four deleted postings restored
Bill Wilson
four deleted postings restored September 02, 2001 04:05AM |
<HTML>My posting having been deleted, I am inserting these copies, aware that they weigh rather heavily, but figuring that the Messagebaord can use some bulk in its diet. These notes were written before ?History and Theory,? and make most sense if read in relation to messages I am responding to when I write to David and to Phill:
NETTING RAY JOHNSON: This note gets rather long-winded so I?ll say here that it aims toward a request for questions about the history of mailart in order to widen my own perspectives. On the history of mail art: I am compiling a chronicle of mailart as that becomes a network through the work of Ray Johnson. While Ray was alive, I published seven pieces about him, none of them completely satisfactory then or now, and certainly none of them either history or chronicle. Ray?s own attitude, taking ?no? out of ?chroNOlogy? to get ?No chro__logy? didn?t help, except to confirm the value he placed on immediacy of inspection rather than on retrospection. Since he has died, I have written the Black Mountain College Dossier, a rambling essay which mentions some of those early events, but nothing systematic, and a sketchy memoir of Ray Johnson and May Wilson which is on-line at rubberstampmuseum under Modern Realism. The issue of Lightworks magazine published by Charlton Burch contains interesting material, but wouldn?t claim to offer much in the way of history. As long as Ray?s own papers are held by the Richard Feigen Gallery, on behalf of the Estate of Ray Johnson, his documents are a potential commodity to be placed in the market, so that any involvement with the documents in the name of scholarship can have inadvertent commercial value, which confuses the issues somewhat. However the Richard Feigen Gallery sponsored an astonishing show, curated by Muffet Jones and Frances Beatty for the Feigen Contemporary Gallery, which made papers from the Estate of Ray Johnson visually available in the context of some unknown collages and works on paper. Every show is an opportunity for new thoughts and fresh feelings, as with the show curated by Harley, currently on view at the Luther Burbank Museum in Sonoma, California. Fortunately future shows of Ray?s work are underway, with at least two I am aware of which will clarify history: 1) most certainly, collages to be shown in Norway under sensitive and intelligent curatorship, with sophisticated themes adequate to the seriousness and complexities of themes in his life and in his art; and 2) very possibly, and entirely desirable, a show of mailart in England, under ideal curatorship, if plans develop and hold. For a medley of reasons, I must work almost entirely from documents in my archives that begin when I met Ray in 1956 (he, May Wilson and I thought that we had met in 1955, thus scrambling some dates once in a while). I have found in organizing papers that my confident statement in the Black Mountain College Dossier that the first ?Please send to? in my experience was in July, 1962, is wrong, for some earlier papers recently reexamined are inscribed ?Please send to.? Nevertheless I have no evidence that anyone did relay papers sent by Ray toward the other person he had indicated. Of course the archives of Stanton Kreider and of Albert M. Fine might show that Ray?s instructions were being followed. The potentially informative collections held by two women who were indispensible in the early period, Marie Tavroges Stilkind, & Helen Jacobson of Baltimore, are not retrievably or availably catalogued as far as I am aware. My own memories of the first active relaying do start in July 1962, with confirmation from documents in my archives (available for consulting with appropriate arrangements). From then on, one was not running an individual race, but was running within a team, with postal employees participating in an art like selfless stagehands in a theater. Fortunately, for the sudden expansion of mailart through that autumn, I have memories and documents, including some of May Wilson?s papers. The longer Ray is dead, the more I see that my perspective on him grows deeper, but also narrower, as I was acquainted with one or two or three facets of his life and art, but now have tumbled to the fact that he was known differently by other people, who had their unique perspectives on those facets he chose to display to them. I can only hope that everyone who was acquainted with him or with his work will write memoirs of their experiences, no matter how brief. Meanwhile, to turn toward people who express an interest in the history of mailart: with the understanding that I work from my narrow perspectives, what would help me is questions that anyone might offer, from their perspectives, so that I might think more comprehensively. What questions would anyone ask that I might be able to help answer, especially with documentation from 38 years of mailart (from autumn ?56 through late autumn ?94, with telephone calls until 4pm January 13, 1995). I don?t think that any detail is trivial, because any detail can be a clue to themes and meanings. For example, a trustworthy scholar of mailart describes photocopies as ?Xeroxes,? while the documents show that Ray, when he had a grant, rented a Minolta Copier, and with characteristic precision described the differences in the tones achieved with Minolta rather than with Xerox. What would you like to know that I might be able to respond to with documented answers?
The note has a subtext I want to make explicit. I see that some people who think about the origins of mailart as they participate in it within a network point toward the 19th century and decorated envelopes, etc. Some in Europe who would like to bracket the United States out of the history of visual arts write a linear history that leads to them from say Manet, Van Gogh or through other Continental painters who stylized envelopes in accord with their aesthetic. Mostly they were incapable of being anything but chic, a difference from Ray Johnson of Detroit, Michigan (Claus Oldenburg in a rough anagram wrote: Detroit, toilet, Mt Ste Victoire). That pure European lineage opens to include Picasso, adding a Spanish sauceiness, and Italian Futurists electrifying their envelopes (see those written to Fortunato Depero at 464 West 23rd Street in New York City for a link with other links, for I type at 458 West 25th Street, two blocks due north). That history is glorious in its own way, but the art-on-envelopes in their linear history is episodic, ?particulate and singly catenarian,? which is nothing like a network, ?reticular and hierarchically fluctuating??I am borrowing from Joseph Needham. In my experience, only Ray Johnson sent envelopes, sometimes decorated, holding papers which were marked to be relayed to someone else, thereby constructing a network of correspondents in a team sport that deprived the postal service of its seriousness and self-importance. The linear episodes of tr?s chic decorated envelopes did not organize an informal, self-organizing, self-sustaining, & self-enlarging system. However an envelope from Ray Johnson wove another link in a netting, joining strangers in a self-supported net of communications. Thus I am saddened by some of the grudging remarks in accounts of mailart that claim to be written as history. Gratitude, like so much that Ray pointed toward in his life and in his art, is free, and also can be emancipating.
On themes of freedoms which have arisen on the bulletinboard, I?ll mention that Ray worked with papers and objects which were cast-offs, discards and junk which otherwise would have become trash. The backing of Moticos was usually shirt-board from Richard Lippold?s laundered shirts. The materials were leavened from dull inert opaque trash toward the radiance of art, without issues of money except for stamps. That?s where Marie Tavroges Stilkind, May Wilson and Helen Jacobson, among others, came in as friends who were glad to add stamps to Ray?s envelopes, sometimes a hundred at a time. Ray Johnson had found a vent in the totalitizations of capitalism, with a little help from his friends. Or perhaps he had not found a vent so much as he had constructed a vent. Ray could make gifts of his art to provide people with experiences within this culture which were outside that capitalism which, as a totalizing system, would if it could close down over us with uniformities and conformities, thereby sinking us into a quicksand with no vents, hence with few if any novel events. Ray participated in some practices of Buddhism, with what degree of seriousness or scholarship I leave to the kindness of strangers. While urine is thought of as waste, in some Buddhisms the urine of a god is gold, which suggests that nothing in the Cosmos is waste except where humans have decreed uselessness from their narrow and shallow perspectives. Even dung-beetles have another point of view. Ray?s free spirit, animated by a Cosmos in which we find hospitality for which we might be grateful -- a Cosmos which we can govern only where we obey, as Francis Bacon suggested -- began the frail self-supporting network which has grown in niches like this bulletinboard. So OK now: any questions to help with a chronicle of the history of free mailart will be received with gratitudes.
After a response:
David: your reply is already helpful for me to see beyond Ray Johnson. I am sorry that you have received no responses after cooperating with inquiries ? many of us have our stories. On the larger picture, perhaps people will have to contribute their own histories to a compilation, for there is a dense mass of material, uncatalogued and otherwise unavailable. The bibliography on mailart is huge, and I am in no position to write a descriptive or evaluative bibliography. The writers of such works as The Eternal Network can speak for themselves. Perhaps John Held Jr. will write an informative posting about his book and his continuing research, for his efforts might well inspire other writers, and encourage other mailartists to maintain retrievable archives. I must write from my direct experience and from documents so that I can make verifiable statements open to correction, but I see from your note that I need to think about how some of the tendrils took hold and even put down roots elsewhere. Ray?s activities were perhaps the first links in sets of fluctuating chains that became self-constructing units, deriving distantly from his work, but becoming fairly independent groups. Yet surely if various groups of mailartists held a family reunion, they would be able to recognize their family-resemblance in the features of Ray Johnson, their progenitor. Fortunately the concept of ?delirium? has been worked out in relation to ?rhizomes,? so that the structure of international mailart has access to words which are adequate to describe the way it has spread across fields rather than being lined up along parallel furrows. Since the Internet is itself rhizomatic, the languages evolving to describe its delirium can help to describe a mailart network, thereby bringing out some resemblances as both InterNet and Mailart Net elude conventional categories and boundaries, offering more people opportunities to communicate with each other, in control of their identities, without regard for national boundaries, ethnicities, gender or other identifications over which they have less control. When you write ?mailart history seems to begin and end with Ray Johnson,? I lose focus, for I hope that I didn?t suggest that mailart or a world-wide network began and ended. Do you mean that you want to learn about other people whose activities became new centers of interest? I am going to think about that later. A problem with a chronicle and with a history and documentation is that anyone like me who met Ray forty-five years ago, or anyone helping in the early days of the NYCS, from 1962, about forty years ago, is seriously old, and has four or more last things to think final thoughts about. I wouldn?t have implied that Picasso?s mailart was ?mere? correspondence, merely that mailing a postcard to lover or friend inserted a work of art into the postal system, but did not weave links into a network which you can participate in. Think rhizomes. Work with delirium, which means ?out of the furrow,? like someone plowing zigzags. Am I ?just an archivist/historian/writer,? you ask. From fall of 1956, before a concept like mailart was being thought with, and before Ed Plunkett brought the word ?art? into play with his witty label, The New York Correspondence School of Art, I was responding to mailings from Ray Johnson. I don?t recall the word ?art? being used to think with until late 1962. Since I am not a visual artist, and have no talents for design, color, shape or other visual expression, anything I mailed was limited by my limitations. Ray did not respond well to visual materials which tried to resemble what he was doing, and I had nothing visually interesting of my own to do. He wanted the mail he received from a person to be to that person as the mail which he sent was to him?specific, original, spontaneous, and personal without being intrusive. He tried to astonish himself with what he did, and he enjoyed being astonished by others. Usually I sent him rather flatly factual or informative materials, but under the pressures he exerted on ideas and images, from those materials emerged unforeseeable novelties. It was as though he had a magnet that attracted the strangeness within the ordinary, bringing it onto an observable plane. After the first several months of our friendship, I usually thought of myself as providing Ray with materials that he could use, putting his characteristic spin on them, so that while I might send him raw wheat, I would get back bread. I saw him as the Sorcerer for whom occasionally I could be the Sorcerer?s Apprentice. May Wilson was (is) my mother. She played Ray?s games from 1956 until within a few years of her dying in 1986. On your question about published histories, etc., I can mention that I am compiling a bibliography, but narrowly, for it is primarily focussed on Ray Johnson, and indeed, for decades he gave me printed materials about himself which I am now archiving. In England, Clive Phillpot, who has professional experience as a librarian (formerly of MoMA) and as a bibliographer, is working on a bibliography, perhaps more about Ray than about the growth and development of the mailart network. Anyone can consult my bibliography, which is added to constantly, both new items, and earlier materials which surface in catalogues, for now that his name is famous, and therefore is a commodity, booksellers informatively include him in their lists. As you have written, ?mailart history certainly did not end with Ray,? and I regret if any of my work has implied that it might have. About that larger history which you correctly ask for, I fear that not until an institution finds it in its self-interest to collect mailart will anyone be offered time, money and materials to write a history, if only because professional activities in museums, and distributions of grants, usually follow both fame and the marketplace in art. However, in some ways, I love the privacy of an activity occurring in full view of economic and aesthetico-political powers for which it is invisible. Here we have it: an international low-cost movement of thousands of people communicating freely through obsolete and rickety postal systems, achieving an intimacy of visual thoughts that is neither supported nor understood by any official power. The history of continuations of that movement, which is what you are calling for, would be part of the history of movements toward freedom, not all of which actually get recorded appreciatively in the mainstream which can?t expect to profit from them. Mailart couldn?t have ended with Ray because his axiomatic wish was that people would free themselves to be themselves, and that self-constructed freedom continues to happen with no help from him. Insofar as the story of his life tells of his hope that people find and convey their freedoms, both their freedoms from deadening forms, and their freedoms to invent and to reinvent themselves, in free-hand & in free-form, then, at least for those of us who knew and loved him, the story of his moral and aesthetic life is continued by activities like yours when you pop an envelope into the eddying tide of mailart.
Later to David: thanks for your patient reply. I have not attempted a history of mailart in any sense of history as I understand it. My interest from the beginning, from 1956 intensely exchanging items in the mail with Ray Johnson, and with his friend Norman Solomon --- papers such as clippings, photographs, playing cards found on the street, stray postcards --- was in the meanings and values which were manifest in the activities. I was receiving in the mail extraordinary collages from Ray Johnson, and while some of those collages have been framed for display in museums, they remain for me as they began ? intimate responses within a visual conversation Ray and I were conducting almost until his drowning. As Ray introduced so many people to each other by taking them for visits, often followed up with something in the mail, those conversations and correspondences gradually opened to include Marie Tavroges, Ed Plunkett, May Wilson, Stanton Krieder, Dale Joe, John Daley and others. By late 1962, when a network was begun through the efforts of many people collaborating with Ray, an inherent ethic produced itself out of the activities: say nothing that would end the conversation; mail nothing that would end the correspondence. Send nothing too personal, nothing too indifferent, and whatever else you do, pass stuff along. The people who enrolled or were enrolled in ?The School? were self-selecting, because not everyone who was invited wanted to play the games. No one was excluded unless they did something that killed the conversation being conducted with verbal and visual correspondences. One of the mainstays by the mid-1960s was John Willenbecher, who has not sought a place in any historical chronicle, hence is rarely mentioned. In 1977 I printed a booklet for Ray?s 50th birthday with some of his exchanges with John, who continues mailing much more than letters to friends, to members of his family who still might not quite get the point, and to some strangers whose sympathies and interests overlap his own. For me, a history of mailart would be a history of a spirit animating an activity that was without practical value, but which could enhance a day with friendliness. Ray, who was content with evaporations and invisibilities, did not try to stop time, or even to preserve much evidence of his activities, at least until he moved from Manhattan in 1968. In the improvisations and spontaneities of those early days, with no model for his activities, Ray was a populist, delirious, bootstrapping, trailblazing bricoleur--about--town. The themes in his activities were elaborations of his religio-philosophic ideas, primarily an American Buddhism in Manhattan. He did not often state or explicate his themes directly, but he worked on behalf of his governing aesthetic values with visual papery manifestations which exemplified his moral and/or ethical values. Any history which included Ray would necessarily include the meanings that gave meaningfulness to his experiences, hence for me a history of mailart would be a history of meanings. I have tried to suggest some of those meanings here and there, reflecting my narrow interest in mailart as it conveys and preserves such meanings in my experiences. The ideas implicit in Ray?s early work as I first experienced them were marvelously emancipating for me in that time and in that place, that is, within conditions which can?t, don?t and won?t hold for younger people, who choose who they are to become within very different contexts. I?m glad when contemporary mailartists feel a rapport with Ray Johnson, especially if they work with unrehearsed, spontaneous & improvised visual events which have the strength and the delicacy of a tensile haiku.
David, in the origins of mailart as I experienced the stream that flows from Ray Johnson, the pressure of the flow was to get people to respond from their origins, person-to-person, without emptily abstract concepts interfering with conversations and correspondences. However Ray was as wide as he was deep, and he was involved with abstract concepts if only in his battles against most of them. I have published a letter in which he asks me to write down for him what we had been talking about together, the theme of identity and difference in the philosophy of Hegel. Later he was shown how his work intersected some of the ideas of Jacques Derrida, especially in Derrida?s novel, The Postcard, so he mailed stuff to Derrida. Ray was always interested in thinking about his methods of thinking, yet, hoping to be astonished, he would not expect or want other people to think the thoughts he had already thought through by using them in his work. As I keep quoting from Robert Frost:
"He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response."
Among the many problems of any history of any art is that while the art-object, in any of visual or literary arts, can exist to be experienced within a consensus, as we can look at pretty much the same collages, and can feel that we are listening to pretty much the same pieces of music, the history of the art is not an object which can be examined in verifiable statements. A history of anything, but I?ll stick to mailart, is necessarily constructivist, that is, by following a theory and sets of rules, a historian can devise a coherent narrative which can be analysed for its adequacy to the ?facts? as the facts have themselves been devised. No historical account of mailart can be held up against an object to be judged for verisimilitude, if only because mailart is a process, not a product. Anyway facts are constructs themselves, that is, facts already represent theorizing about what is important (hence mailart has made an art of bringing overlooked and neglected scraps and images into play on an observable plane where they register as visible facts). A history of mailart, undertaken as a construction, suffers the problem that a history of mailart can?t be like a history of painting (which has its own problems which become fatal for the last two centuries). If a history of mailart is impossible, or at least is forever radically incomplete, that predicament may be an opportunity to think or to rethink meanings. Perhaps one can glance back selectively at the historical days, but the selections would be made to support a person?s work as that follows from the character of that person now. Perhaps the only method of preserving and of continuing some of the early values manifest in mailart is to go forward, in a continuous process, aware of some continuities and of some discontinuities, but trying to do work that is to the present as Ray Johnson?s work was to him and his times.
Another problem of standard history derives from a lack of understanding of the relations of a structure like a mailart network to its origins and foundation. The history of mailart could not have been begun at the beginning of Ray Johnson?s activities, because he did not prepare a foundation and then build on it. The present structure, now, is not built upon a ready-made foundation, but constructs its own foundation under it. The future structure, in 2010, may construct a different foundation for itself, that is, it might rewrite history. Foundations are strengthened by the size of the structure which holds the foundation down while the foundation holds the structure up -- a thought which derives from Kurt Godel in mathematico-logic ? and which is made visible in the Hong Kong Airport. That Airport has been built upon an island newly constructed in a harbor. The materials in the fabricated island will settle for decades. The airport is engineered so that the buildings constructed on the island will strengthen the island through their weight, the structures holding down that which holds them up. Foundations preplanned by engineers sometimes fail, as with the Tower of Pisa, but that Tower constructed its own foundation as its weight settled, and it didn?t fall. The point is that foundations come later, in retrospection and in retroaction. Yet another problem arises, for the origins of an event are usually irretrievable. At the time, one often can?t know that what is being done is a beginning that is going to be built on, as in the development of a baby that constructs its direction for itself out of its own directionless activities. In later stages of a process, the initial conditions are elusive, irretrievable, and uncertain, as only years later did Ray see that as early as 1943 he had been doing something that had come to look like mailart. His retrospection reaches highschool, a stage of life at which many contemporary mailartists were decorating their envelopes without needing example or inspiration or permission from any movement in the visual arts.
Most mailartists have known implicitly what they come to realize explicitly when they happen upon a network of mailartists. Mailartists enjoy telling about their first time, which invariably happened with no awareness that other people, perhaps even their parents, were doing it. For these and other reasons, I think that a chronicle of mailart would be the most, yet also the best, that might be achieved.
In these perspectives, the French mailartists who point toward Manet or another modern classic are moving their own foundations into place beneath their activities, and they are right, for the sake of their meanings, to bracket Johnson out of their linear historical narratives. However nowhere has any variety of mailart followed a linear narrative like a plowman digging a straight furrow, for it has grown like those rhizomes spreading across a field. Only the future will tell us what the past has been. Imagine a baby born in December, 2000. If that baby grows up and does mailart inspired by discoveries of knot-writing, by the odor of vinegar on letters from a time of plague, or by recollections of singing telegrams, then that future activity will have brought out of the past its own precedents, thus far unrecorded in official mailart histories.
Another problem with a history pertains to participations and complicities. Criticism of both mailart and of hyper-spatial-computer communications is impossible without participation. Maybe one does not have to make movies to be a critic of movies, but only by participation in the cool intimacies of the processes of mailart can one qualify to describe and analyse mailart and on-line communications. Experience of process, not of product, is necessary, but two problems arise: 1) the processes have receded and are irrecoverable in their flow and turbulence; 2) once one has participated in the experiences, a non-participating objectivity is impossible. I think that such a perplexity about subjectivities and objectivities is appropriate, but not much history gets written that way, because of the awkwardness of pivoting between one?s subjective experience and an objective history.
The participation which qualifies also disqualifies, because of the commitments to some of the moral values in some mailart. Participation is not neutral. In my experience, artists who were working toward success within the marketplace for art might participate, responding to Ray?s activities, and relaying paper to someone else in 1963 or 1964. James Rosenquist and Chuck Close are two artists who played Ray?s games across decades. However some artists gradually realized that almost any paper they had modified might have aesthetic value that could be quantified as financial value. Therefore if they participated in events which were free, tossing into the network of mailart materials which could be sold because the papers had passed through their hands, they would be giving away material which someone might sell. That sale would in no way benefit the original artist financially, and would wastefully confuse all issues. If the artist continued to play in the New York Correspondance School, that implied that the artist was not working art only for the money. Yet the expense of time and energy would be enormous, and many artists needed to concentrate on their own work, unable to live like Ray, who never correlated time with money. An artist of the stature of Ad Reinhardt sometimes passed the relay, but I was hesitant to forward materials from Ray to Ad, he was too famous, and his own work too important for me to disturb him. Yet I could see on visits that he was happy to stop work to talk with Ray, hence I was wrong to presume to judge what was right for him.
The vexed questions of art and money are answered by each person from within the life-world that person arises in the midst of, and no general rules or regulations can be applied. Ray reacted with vehemence if he thought that someone was profiting on his work, although his idea of such profiteering often did not take into account the labor of other people, or their need for money in order to live. I have seen Ray Johnson?s mailart for sale in a catalogue for ten dollars, which might, after all, buy a lot of potsage. That misprint is a gift from the novel about an underground postal system, The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon.
To Phill: your experience will contribute to experiments on the Net from which everyone might be learning. As I have written to Honoria, now revising my general words to her into this personal note to you, Mailart is fully sensory, while the touch of keyboards, and the sight of screens, can be such a sensory deprivation that I reach for peanuts to engage my senses. A friend told me that she cannot go on-line without a cup of tea, and has spilled three into her keyboard. The personal, even intimate, communication is the issue. People can take only so much impersonality masked as personal attentions, as when a salesperson telephones in the tone of an old friend, calling me by my first name. If mailart is art, then it must face issues of individual and personal expressiveness, and the Internet assumes the same challenge. I figure that people wanted to hear from you in all your charming peculiarity, and that they felt frustration. Here is where you can contribute: what are your own feelings when receiving a communication more or less automatically and impersonally? What satisfies you in an exchange without the slant of a person adapting a message to you, perhaps before relaying it? You can testify as a witness who takes pleasure in the very same style and content of communications as displeases other people. You may be bringing news of a different, and perhaps emerging, sensibility. Wallace Stevens wrote about modern art and poetry as ?The poem of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice?? If you can explain your values, when that which suffices for you obviously does not suffice for other people, we may all be able to respond more aptly to each other, and to think more clearly within these machines.
Mailart, which got delivered and gets delivered by an indifferent and impersonal postal system, can engage visual, tactile, and aural senses, and perhaps taste and smell could be involved. Ray Johnson thought even about a person?s spit on the back of a stamp, of course in the days before self-sticking stamps, so mailart could include the use of the tongue and the flavor of mucilage. Can you see how people might want to preserve details as individual as the moistening of a stamp, somehow, in the transpositions of mailart networks onto e-mail networks? People have mailed coconuts and envelopes fragrant enough to alert the sniffing dogs. The goal has been as intense a physiological experience as can survive the systems. Even gently folding and unfolding a piece of paper involves energy that manifests as a sound, albeit a quiet one, but I know that the sound is there, and listen for it. What within your experience is so different that you are satisfied with mechanically mediated ?art?? Can you understand that computerized messages, even more mechanized than the postal system, can feel like yet another insensitive assault on one?s sensitivities? The sounds of the computer are to mailart as a synthesizer is to music. I write as one whose teen years were saved by Les Paul and Mary Ford, hence as open to electrifications when they amplify and enhance sounds which are personal to the point of idiosyncratic. However I have recently been jolted by a young artist pressuring a synthesizer to simulate music. How could he be pleased with automated sounds when he paints with splashes and drips? Almost two centuries ago Beethoven mocked the metronome, so that the history of capricious individual aesthetic expressions in relations with mechanizations has a distinguished history. Anyway I open envelopes noisily, in a style that I guess fits my character, hence expresses my private music, even if the expression is impossible to convey with words.
In my experience, the technological progress of an Internet network challenges the personal in at least two ways: 1) by pretending to be personal while being mechanically indifferent to an individual who is identified as a consumer by a computerized profile; 2) startling invasions of privacy as the personal is violated. I am assaulted by a machine recommending books, CDs or videos that it calculates fit my personal taste. I prefer the instincts of friends who guess that I might enjoy their improbable recommendation, not a recommendation deduced from algebras and probabilities. To me sometimes the computer seems more a depletion of the sensory than a visual and tactile feast. So can you sympathize with people who prefer an e-mail message tailored to them as individual recipients, perhaps marked indelibly with the personality of the person who has originated the message? Could you comment on how you respond to an impersonally transmitted item, when it is unlikely to convey feelings across the Internet? Do you try to pump feelings into your constructions? I find myself becoming strident in tone to get my voice to hover above the impersonalities and indifferences of this glaring computer-screen. The Internet Network needs to work out a phenomenology of the computer, its sights and sounds, and perhaps the touch of the keys, along with the amazement that occasionally a person seems to pop out of virtual space alive onto the screen. To borrow from Percy Shelley for this occasion, sometimes a message is like a heart plucked alive from the body of the Internet. But perhaps that livingness is not universally desired, in which case, I would like to learn more about the qualities that do seem desirable. A message of any kind unaccompanied by feelings can be rather forlorn. The most sensory messages I have received have been the few that have made me laugh, but that response, merely mine, is no certain evidence about the content of the other person's communications. The challenge for an aesthetic of the Internet is huge precisely because of unfeeling mechanizations. That impersonality, as a quality of the messages you forwarded, apparently does not trouble you. However, I?m guessing about you as a person, but would rather hear you speak for yourself. You may have, or you may be, new information which could go toward working out rules of responsive and responsible communications, and standards of aesthetic taste, appropriate to a novel practice and theory of art within the Internet. How about it? Bring us news.</HTML>
NETTING RAY JOHNSON: This note gets rather long-winded so I?ll say here that it aims toward a request for questions about the history of mailart in order to widen my own perspectives. On the history of mail art: I am compiling a chronicle of mailart as that becomes a network through the work of Ray Johnson. While Ray was alive, I published seven pieces about him, none of them completely satisfactory then or now, and certainly none of them either history or chronicle. Ray?s own attitude, taking ?no? out of ?chroNOlogy? to get ?No chro__logy? didn?t help, except to confirm the value he placed on immediacy of inspection rather than on retrospection. Since he has died, I have written the Black Mountain College Dossier, a rambling essay which mentions some of those early events, but nothing systematic, and a sketchy memoir of Ray Johnson and May Wilson which is on-line at rubberstampmuseum under Modern Realism. The issue of Lightworks magazine published by Charlton Burch contains interesting material, but wouldn?t claim to offer much in the way of history. As long as Ray?s own papers are held by the Richard Feigen Gallery, on behalf of the Estate of Ray Johnson, his documents are a potential commodity to be placed in the market, so that any involvement with the documents in the name of scholarship can have inadvertent commercial value, which confuses the issues somewhat. However the Richard Feigen Gallery sponsored an astonishing show, curated by Muffet Jones and Frances Beatty for the Feigen Contemporary Gallery, which made papers from the Estate of Ray Johnson visually available in the context of some unknown collages and works on paper. Every show is an opportunity for new thoughts and fresh feelings, as with the show curated by Harley, currently on view at the Luther Burbank Museum in Sonoma, California. Fortunately future shows of Ray?s work are underway, with at least two I am aware of which will clarify history: 1) most certainly, collages to be shown in Norway under sensitive and intelligent curatorship, with sophisticated themes adequate to the seriousness and complexities of themes in his life and in his art; and 2) very possibly, and entirely desirable, a show of mailart in England, under ideal curatorship, if plans develop and hold. For a medley of reasons, I must work almost entirely from documents in my archives that begin when I met Ray in 1956 (he, May Wilson and I thought that we had met in 1955, thus scrambling some dates once in a while). I have found in organizing papers that my confident statement in the Black Mountain College Dossier that the first ?Please send to? in my experience was in July, 1962, is wrong, for some earlier papers recently reexamined are inscribed ?Please send to.? Nevertheless I have no evidence that anyone did relay papers sent by Ray toward the other person he had indicated. Of course the archives of Stanton Kreider and of Albert M. Fine might show that Ray?s instructions were being followed. The potentially informative collections held by two women who were indispensible in the early period, Marie Tavroges Stilkind, & Helen Jacobson of Baltimore, are not retrievably or availably catalogued as far as I am aware. My own memories of the first active relaying do start in July 1962, with confirmation from documents in my archives (available for consulting with appropriate arrangements). From then on, one was not running an individual race, but was running within a team, with postal employees participating in an art like selfless stagehands in a theater. Fortunately, for the sudden expansion of mailart through that autumn, I have memories and documents, including some of May Wilson?s papers. The longer Ray is dead, the more I see that my perspective on him grows deeper, but also narrower, as I was acquainted with one or two or three facets of his life and art, but now have tumbled to the fact that he was known differently by other people, who had their unique perspectives on those facets he chose to display to them. I can only hope that everyone who was acquainted with him or with his work will write memoirs of their experiences, no matter how brief. Meanwhile, to turn toward people who express an interest in the history of mailart: with the understanding that I work from my narrow perspectives, what would help me is questions that anyone might offer, from their perspectives, so that I might think more comprehensively. What questions would anyone ask that I might be able to help answer, especially with documentation from 38 years of mailart (from autumn ?56 through late autumn ?94, with telephone calls until 4pm January 13, 1995). I don?t think that any detail is trivial, because any detail can be a clue to themes and meanings. For example, a trustworthy scholar of mailart describes photocopies as ?Xeroxes,? while the documents show that Ray, when he had a grant, rented a Minolta Copier, and with characteristic precision described the differences in the tones achieved with Minolta rather than with Xerox. What would you like to know that I might be able to respond to with documented answers?
The note has a subtext I want to make explicit. I see that some people who think about the origins of mailart as they participate in it within a network point toward the 19th century and decorated envelopes, etc. Some in Europe who would like to bracket the United States out of the history of visual arts write a linear history that leads to them from say Manet, Van Gogh or through other Continental painters who stylized envelopes in accord with their aesthetic. Mostly they were incapable of being anything but chic, a difference from Ray Johnson of Detroit, Michigan (Claus Oldenburg in a rough anagram wrote: Detroit, toilet, Mt Ste Victoire). That pure European lineage opens to include Picasso, adding a Spanish sauceiness, and Italian Futurists electrifying their envelopes (see those written to Fortunato Depero at 464 West 23rd Street in New York City for a link with other links, for I type at 458 West 25th Street, two blocks due north). That history is glorious in its own way, but the art-on-envelopes in their linear history is episodic, ?particulate and singly catenarian,? which is nothing like a network, ?reticular and hierarchically fluctuating??I am borrowing from Joseph Needham. In my experience, only Ray Johnson sent envelopes, sometimes decorated, holding papers which were marked to be relayed to someone else, thereby constructing a network of correspondents in a team sport that deprived the postal service of its seriousness and self-importance. The linear episodes of tr?s chic decorated envelopes did not organize an informal, self-organizing, self-sustaining, & self-enlarging system. However an envelope from Ray Johnson wove another link in a netting, joining strangers in a self-supported net of communications. Thus I am saddened by some of the grudging remarks in accounts of mailart that claim to be written as history. Gratitude, like so much that Ray pointed toward in his life and in his art, is free, and also can be emancipating.
On themes of freedoms which have arisen on the bulletinboard, I?ll mention that Ray worked with papers and objects which were cast-offs, discards and junk which otherwise would have become trash. The backing of Moticos was usually shirt-board from Richard Lippold?s laundered shirts. The materials were leavened from dull inert opaque trash toward the radiance of art, without issues of money except for stamps. That?s where Marie Tavroges Stilkind, May Wilson and Helen Jacobson, among others, came in as friends who were glad to add stamps to Ray?s envelopes, sometimes a hundred at a time. Ray Johnson had found a vent in the totalitizations of capitalism, with a little help from his friends. Or perhaps he had not found a vent so much as he had constructed a vent. Ray could make gifts of his art to provide people with experiences within this culture which were outside that capitalism which, as a totalizing system, would if it could close down over us with uniformities and conformities, thereby sinking us into a quicksand with no vents, hence with few if any novel events. Ray participated in some practices of Buddhism, with what degree of seriousness or scholarship I leave to the kindness of strangers. While urine is thought of as waste, in some Buddhisms the urine of a god is gold, which suggests that nothing in the Cosmos is waste except where humans have decreed uselessness from their narrow and shallow perspectives. Even dung-beetles have another point of view. Ray?s free spirit, animated by a Cosmos in which we find hospitality for which we might be grateful -- a Cosmos which we can govern only where we obey, as Francis Bacon suggested -- began the frail self-supporting network which has grown in niches like this bulletinboard. So OK now: any questions to help with a chronicle of the history of free mailart will be received with gratitudes.
After a response:
David: your reply is already helpful for me to see beyond Ray Johnson. I am sorry that you have received no responses after cooperating with inquiries ? many of us have our stories. On the larger picture, perhaps people will have to contribute their own histories to a compilation, for there is a dense mass of material, uncatalogued and otherwise unavailable. The bibliography on mailart is huge, and I am in no position to write a descriptive or evaluative bibliography. The writers of such works as The Eternal Network can speak for themselves. Perhaps John Held Jr. will write an informative posting about his book and his continuing research, for his efforts might well inspire other writers, and encourage other mailartists to maintain retrievable archives. I must write from my direct experience and from documents so that I can make verifiable statements open to correction, but I see from your note that I need to think about how some of the tendrils took hold and even put down roots elsewhere. Ray?s activities were perhaps the first links in sets of fluctuating chains that became self-constructing units, deriving distantly from his work, but becoming fairly independent groups. Yet surely if various groups of mailartists held a family reunion, they would be able to recognize their family-resemblance in the features of Ray Johnson, their progenitor. Fortunately the concept of ?delirium? has been worked out in relation to ?rhizomes,? so that the structure of international mailart has access to words which are adequate to describe the way it has spread across fields rather than being lined up along parallel furrows. Since the Internet is itself rhizomatic, the languages evolving to describe its delirium can help to describe a mailart network, thereby bringing out some resemblances as both InterNet and Mailart Net elude conventional categories and boundaries, offering more people opportunities to communicate with each other, in control of their identities, without regard for national boundaries, ethnicities, gender or other identifications over which they have less control. When you write ?mailart history seems to begin and end with Ray Johnson,? I lose focus, for I hope that I didn?t suggest that mailart or a world-wide network began and ended. Do you mean that you want to learn about other people whose activities became new centers of interest? I am going to think about that later. A problem with a chronicle and with a history and documentation is that anyone like me who met Ray forty-five years ago, or anyone helping in the early days of the NYCS, from 1962, about forty years ago, is seriously old, and has four or more last things to think final thoughts about. I wouldn?t have implied that Picasso?s mailart was ?mere? correspondence, merely that mailing a postcard to lover or friend inserted a work of art into the postal system, but did not weave links into a network which you can participate in. Think rhizomes. Work with delirium, which means ?out of the furrow,? like someone plowing zigzags. Am I ?just an archivist/historian/writer,? you ask. From fall of 1956, before a concept like mailart was being thought with, and before Ed Plunkett brought the word ?art? into play with his witty label, The New York Correspondence School of Art, I was responding to mailings from Ray Johnson. I don?t recall the word ?art? being used to think with until late 1962. Since I am not a visual artist, and have no talents for design, color, shape or other visual expression, anything I mailed was limited by my limitations. Ray did not respond well to visual materials which tried to resemble what he was doing, and I had nothing visually interesting of my own to do. He wanted the mail he received from a person to be to that person as the mail which he sent was to him?specific, original, spontaneous, and personal without being intrusive. He tried to astonish himself with what he did, and he enjoyed being astonished by others. Usually I sent him rather flatly factual or informative materials, but under the pressures he exerted on ideas and images, from those materials emerged unforeseeable novelties. It was as though he had a magnet that attracted the strangeness within the ordinary, bringing it onto an observable plane. After the first several months of our friendship, I usually thought of myself as providing Ray with materials that he could use, putting his characteristic spin on them, so that while I might send him raw wheat, I would get back bread. I saw him as the Sorcerer for whom occasionally I could be the Sorcerer?s Apprentice. May Wilson was (is) my mother. She played Ray?s games from 1956 until within a few years of her dying in 1986. On your question about published histories, etc., I can mention that I am compiling a bibliography, but narrowly, for it is primarily focussed on Ray Johnson, and indeed, for decades he gave me printed materials about himself which I am now archiving. In England, Clive Phillpot, who has professional experience as a librarian (formerly of MoMA) and as a bibliographer, is working on a bibliography, perhaps more about Ray than about the growth and development of the mailart network. Anyone can consult my bibliography, which is added to constantly, both new items, and earlier materials which surface in catalogues, for now that his name is famous, and therefore is a commodity, booksellers informatively include him in their lists. As you have written, ?mailart history certainly did not end with Ray,? and I regret if any of my work has implied that it might have. About that larger history which you correctly ask for, I fear that not until an institution finds it in its self-interest to collect mailart will anyone be offered time, money and materials to write a history, if only because professional activities in museums, and distributions of grants, usually follow both fame and the marketplace in art. However, in some ways, I love the privacy of an activity occurring in full view of economic and aesthetico-political powers for which it is invisible. Here we have it: an international low-cost movement of thousands of people communicating freely through obsolete and rickety postal systems, achieving an intimacy of visual thoughts that is neither supported nor understood by any official power. The history of continuations of that movement, which is what you are calling for, would be part of the history of movements toward freedom, not all of which actually get recorded appreciatively in the mainstream which can?t expect to profit from them. Mailart couldn?t have ended with Ray because his axiomatic wish was that people would free themselves to be themselves, and that self-constructed freedom continues to happen with no help from him. Insofar as the story of his life tells of his hope that people find and convey their freedoms, both their freedoms from deadening forms, and their freedoms to invent and to reinvent themselves, in free-hand & in free-form, then, at least for those of us who knew and loved him, the story of his moral and aesthetic life is continued by activities like yours when you pop an envelope into the eddying tide of mailart.
Later to David: thanks for your patient reply. I have not attempted a history of mailart in any sense of history as I understand it. My interest from the beginning, from 1956 intensely exchanging items in the mail with Ray Johnson, and with his friend Norman Solomon --- papers such as clippings, photographs, playing cards found on the street, stray postcards --- was in the meanings and values which were manifest in the activities. I was receiving in the mail extraordinary collages from Ray Johnson, and while some of those collages have been framed for display in museums, they remain for me as they began ? intimate responses within a visual conversation Ray and I were conducting almost until his drowning. As Ray introduced so many people to each other by taking them for visits, often followed up with something in the mail, those conversations and correspondences gradually opened to include Marie Tavroges, Ed Plunkett, May Wilson, Stanton Krieder, Dale Joe, John Daley and others. By late 1962, when a network was begun through the efforts of many people collaborating with Ray, an inherent ethic produced itself out of the activities: say nothing that would end the conversation; mail nothing that would end the correspondence. Send nothing too personal, nothing too indifferent, and whatever else you do, pass stuff along. The people who enrolled or were enrolled in ?The School? were self-selecting, because not everyone who was invited wanted to play the games. No one was excluded unless they did something that killed the conversation being conducted with verbal and visual correspondences. One of the mainstays by the mid-1960s was John Willenbecher, who has not sought a place in any historical chronicle, hence is rarely mentioned. In 1977 I printed a booklet for Ray?s 50th birthday with some of his exchanges with John, who continues mailing much more than letters to friends, to members of his family who still might not quite get the point, and to some strangers whose sympathies and interests overlap his own. For me, a history of mailart would be a history of a spirit animating an activity that was without practical value, but which could enhance a day with friendliness. Ray, who was content with evaporations and invisibilities, did not try to stop time, or even to preserve much evidence of his activities, at least until he moved from Manhattan in 1968. In the improvisations and spontaneities of those early days, with no model for his activities, Ray was a populist, delirious, bootstrapping, trailblazing bricoleur--about--town. The themes in his activities were elaborations of his religio-philosophic ideas, primarily an American Buddhism in Manhattan. He did not often state or explicate his themes directly, but he worked on behalf of his governing aesthetic values with visual papery manifestations which exemplified his moral and/or ethical values. Any history which included Ray would necessarily include the meanings that gave meaningfulness to his experiences, hence for me a history of mailart would be a history of meanings. I have tried to suggest some of those meanings here and there, reflecting my narrow interest in mailart as it conveys and preserves such meanings in my experiences. The ideas implicit in Ray?s early work as I first experienced them were marvelously emancipating for me in that time and in that place, that is, within conditions which can?t, don?t and won?t hold for younger people, who choose who they are to become within very different contexts. I?m glad when contemporary mailartists feel a rapport with Ray Johnson, especially if they work with unrehearsed, spontaneous & improvised visual events which have the strength and the delicacy of a tensile haiku.
David, in the origins of mailart as I experienced the stream that flows from Ray Johnson, the pressure of the flow was to get people to respond from their origins, person-to-person, without emptily abstract concepts interfering with conversations and correspondences. However Ray was as wide as he was deep, and he was involved with abstract concepts if only in his battles against most of them. I have published a letter in which he asks me to write down for him what we had been talking about together, the theme of identity and difference in the philosophy of Hegel. Later he was shown how his work intersected some of the ideas of Jacques Derrida, especially in Derrida?s novel, The Postcard, so he mailed stuff to Derrida. Ray was always interested in thinking about his methods of thinking, yet, hoping to be astonished, he would not expect or want other people to think the thoughts he had already thought through by using them in his work. As I keep quoting from Robert Frost:
"He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response."
Among the many problems of any history of any art is that while the art-object, in any of visual or literary arts, can exist to be experienced within a consensus, as we can look at pretty much the same collages, and can feel that we are listening to pretty much the same pieces of music, the history of the art is not an object which can be examined in verifiable statements. A history of anything, but I?ll stick to mailart, is necessarily constructivist, that is, by following a theory and sets of rules, a historian can devise a coherent narrative which can be analysed for its adequacy to the ?facts? as the facts have themselves been devised. No historical account of mailart can be held up against an object to be judged for verisimilitude, if only because mailart is a process, not a product. Anyway facts are constructs themselves, that is, facts already represent theorizing about what is important (hence mailart has made an art of bringing overlooked and neglected scraps and images into play on an observable plane where they register as visible facts). A history of mailart, undertaken as a construction, suffers the problem that a history of mailart can?t be like a history of painting (which has its own problems which become fatal for the last two centuries). If a history of mailart is impossible, or at least is forever radically incomplete, that predicament may be an opportunity to think or to rethink meanings. Perhaps one can glance back selectively at the historical days, but the selections would be made to support a person?s work as that follows from the character of that person now. Perhaps the only method of preserving and of continuing some of the early values manifest in mailart is to go forward, in a continuous process, aware of some continuities and of some discontinuities, but trying to do work that is to the present as Ray Johnson?s work was to him and his times.
Another problem of standard history derives from a lack of understanding of the relations of a structure like a mailart network to its origins and foundation. The history of mailart could not have been begun at the beginning of Ray Johnson?s activities, because he did not prepare a foundation and then build on it. The present structure, now, is not built upon a ready-made foundation, but constructs its own foundation under it. The future structure, in 2010, may construct a different foundation for itself, that is, it might rewrite history. Foundations are strengthened by the size of the structure which holds the foundation down while the foundation holds the structure up -- a thought which derives from Kurt Godel in mathematico-logic ? and which is made visible in the Hong Kong Airport. That Airport has been built upon an island newly constructed in a harbor. The materials in the fabricated island will settle for decades. The airport is engineered so that the buildings constructed on the island will strengthen the island through their weight, the structures holding down that which holds them up. Foundations preplanned by engineers sometimes fail, as with the Tower of Pisa, but that Tower constructed its own foundation as its weight settled, and it didn?t fall. The point is that foundations come later, in retrospection and in retroaction. Yet another problem arises, for the origins of an event are usually irretrievable. At the time, one often can?t know that what is being done is a beginning that is going to be built on, as in the development of a baby that constructs its direction for itself out of its own directionless activities. In later stages of a process, the initial conditions are elusive, irretrievable, and uncertain, as only years later did Ray see that as early as 1943 he had been doing something that had come to look like mailart. His retrospection reaches highschool, a stage of life at which many contemporary mailartists were decorating their envelopes without needing example or inspiration or permission from any movement in the visual arts.
Most mailartists have known implicitly what they come to realize explicitly when they happen upon a network of mailartists. Mailartists enjoy telling about their first time, which invariably happened with no awareness that other people, perhaps even their parents, were doing it. For these and other reasons, I think that a chronicle of mailart would be the most, yet also the best, that might be achieved.
In these perspectives, the French mailartists who point toward Manet or another modern classic are moving their own foundations into place beneath their activities, and they are right, for the sake of their meanings, to bracket Johnson out of their linear historical narratives. However nowhere has any variety of mailart followed a linear narrative like a plowman digging a straight furrow, for it has grown like those rhizomes spreading across a field. Only the future will tell us what the past has been. Imagine a baby born in December, 2000. If that baby grows up and does mailart inspired by discoveries of knot-writing, by the odor of vinegar on letters from a time of plague, or by recollections of singing telegrams, then that future activity will have brought out of the past its own precedents, thus far unrecorded in official mailart histories.
Another problem with a history pertains to participations and complicities. Criticism of both mailart and of hyper-spatial-computer communications is impossible without participation. Maybe one does not have to make movies to be a critic of movies, but only by participation in the cool intimacies of the processes of mailart can one qualify to describe and analyse mailart and on-line communications. Experience of process, not of product, is necessary, but two problems arise: 1) the processes have receded and are irrecoverable in their flow and turbulence; 2) once one has participated in the experiences, a non-participating objectivity is impossible. I think that such a perplexity about subjectivities and objectivities is appropriate, but not much history gets written that way, because of the awkwardness of pivoting between one?s subjective experience and an objective history.
The participation which qualifies also disqualifies, because of the commitments to some of the moral values in some mailart. Participation is not neutral. In my experience, artists who were working toward success within the marketplace for art might participate, responding to Ray?s activities, and relaying paper to someone else in 1963 or 1964. James Rosenquist and Chuck Close are two artists who played Ray?s games across decades. However some artists gradually realized that almost any paper they had modified might have aesthetic value that could be quantified as financial value. Therefore if they participated in events which were free, tossing into the network of mailart materials which could be sold because the papers had passed through their hands, they would be giving away material which someone might sell. That sale would in no way benefit the original artist financially, and would wastefully confuse all issues. If the artist continued to play in the New York Correspondance School, that implied that the artist was not working art only for the money. Yet the expense of time and energy would be enormous, and many artists needed to concentrate on their own work, unable to live like Ray, who never correlated time with money. An artist of the stature of Ad Reinhardt sometimes passed the relay, but I was hesitant to forward materials from Ray to Ad, he was too famous, and his own work too important for me to disturb him. Yet I could see on visits that he was happy to stop work to talk with Ray, hence I was wrong to presume to judge what was right for him.
The vexed questions of art and money are answered by each person from within the life-world that person arises in the midst of, and no general rules or regulations can be applied. Ray reacted with vehemence if he thought that someone was profiting on his work, although his idea of such profiteering often did not take into account the labor of other people, or their need for money in order to live. I have seen Ray Johnson?s mailart for sale in a catalogue for ten dollars, which might, after all, buy a lot of potsage. That misprint is a gift from the novel about an underground postal system, The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon.
To Phill: your experience will contribute to experiments on the Net from which everyone might be learning. As I have written to Honoria, now revising my general words to her into this personal note to you, Mailart is fully sensory, while the touch of keyboards, and the sight of screens, can be such a sensory deprivation that I reach for peanuts to engage my senses. A friend told me that she cannot go on-line without a cup of tea, and has spilled three into her keyboard. The personal, even intimate, communication is the issue. People can take only so much impersonality masked as personal attentions, as when a salesperson telephones in the tone of an old friend, calling me by my first name. If mailart is art, then it must face issues of individual and personal expressiveness, and the Internet assumes the same challenge. I figure that people wanted to hear from you in all your charming peculiarity, and that they felt frustration. Here is where you can contribute: what are your own feelings when receiving a communication more or less automatically and impersonally? What satisfies you in an exchange without the slant of a person adapting a message to you, perhaps before relaying it? You can testify as a witness who takes pleasure in the very same style and content of communications as displeases other people. You may be bringing news of a different, and perhaps emerging, sensibility. Wallace Stevens wrote about modern art and poetry as ?The poem of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice?? If you can explain your values, when that which suffices for you obviously does not suffice for other people, we may all be able to respond more aptly to each other, and to think more clearly within these machines.
Mailart, which got delivered and gets delivered by an indifferent and impersonal postal system, can engage visual, tactile, and aural senses, and perhaps taste and smell could be involved. Ray Johnson thought even about a person?s spit on the back of a stamp, of course in the days before self-sticking stamps, so mailart could include the use of the tongue and the flavor of mucilage. Can you see how people might want to preserve details as individual as the moistening of a stamp, somehow, in the transpositions of mailart networks onto e-mail networks? People have mailed coconuts and envelopes fragrant enough to alert the sniffing dogs. The goal has been as intense a physiological experience as can survive the systems. Even gently folding and unfolding a piece of paper involves energy that manifests as a sound, albeit a quiet one, but I know that the sound is there, and listen for it. What within your experience is so different that you are satisfied with mechanically mediated ?art?? Can you understand that computerized messages, even more mechanized than the postal system, can feel like yet another insensitive assault on one?s sensitivities? The sounds of the computer are to mailart as a synthesizer is to music. I write as one whose teen years were saved by Les Paul and Mary Ford, hence as open to electrifications when they amplify and enhance sounds which are personal to the point of idiosyncratic. However I have recently been jolted by a young artist pressuring a synthesizer to simulate music. How could he be pleased with automated sounds when he paints with splashes and drips? Almost two centuries ago Beethoven mocked the metronome, so that the history of capricious individual aesthetic expressions in relations with mechanizations has a distinguished history. Anyway I open envelopes noisily, in a style that I guess fits my character, hence expresses my private music, even if the expression is impossible to convey with words.
In my experience, the technological progress of an Internet network challenges the personal in at least two ways: 1) by pretending to be personal while being mechanically indifferent to an individual who is identified as a consumer by a computerized profile; 2) startling invasions of privacy as the personal is violated. I am assaulted by a machine recommending books, CDs or videos that it calculates fit my personal taste. I prefer the instincts of friends who guess that I might enjoy their improbable recommendation, not a recommendation deduced from algebras and probabilities. To me sometimes the computer seems more a depletion of the sensory than a visual and tactile feast. So can you sympathize with people who prefer an e-mail message tailored to them as individual recipients, perhaps marked indelibly with the personality of the person who has originated the message? Could you comment on how you respond to an impersonally transmitted item, when it is unlikely to convey feelings across the Internet? Do you try to pump feelings into your constructions? I find myself becoming strident in tone to get my voice to hover above the impersonalities and indifferences of this glaring computer-screen. The Internet Network needs to work out a phenomenology of the computer, its sights and sounds, and perhaps the touch of the keys, along with the amazement that occasionally a person seems to pop out of virtual space alive onto the screen. To borrow from Percy Shelley for this occasion, sometimes a message is like a heart plucked alive from the body of the Internet. But perhaps that livingness is not universally desired, in which case, I would like to learn more about the qualities that do seem desirable. A message of any kind unaccompanied by feelings can be rather forlorn. The most sensory messages I have received have been the few that have made me laugh, but that response, merely mine, is no certain evidence about the content of the other person's communications. The challenge for an aesthetic of the Internet is huge precisely because of unfeeling mechanizations. That impersonality, as a quality of the messages you forwarded, apparently does not trouble you. However, I?m guessing about you as a person, but would rather hear you speak for yourself. You may have, or you may be, new information which could go toward working out rules of responsive and responsible communications, and standards of aesthetic taste, appropriate to a novel practice and theory of art within the Internet. How about it? Bring us news.</HTML>
Bill Wilson
Re: Fundamentals of the Mail Art System September 02, 2001 06:50PM |
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