work of art, and differences between work which constructs something positive, and labor which can both wear down machines and wear out people. In history some works of art have effaced every trace of the work, even labor, in the making of the art, while other art preserves signs, perhaps scars, of the process. Such differences are visible in mailart, which has a wide range from machine-made copies through to fingerprints (in a work by George Brecht).
A pattern can be discerned in which as people grow richer, they want more evidence of the hand-made, enjoying that other people are laboring for their pleasure, hand-knitting sweaters, hand-dipping candles, uncorking wine, or completing the cooking of a meal at the table in a restaurant which serves slow cuisine, not fast food. Sometimes a person as a gourmet can point to the fish or lobster to be killed and cooked to a specific quality, with the labor gratifyingly visible, rather unlike the potato products processed from dried potatoes in remote factories, one of many profitable methods of reducing the costs of labor, that is, of making fewer jobs for people. To be offended by hand-made lace, one has to know about the methods of production of hand-made lace, a theme beautifully handled by Katherine Ann Porter in her story, The Flowering Judas.
People labor on assembly-lines to make products that bear no traces of their hands, even as most commodities for sale in most stores bear no traces of the individual laborers or workers, hence can be discarded with no personal regrets. Those workers might well want to go country dancing later, and listen to singers who haven?t had the brogue or twang removed from their voices. Selling to ordinary working citizens so relies on generic products that the specific name of Randy Traywick, a name worth thinking about, was generalized to Randy Travis. The values of machine-like efficiency brush against mailart if it is sent to Avon, North Carolina, which was Kinnakeet until the United States Postal Service alphabetized the towns, changing Kinnakeet into Avon, and reducing The Cape to Buxton. In Maryland a town named for an Indian chief, Vinnacokasimmon, became Vienna, which inspired Berlin as the name of a nearby town, until World War II when Berlin became Berwyn. Postal addresses differ from websites, as when Ray Johnson drove to Intercourse, Pennsylvania, to mail something I?d rather not think about. A mailartist is inescapably involved in the nightmare of history, and cannot help choosing the qualities of his or her mailart as corrective responses, examples of the way events could be, should be, and would be, if only.
Stores that sell ?hand-made? crafts can be interesting, even dreamy, yet also awkward if one rejects the objects offered for sale, for that feels like rejecting the craftsperson. So many jobs entail labor that produces something bearing no trace of the worker that a hunger can be felt for objects which put the direct touch of another person into one?s hands, like buying vegetables from a farm-stand next to the garden. This year ?Home-grown? was generously interpreted by garden-stands in Maryland selling identical tomatoes from Illinois!
The technologies which conceal the methods and materials of the production of commodities obscure the real relations among people. A gold ring with a diamond has a history, and connects the owner?s life with many other lives, right down into gold-mines and diamond mines, and right up into international corporations unlikely to share profits with the workers, who lose the product of their labor because they cannot afford to purchase it. Even paper has its history, with harsh life-denying practices in a papermill described by Herman Melville in two stories, ?The Tartarus of Maids,? and ?The Paradise of Bachelors.? The first is about women, none of whom says a word, who make paper from old shirts ripped to shreds in a dusty factory. The second is about the men who wore those shirts, garrulous men in London, who use rag paper made from their castoff shirts by those wordless women coughing in that factory. Their cycle is not constructive feedback, it goes from wasted lives of young women to the lives of the men who obliviously exploit them.
Technologies offer illusions which feel like magic, thinking of magic as a technique that produces effects while concealing the methods and materials by which the effects are produced. Movies seem magical, which explains why Dziga Vertov made his great 1929 film about the materials and methods in the production of films, Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov?s film cuts through the ideology of films, showing a spectator the dozens of people whose work and labor are effaced in the final product. Anyone watching John Walter?s film about Ray Johnson, How to Draw a Bunny, isn?t put into a relation with Walter as a person, for like most films, it appropriately conceals the art, craft, work and labor of many people in the production of a movie. Yet note that an exception is made for the musician, Max Roach, who improvised an accompaniment to some scenes on his drums ? that is, another creative artist, not a regular worker. A film about Ray Johnson made by Lars Movin and Steen Moeller Rasmussen, Ray Johnson On-Line, collages telephoned interviews with John Willenbecher, Lawrence Weiner and other artists who do mailart. The filmmakers patch in snatches of old industrial-operation films about how mail is processed on machines operated by people. Those postal workers are generic, personages not personalities. They are seen but not heard in the film, unlike the artists who are heard but not seen. However Movin and Rasmussen also interviewed two postal workers who handled Ray Johnson?s mail in Locust Valley. At the time of filming, years after his drowning, they were amused still to be handling it. Thus their film about mailart shows the aesthetic activities in mailart in the foreground, yet with the technology and labor visible in the background, implying a significant difference between specifically working to make an object of mailart, and generically laboring in the post-office. Mailart activities are ineluctably individual, while the postal services are generalized until the point at which a postal employee hands over the mail. Ray, who lived hand-to-hand, once wrote that his new mailman ?was shy.?
A related point is that mailart, even if it perishes, preserves its radical individuality. Consider art displayed in museums. Typically museums display art of the same historical era, or of the same style, and sometimes with the same thematic content (variously interpreted). MoMA juxtaposed a painting in oil by Paul Cezanne, portraying a standing male in something like a bathing suit that reaches only to the waist, with a photograph of an adolescent boy in swim-trunks. The implication is that the work of two individual artists, working in two different media, can be brought to bear on a totality neither of them could have been aware of. Museums gather the work of idiosyncratic individuals under their large thematic umbrellas, demonstrating relations among works of art as those were thought about by the curators, not by the artists. Thus meanings can be imposed on most works of art by contexts. However I do not see how a particular incident, event or episode of mailart can be given meaning from outside, as though part of its meaning follows from how it belongs to someone else?s larger theoretical whole.
The process of mailart has not been, is not, and I think can never be, a totalizing process. The structure of Mailart is seriatim, with no totality in sight. A complementary thought is that a totality has a beginning, with possibilities; a middle, with probabilities; and an end, with necessary conclusions, like a dramatic action, and like life itself. However mailart seems always to return to the stage of possibilities, which is always to be at a beginning, or to be beginning all over again. Say that a person decides on a mailart ?object? that has achieved an aesthetic inevitability, with relations among parts that could not be otherwise. Mail that item to another mailartist, and the necessities become possibilities again, as the recipient is free to add, subtract, recompose, revise, and otherwise transform the received mailart, making a new work to be mailed away toward the possibility of being reworked yet again. Mailart constructs its possibilities as it goes, while retaining the open possibilities of the beginning throughout a process which cannot reach a conclusion. A complete, completable or completed system is as dangerous to freedoms as totalizing is. A large theoretical structure can aim toward completeness, as in closing down with the necessities, when nothing can be otherwise than it is, but such a structure risks self-exhaustion. Do not wish for certainty unless you are certain what you are asking for. The valid uncertainties of mailart are like an ideal process of justice in which, after one trial and judgment, spontaneously arise retrials and rejudgments. Mailart holds situations open and free, and not everyone wants that for you.
A painter can be like a player in an orchestra, with museums or galleries defining a subordinate place in the total orchestration. However, a mailartist, as a player in the field of mailart, is not even like a soloist in an orchestra. In mailart, there is no whole orchestra, there is no total orchestration, there cannot be a conductor, & there is not much of a score to follow. Rather than playing a solo, the mailartist is most fulfilled when giving an opportunity to another player, who may in reciprocity mail something that sets in motion the very person who set in motion that reciprocity. These reciprocities open themes of feed-back, in which effects affect causes. A system with feed-backs can achieve a steady-state self-governing and self-controlling system when an item of mailart sent by a person elicits the responsiveness of the recipient. Then sender and recipient can reverse into recipient and sender like two nodes within a fluctuating network, something like a nerve net: ?a diffuse network of cells that conducts impulses in all directions from the area stimulated? (American Heritage Dictionary). Any one mailartist is at the center of mailart, setting an individual tempo, going for high notes or low notes, perhaps like events in the brain, or in the ?endocrine orchestra,? which may be more like a conductorless orchestra warming up than anything Philharmonic. (Yes, I?m rereading Joseph Needham?s essay on the Fundamental Ideas of Chinese Science, in volume II of Science and Civilization in China, where I have borrowed terms to describe the structure of mailart activities for over thirty years).
Mailart is not unique because the work that goes into it is visible, but because mailart cannot be made with no traces of the effort that went into making and sending it. It has a person?s fingerprints all over it. Its arrival is already a meaning about activity, let?s call it the joy of work, as work to make a gift differs from labor to make a commercial product. The arrival of mailart is evidence of the laborers in the postal services, and it is handed over, or given, not to a passive spectator of art, but to another worker, a person whom the arrival of mailart sets in motion. At its best, a recipient becomes a sender, perhaps relaying something on paper as directed; maybe finding an apt place for a piece of paper, a stamp, a picture, that has been hanging around the desk for months. Reusing a mischievously decorated envelope becomes a kind of gift ? demonstrating the teaching that giving something away as a gift is the best way to possess it. Your desk may not always be yours, but your gift will always be your gift. Or, in a relation to the passage of time that painting can?t achieve, the transitoriness of experience feels less like a loss when a person can forward a paper to another mailartist, figuring that the image will be apt because of a shared reference. The reference in common is like a motif in a musical composition which turns back toward the origin of the theme, even while turning forward into an inventive, unpredictable variation of that theme.
So mailart brings with it an implied request to do something actively in response. A museum does not inherently give you an opportunity to do your work of responsiveness, person-to-person, but mailart invites and encourages you to do the work you want to do, and which, like biological functions, no one else can do for you. I don?t know if we have a word for an event which constructs an opportunity to do something you want to do, even if you don?t know what it is at first, but will find out what you are doing in the act of doing it. What you will be doing is acting within a peculiar structure of continuous possibilities. The arrival of much ordinary mail can close possibilities ? the bills must be paid. Business mail should be transparent in the sense that one reads through the material medium, maybe ink on paper, toward information and non-material ideas, and can discard the physical paper. But, contrarily, mailart is not transparent, it has a surface, it can have depths of interiorities, it can enlarge possibilities, and it can become new mailart. Not anything like the receipt of a final notice in the mail, actively arriving mailart opens possibilities limited only by one?s limitations. But even those limitations transpose into a style of one?s own. Insofar as the limits of one?s mailart are the limits of one?s world, mailart delineates a self-portrait. If you want to know who you are, ask your mailart. Maybe your post-person can tell you, or at least can tell your mail apart from your neighbor?s mail. Tony, recently retired, used to ring my bell and wordlessly hand me my mail, but with a lilt and a twinkle that told me he had been amused by something in the mail, and was pleased to be the one to deliver it to my door.
An interlude: A mailartist is in the best position to gauge the labor and/or work that has gone into an event of mailart. No professor is more expert in mailart, its theory and practice, than anyone who is actively mailing.
Mailart differs from most spectator or auditor arts in that it must be lived. Some conventional mail is useful, some is sweet or pleasing. Long ago Horace described poetry as useful and pleasing: utile et dulce. Genial mailart can arrive with a congeniality that can seem infectious. In times of plague letters were sometimes disinfected with vinegar to kill germs that might kill the recipient of the letter. Contrarily, the health of mailart is to inspire more mailart as an image of what events can be like. That is, the structure of mailart can be used as a model of qualities to look for in existence, and to hope for in experiences with other people.
One resemblance to games and to sports is that an idea or an image might be bounced back and forth ? in a volley of mailart exchanged over a postal network. However mailart, if a game, is a phantom game played without a net, in the sense of a net as imposed rules, and of a net as objective criteria of skill and achievement. Playing without a net, oblivious to external standards, is a method of discovering one?s immanent and self-set standards, while at least satisfying the rules and regulations of the postoffice, that is, playing their game. Games aren?t utilitarian, but they do have their uses, in the same combination of use with pleasure that is healthy for art.
Works of art can be kept alive by their usefulness in thinking and in feeling. Maybe the usefulness of celluloid film is at an end, yet some artists are even shooting in 8 and in Super-8, so the medium must still have something to say. I use art, and find it useful because it isn?t warped by practical utilitarian purposes. I grew up in a household and in a family in which people used quotations from music, dance, poetry, drama and anything else they could grab in the moment to explain, or to clarify, or to elaborate on a statement. My mother would use a few steps of tap, soft-shoe or the Charleston like words in a sentence, like a sentence in a paragraph, or like testimony in a trial. My father quoted Dylan Thomas and "King Lear" on his deathbed. In my messages on this Messageboard I use quotations from Robert Frost and from Wallace Stevens. Such use confirms the value of their art ? for I do not hold with the Kantian separation of pure art from use, positioning art as purposeful purposelessness or as purposeless purposefulness. Sometimes I even verify art: now that summer is almost over, the truth of Shakespeare?s line is confirmed: ?And summer?s lease hath all too short a date.? That lease is both the lease Summer has taken on the year, and the lease a person has signed to rent a place for the duration of a summer away from the city. I have verified the line as though it were an everyday proposition, and I confirm it by using it to see how it works.
I have used Shakespeare?s line, passing it along ? but here is another advantage of mailart, for now to be compared with the messageboard. From the tone of some messages on this messageboard, I feel that I may be quoting Shakespeare into an unsympathetic context wherein some resentful, rancorous and embittered person is going to damn Shakespeare, and probably castigate me, that public-enemy, a retired teacher who probably dampened creativity in his students, and who has reached his own dead-end. I cannot pick recipients on the messageboard, but I can write to someone privately, and perhaps insert lines from a poem. I can enjoy the feeling of anticipating that the recipient will enjoy receiving a communication, perhaps appreciate the poetry, and if not, will feel free to slip the lines into an envelope being aimed toward someone who might. Passing along a birthday present one doesn?t want, converting it into a gift to someone else, stands in contrast with passing along artists? stamps one has been given. I was once given a bottle of wine as a gift, the very bottle I had given to that person on an earlier holiday. Yet I have magnanimous mailart from the late David Cole, made shortly before he died, like someone?s last symphony, composed with a generosity of spirit that I use to remind myself of what is possible. David?s mailart is so beautiful that I might give it away.
Mailart awakens many themes of possessions, commodities, profits, and gifts. In the early 1990s Ray Johnson mailed to me an exquisite little box with a miniature ladder in it. A ladderman to his ear was a letterman, and a letterman was a mailartist. Written on the box were the words, ?Please send to Charlton Burch.? Charlton phoned me later to report that Ray had called him to learn if he had received the box. I was displeased not to be trusted, but understood that mailart from Ray had become confused with saleable commodities. Ray once sent material to a curator to be mailed to my son, Andrew Wilson (whom Ray phoned for a long conversation that evening before his drowning). The curator sent him, then two or three years old, photocopies, and wrote a letter explaining her moral obligation as a curator to preserve works of art. But actually, by extracting a product from a process, she had destroyed a work of art.
Some mailart can be like the children?s game of Telephone in which a message is whispered from person or person, altering in the process. In fact the very concept of mailart itself seems to undergo changes as it passes from person to person, and certainly from nation to nation. Yet surely mailartists are in the vanguard of living locally, while thinking and communicating globally. As the bumptious world is trampled flat by international corporations in the military-entertainment complex, aided and abetted by fast-food chains, that international leveling of local differences is shadowed by inter-national mailart. Even American mailart is not a global threat the way American corporations are.
As I write about work and labor, and about the usefulness of non-utilitarian mailart, I begin to wonder about the unhappiness within some unpleasant messages, here and elsewhere, on the Net. There is much to be unhappy about, but mailart? Say that someone has worked, or labored, for eight-hours of hourly wages. When that person turns away from the external world, toward mailart, or toward the Internet, that person?s back becomes a mirror reflecting the world that has been turned away from. The qualities of mailart, and the content of the messages, are reflections of the world ? not like imitations in a mirror, but in the way the positive of mailart is shaped by its negations of negative forces and abrasive qualities in mundane experience. Surely mailart has moral imperatives such as, Thou shalt not assault with anything in the mail. But what?s this problem with the Internet?
Any history or theory of mailart will benefit if mailartists would post statements about the meanings of their mailart in the sense of a positive activity, on an observable plane, that negates some of the obscurely felt negativities in experience. This messageboard is an absolutely new kind of evidence, a novel historical record, which should inspire a new kind of history. Two questions to think with are: 1) how is my mailart not like my labor and/or work?; 2) how are my labor and work not like my mailart? For extra credit, discuss among yourselves: how is working at mailart not like working under a boss? How are your relations with both mailartists and postal service workers different from your relations with workers and laborers in other work and in other jobs? How is mailart like cooking and serving a meal to a friend, more than like tending the fries-machine in Burger King? Can you read through the shapes, textures, and temporalities (the tempos and rhythms) of your mailart toward the socio-economic experiences you may be recoiling from?
Anyone mailing a postcard rather than an envelope, to save the cost of postage, is aware of economic determinisms, and already sees that the shape of mailart is an outline of economic forces. Such awareness of socio-economic themes could be extended into a description of how the positive of mailart is shadowed by the negatives of fairly ordinary existence within this culture. A mailartist must have one foot within this society, but can keep the other foot out of it. Who knows? Perhaps sending mailart is the best revenge on the systems which drain vitalities away -- using the impersonal power of the postal system to amplify one?s own powers. I am trying to encourage testimony about how the style of mailart is a further elaboration of the huge complex themes which are the dominant content of our lives. Is the mailart of a person who lifts crates of Orange Nehi all day different from the mailart of a piano teacher? And can someone help me? What damage has occurred to the spirit of the postal clerk who told me that I couldn?t put stamps on the envelope like that? Like what?, I asked her.
I am saying that the meaning of mailart includes the fact that it is not labor paid by the hour, that it is not exploitative buying and selling, and that, while it relies on technology, it does not share the aesthetic or ethic of technology ? to be efficient, economical and reliable. Mailart is not efficient; it is not economical in terms of financial accounts; and it isn?t predictable and regular as a machine like this computer should be. Mailart has little to do with other arts, or with other kinds of work or labor, yet has much to do as a constructed world. As a constructive world, mailart runs parallel to the actual world it tends to turn its back on ? that actual world of: 1) sometimes cynical and ironic art, more to be pitied than scorned; and 2) pointless, repetitive, and perhaps painful labor, like working the fries at McDonalds. Sorting mail in the postal service is an ordeal, but sorting mailart at home, even without intense tender loving care, can be constructive work that is a genial parody of repetitive labor that can induce breakdowns. The post office I often use now seats its clerks behind bullet-proof glass. The moment of handing over an envelope for weighing has lost its radiance.
I have taught writing fiction to many disheartened postal workers, many of them veterans of the War in Vietnam, some of them women, and all of them embittered and resentful in a way that stunned me. They described angry sessions in the men?s room, which seemed to be their complaint department. I am not astonished when post office employees go postal, but trust that mailartists are unlikely to. I am less sure about computer Networkers, some of whom seem to go incomputable, since their tone so often gets rancid. Surely their sorrows and pains are all too real, as they seem to want to make people feel as bad as they do ? which is a sort of communication, I guess. Yet if unpleasantness seems not to fit into mailart, or onto a messageboard about mailart, then those facts can be further evidence in trials of the meaning and value of mailart. I hope to learn about about mailart, the only way I can, person to person. And please, let no one mail me french fries.</HTML>
A pattern can be discerned in which as people grow richer, they want more evidence of the hand-made, enjoying that other people are laboring for their pleasure, hand-knitting sweaters, hand-dipping candles, uncorking wine, or completing the cooking of a meal at the table in a restaurant which serves slow cuisine, not fast food. Sometimes a person as a gourmet can point to the fish or lobster to be killed and cooked to a specific quality, with the labor gratifyingly visible, rather unlike the potato products processed from dried potatoes in remote factories, one of many profitable methods of reducing the costs of labor, that is, of making fewer jobs for people. To be offended by hand-made lace, one has to know about the methods of production of hand-made lace, a theme beautifully handled by Katherine Ann Porter in her story, The Flowering Judas.
People labor on assembly-lines to make products that bear no traces of their hands, even as most commodities for sale in most stores bear no traces of the individual laborers or workers, hence can be discarded with no personal regrets. Those workers might well want to go country dancing later, and listen to singers who haven?t had the brogue or twang removed from their voices. Selling to ordinary working citizens so relies on generic products that the specific name of Randy Traywick, a name worth thinking about, was generalized to Randy Travis. The values of machine-like efficiency brush against mailart if it is sent to Avon, North Carolina, which was Kinnakeet until the United States Postal Service alphabetized the towns, changing Kinnakeet into Avon, and reducing The Cape to Buxton. In Maryland a town named for an Indian chief, Vinnacokasimmon, became Vienna, which inspired Berlin as the name of a nearby town, until World War II when Berlin became Berwyn. Postal addresses differ from websites, as when Ray Johnson drove to Intercourse, Pennsylvania, to mail something I?d rather not think about. A mailartist is inescapably involved in the nightmare of history, and cannot help choosing the qualities of his or her mailart as corrective responses, examples of the way events could be, should be, and would be, if only.
Stores that sell ?hand-made? crafts can be interesting, even dreamy, yet also awkward if one rejects the objects offered for sale, for that feels like rejecting the craftsperson. So many jobs entail labor that produces something bearing no trace of the worker that a hunger can be felt for objects which put the direct touch of another person into one?s hands, like buying vegetables from a farm-stand next to the garden. This year ?Home-grown? was generously interpreted by garden-stands in Maryland selling identical tomatoes from Illinois!
The technologies which conceal the methods and materials of the production of commodities obscure the real relations among people. A gold ring with a diamond has a history, and connects the owner?s life with many other lives, right down into gold-mines and diamond mines, and right up into international corporations unlikely to share profits with the workers, who lose the product of their labor because they cannot afford to purchase it. Even paper has its history, with harsh life-denying practices in a papermill described by Herman Melville in two stories, ?The Tartarus of Maids,? and ?The Paradise of Bachelors.? The first is about women, none of whom says a word, who make paper from old shirts ripped to shreds in a dusty factory. The second is about the men who wore those shirts, garrulous men in London, who use rag paper made from their castoff shirts by those wordless women coughing in that factory. Their cycle is not constructive feedback, it goes from wasted lives of young women to the lives of the men who obliviously exploit them.
Technologies offer illusions which feel like magic, thinking of magic as a technique that produces effects while concealing the methods and materials by which the effects are produced. Movies seem magical, which explains why Dziga Vertov made his great 1929 film about the materials and methods in the production of films, Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov?s film cuts through the ideology of films, showing a spectator the dozens of people whose work and labor are effaced in the final product. Anyone watching John Walter?s film about Ray Johnson, How to Draw a Bunny, isn?t put into a relation with Walter as a person, for like most films, it appropriately conceals the art, craft, work and labor of many people in the production of a movie. Yet note that an exception is made for the musician, Max Roach, who improvised an accompaniment to some scenes on his drums ? that is, another creative artist, not a regular worker. A film about Ray Johnson made by Lars Movin and Steen Moeller Rasmussen, Ray Johnson On-Line, collages telephoned interviews with John Willenbecher, Lawrence Weiner and other artists who do mailart. The filmmakers patch in snatches of old industrial-operation films about how mail is processed on machines operated by people. Those postal workers are generic, personages not personalities. They are seen but not heard in the film, unlike the artists who are heard but not seen. However Movin and Rasmussen also interviewed two postal workers who handled Ray Johnson?s mail in Locust Valley. At the time of filming, years after his drowning, they were amused still to be handling it. Thus their film about mailart shows the aesthetic activities in mailart in the foreground, yet with the technology and labor visible in the background, implying a significant difference between specifically working to make an object of mailart, and generically laboring in the post-office. Mailart activities are ineluctably individual, while the postal services are generalized until the point at which a postal employee hands over the mail. Ray, who lived hand-to-hand, once wrote that his new mailman ?was shy.?
A related point is that mailart, even if it perishes, preserves its radical individuality. Consider art displayed in museums. Typically museums display art of the same historical era, or of the same style, and sometimes with the same thematic content (variously interpreted). MoMA juxtaposed a painting in oil by Paul Cezanne, portraying a standing male in something like a bathing suit that reaches only to the waist, with a photograph of an adolescent boy in swim-trunks. The implication is that the work of two individual artists, working in two different media, can be brought to bear on a totality neither of them could have been aware of. Museums gather the work of idiosyncratic individuals under their large thematic umbrellas, demonstrating relations among works of art as those were thought about by the curators, not by the artists. Thus meanings can be imposed on most works of art by contexts. However I do not see how a particular incident, event or episode of mailart can be given meaning from outside, as though part of its meaning follows from how it belongs to someone else?s larger theoretical whole.
The process of mailart has not been, is not, and I think can never be, a totalizing process. The structure of Mailart is seriatim, with no totality in sight. A complementary thought is that a totality has a beginning, with possibilities; a middle, with probabilities; and an end, with necessary conclusions, like a dramatic action, and like life itself. However mailart seems always to return to the stage of possibilities, which is always to be at a beginning, or to be beginning all over again. Say that a person decides on a mailart ?object? that has achieved an aesthetic inevitability, with relations among parts that could not be otherwise. Mail that item to another mailartist, and the necessities become possibilities again, as the recipient is free to add, subtract, recompose, revise, and otherwise transform the received mailart, making a new work to be mailed away toward the possibility of being reworked yet again. Mailart constructs its possibilities as it goes, while retaining the open possibilities of the beginning throughout a process which cannot reach a conclusion. A complete, completable or completed system is as dangerous to freedoms as totalizing is. A large theoretical structure can aim toward completeness, as in closing down with the necessities, when nothing can be otherwise than it is, but such a structure risks self-exhaustion. Do not wish for certainty unless you are certain what you are asking for. The valid uncertainties of mailart are like an ideal process of justice in which, after one trial and judgment, spontaneously arise retrials and rejudgments. Mailart holds situations open and free, and not everyone wants that for you.
A painter can be like a player in an orchestra, with museums or galleries defining a subordinate place in the total orchestration. However, a mailartist, as a player in the field of mailart, is not even like a soloist in an orchestra. In mailart, there is no whole orchestra, there is no total orchestration, there cannot be a conductor, & there is not much of a score to follow. Rather than playing a solo, the mailartist is most fulfilled when giving an opportunity to another player, who may in reciprocity mail something that sets in motion the very person who set in motion that reciprocity. These reciprocities open themes of feed-back, in which effects affect causes. A system with feed-backs can achieve a steady-state self-governing and self-controlling system when an item of mailart sent by a person elicits the responsiveness of the recipient. Then sender and recipient can reverse into recipient and sender like two nodes within a fluctuating network, something like a nerve net: ?a diffuse network of cells that conducts impulses in all directions from the area stimulated? (American Heritage Dictionary). Any one mailartist is at the center of mailart, setting an individual tempo, going for high notes or low notes, perhaps like events in the brain, or in the ?endocrine orchestra,? which may be more like a conductorless orchestra warming up than anything Philharmonic. (Yes, I?m rereading Joseph Needham?s essay on the Fundamental Ideas of Chinese Science, in volume II of Science and Civilization in China, where I have borrowed terms to describe the structure of mailart activities for over thirty years).
Mailart is not unique because the work that goes into it is visible, but because mailart cannot be made with no traces of the effort that went into making and sending it. It has a person?s fingerprints all over it. Its arrival is already a meaning about activity, let?s call it the joy of work, as work to make a gift differs from labor to make a commercial product. The arrival of mailart is evidence of the laborers in the postal services, and it is handed over, or given, not to a passive spectator of art, but to another worker, a person whom the arrival of mailart sets in motion. At its best, a recipient becomes a sender, perhaps relaying something on paper as directed; maybe finding an apt place for a piece of paper, a stamp, a picture, that has been hanging around the desk for months. Reusing a mischievously decorated envelope becomes a kind of gift ? demonstrating the teaching that giving something away as a gift is the best way to possess it. Your desk may not always be yours, but your gift will always be your gift. Or, in a relation to the passage of time that painting can?t achieve, the transitoriness of experience feels less like a loss when a person can forward a paper to another mailartist, figuring that the image will be apt because of a shared reference. The reference in common is like a motif in a musical composition which turns back toward the origin of the theme, even while turning forward into an inventive, unpredictable variation of that theme.
So mailart brings with it an implied request to do something actively in response. A museum does not inherently give you an opportunity to do your work of responsiveness, person-to-person, but mailart invites and encourages you to do the work you want to do, and which, like biological functions, no one else can do for you. I don?t know if we have a word for an event which constructs an opportunity to do something you want to do, even if you don?t know what it is at first, but will find out what you are doing in the act of doing it. What you will be doing is acting within a peculiar structure of continuous possibilities. The arrival of much ordinary mail can close possibilities ? the bills must be paid. Business mail should be transparent in the sense that one reads through the material medium, maybe ink on paper, toward information and non-material ideas, and can discard the physical paper. But, contrarily, mailart is not transparent, it has a surface, it can have depths of interiorities, it can enlarge possibilities, and it can become new mailart. Not anything like the receipt of a final notice in the mail, actively arriving mailart opens possibilities limited only by one?s limitations. But even those limitations transpose into a style of one?s own. Insofar as the limits of one?s mailart are the limits of one?s world, mailart delineates a self-portrait. If you want to know who you are, ask your mailart. Maybe your post-person can tell you, or at least can tell your mail apart from your neighbor?s mail. Tony, recently retired, used to ring my bell and wordlessly hand me my mail, but with a lilt and a twinkle that told me he had been amused by something in the mail, and was pleased to be the one to deliver it to my door.
An interlude: A mailartist is in the best position to gauge the labor and/or work that has gone into an event of mailart. No professor is more expert in mailart, its theory and practice, than anyone who is actively mailing.
Mailart differs from most spectator or auditor arts in that it must be lived. Some conventional mail is useful, some is sweet or pleasing. Long ago Horace described poetry as useful and pleasing: utile et dulce. Genial mailart can arrive with a congeniality that can seem infectious. In times of plague letters were sometimes disinfected with vinegar to kill germs that might kill the recipient of the letter. Contrarily, the health of mailart is to inspire more mailart as an image of what events can be like. That is, the structure of mailart can be used as a model of qualities to look for in existence, and to hope for in experiences with other people.
One resemblance to games and to sports is that an idea or an image might be bounced back and forth ? in a volley of mailart exchanged over a postal network. However mailart, if a game, is a phantom game played without a net, in the sense of a net as imposed rules, and of a net as objective criteria of skill and achievement. Playing without a net, oblivious to external standards, is a method of discovering one?s immanent and self-set standards, while at least satisfying the rules and regulations of the postoffice, that is, playing their game. Games aren?t utilitarian, but they do have their uses, in the same combination of use with pleasure that is healthy for art.
Works of art can be kept alive by their usefulness in thinking and in feeling. Maybe the usefulness of celluloid film is at an end, yet some artists are even shooting in 8 and in Super-8, so the medium must still have something to say. I use art, and find it useful because it isn?t warped by practical utilitarian purposes. I grew up in a household and in a family in which people used quotations from music, dance, poetry, drama and anything else they could grab in the moment to explain, or to clarify, or to elaborate on a statement. My mother would use a few steps of tap, soft-shoe or the Charleston like words in a sentence, like a sentence in a paragraph, or like testimony in a trial. My father quoted Dylan Thomas and "King Lear" on his deathbed. In my messages on this Messageboard I use quotations from Robert Frost and from Wallace Stevens. Such use confirms the value of their art ? for I do not hold with the Kantian separation of pure art from use, positioning art as purposeful purposelessness or as purposeless purposefulness. Sometimes I even verify art: now that summer is almost over, the truth of Shakespeare?s line is confirmed: ?And summer?s lease hath all too short a date.? That lease is both the lease Summer has taken on the year, and the lease a person has signed to rent a place for the duration of a summer away from the city. I have verified the line as though it were an everyday proposition, and I confirm it by using it to see how it works.
I have used Shakespeare?s line, passing it along ? but here is another advantage of mailart, for now to be compared with the messageboard. From the tone of some messages on this messageboard, I feel that I may be quoting Shakespeare into an unsympathetic context wherein some resentful, rancorous and embittered person is going to damn Shakespeare, and probably castigate me, that public-enemy, a retired teacher who probably dampened creativity in his students, and who has reached his own dead-end. I cannot pick recipients on the messageboard, but I can write to someone privately, and perhaps insert lines from a poem. I can enjoy the feeling of anticipating that the recipient will enjoy receiving a communication, perhaps appreciate the poetry, and if not, will feel free to slip the lines into an envelope being aimed toward someone who might. Passing along a birthday present one doesn?t want, converting it into a gift to someone else, stands in contrast with passing along artists? stamps one has been given. I was once given a bottle of wine as a gift, the very bottle I had given to that person on an earlier holiday. Yet I have magnanimous mailart from the late David Cole, made shortly before he died, like someone?s last symphony, composed with a generosity of spirit that I use to remind myself of what is possible. David?s mailart is so beautiful that I might give it away.
Mailart awakens many themes of possessions, commodities, profits, and gifts. In the early 1990s Ray Johnson mailed to me an exquisite little box with a miniature ladder in it. A ladderman to his ear was a letterman, and a letterman was a mailartist. Written on the box were the words, ?Please send to Charlton Burch.? Charlton phoned me later to report that Ray had called him to learn if he had received the box. I was displeased not to be trusted, but understood that mailart from Ray had become confused with saleable commodities. Ray once sent material to a curator to be mailed to my son, Andrew Wilson (whom Ray phoned for a long conversation that evening before his drowning). The curator sent him, then two or three years old, photocopies, and wrote a letter explaining her moral obligation as a curator to preserve works of art. But actually, by extracting a product from a process, she had destroyed a work of art.
Some mailart can be like the children?s game of Telephone in which a message is whispered from person or person, altering in the process. In fact the very concept of mailart itself seems to undergo changes as it passes from person to person, and certainly from nation to nation. Yet surely mailartists are in the vanguard of living locally, while thinking and communicating globally. As the bumptious world is trampled flat by international corporations in the military-entertainment complex, aided and abetted by fast-food chains, that international leveling of local differences is shadowed by inter-national mailart. Even American mailart is not a global threat the way American corporations are.
As I write about work and labor, and about the usefulness of non-utilitarian mailart, I begin to wonder about the unhappiness within some unpleasant messages, here and elsewhere, on the Net. There is much to be unhappy about, but mailart? Say that someone has worked, or labored, for eight-hours of hourly wages. When that person turns away from the external world, toward mailart, or toward the Internet, that person?s back becomes a mirror reflecting the world that has been turned away from. The qualities of mailart, and the content of the messages, are reflections of the world ? not like imitations in a mirror, but in the way the positive of mailart is shaped by its negations of negative forces and abrasive qualities in mundane experience. Surely mailart has moral imperatives such as, Thou shalt not assault with anything in the mail. But what?s this problem with the Internet?
Any history or theory of mailart will benefit if mailartists would post statements about the meanings of their mailart in the sense of a positive activity, on an observable plane, that negates some of the obscurely felt negativities in experience. This messageboard is an absolutely new kind of evidence, a novel historical record, which should inspire a new kind of history. Two questions to think with are: 1) how is my mailart not like my labor and/or work?; 2) how are my labor and work not like my mailart? For extra credit, discuss among yourselves: how is working at mailart not like working under a boss? How are your relations with both mailartists and postal service workers different from your relations with workers and laborers in other work and in other jobs? How is mailart like cooking and serving a meal to a friend, more than like tending the fries-machine in Burger King? Can you read through the shapes, textures, and temporalities (the tempos and rhythms) of your mailart toward the socio-economic experiences you may be recoiling from?
Anyone mailing a postcard rather than an envelope, to save the cost of postage, is aware of economic determinisms, and already sees that the shape of mailart is an outline of economic forces. Such awareness of socio-economic themes could be extended into a description of how the positive of mailart is shadowed by the negatives of fairly ordinary existence within this culture. A mailartist must have one foot within this society, but can keep the other foot out of it. Who knows? Perhaps sending mailart is the best revenge on the systems which drain vitalities away -- using the impersonal power of the postal system to amplify one?s own powers. I am trying to encourage testimony about how the style of mailart is a further elaboration of the huge complex themes which are the dominant content of our lives. Is the mailart of a person who lifts crates of Orange Nehi all day different from the mailart of a piano teacher? And can someone help me? What damage has occurred to the spirit of the postal clerk who told me that I couldn?t put stamps on the envelope like that? Like what?, I asked her.
I am saying that the meaning of mailart includes the fact that it is not labor paid by the hour, that it is not exploitative buying and selling, and that, while it relies on technology, it does not share the aesthetic or ethic of technology ? to be efficient, economical and reliable. Mailart is not efficient; it is not economical in terms of financial accounts; and it isn?t predictable and regular as a machine like this computer should be. Mailart has little to do with other arts, or with other kinds of work or labor, yet has much to do as a constructed world. As a constructive world, mailart runs parallel to the actual world it tends to turn its back on ? that actual world of: 1) sometimes cynical and ironic art, more to be pitied than scorned; and 2) pointless, repetitive, and perhaps painful labor, like working the fries at McDonalds. Sorting mail in the postal service is an ordeal, but sorting mailart at home, even without intense tender loving care, can be constructive work that is a genial parody of repetitive labor that can induce breakdowns. The post office I often use now seats its clerks behind bullet-proof glass. The moment of handing over an envelope for weighing has lost its radiance.
I have taught writing fiction to many disheartened postal workers, many of them veterans of the War in Vietnam, some of them women, and all of them embittered and resentful in a way that stunned me. They described angry sessions in the men?s room, which seemed to be their complaint department. I am not astonished when post office employees go postal, but trust that mailartists are unlikely to. I am less sure about computer Networkers, some of whom seem to go incomputable, since their tone so often gets rancid. Surely their sorrows and pains are all too real, as they seem to want to make people feel as bad as they do ? which is a sort of communication, I guess. Yet if unpleasantness seems not to fit into mailart, or onto a messageboard about mailart, then those facts can be further evidence in trials of the meaning and value of mailart. I hope to learn about about mailart, the only way I can, person to person. And please, let no one mail me french fries.</HTML>
Merlin
Re: history and theory September 01, 2001 05:00PM |
<HTML>it is my target - but - you see what happens- even my computer crashed, no scanner available and........
so my English is rather poor, misunderstandings.
But - reading your postings at THIS BOARD teaches me to put
my liftetime into it to keep it alive........
It is important in 21centurie isn?t it?
one free platform for U too - please vorgiveme for deleting
Ur postings while struggling with any troll instead of deleting
his postings
your
Merlin</HTML>
so my English is rather poor, misunderstandings.
But - reading your postings at THIS BOARD teaches me to put
my liftetime into it to keep it alive........
It is important in 21centurie isn?t it?
one free platform for U too - please vorgiveme for deleting
Ur postings while struggling with any troll instead of deleting
his postings
your
Merlin</HTML>
Sorry, you do not have permission to post/reply in this forum.
YOU are in MAIL ART FORUMS on mailartforums.crosses.net PLEASE REGISTER TO POST! (It is to avoid spam & hack attacks) - Thanks!
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